A New Language for Grappling With Climate Change

This month, a major UN report on climate change declared that humanity has just a few short years to make the drastic changes needed to stave off an environmental catastrophe. While news outlets reacted with shock and alarm, those who regularly write, research or advocate on climate change were more resigned. For them, the report — which synthesized existing research — merely aggravated the psychic wound formed by continually reckoning with the end of the world.

What's ahead for kids like me?

Responding to the report, climate writer Eric Holthaus encouraged readers to talk about their feelings with friends, though he said that he has “no idea whether or not this is the right advice for everyone.” Environmental reporter Zoë Schlanger expressed similar ambivalence, writing that “in 2018, life can feel in need of a dirge for the whole world, with scarcely the language to write it.”

Perhaps as the climate changes, so must our vocabulary. We need new words to grapple with these new challenges. What does it feel like when your home leaves you? When the seasons shift and rains dry up or turn to deluge? How do you capture the sense of this new abnormal? And how do you cope?

Read the story from NexusMedia by Phil Newell - “A New Language for Grappling With Climate Change.”

The Truth About These Climate Change Numbers

It’s often argued that climate change is not a technological or engineering problem, it is a political problem. And it’s true. We have all the technology we need to power the world with renewables and stave off the worst of climate chaos. What we lack is the political will to take the kind of moonshot-scale action necessary to accomplish it.

An image of a type often used to
illustrate climate change stories.

But climate change is also a numbers problem. Every ton of carbon that we dump into the atmosphere stays there for hundreds of years, warming the atmosphere and reshaping the future climate. As the recent IPCC report pointed out, to avoid the worst of climate chaos, the world needs to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050. Accomplishing that would require not just a remaking of our energy system, but profound changes in agriculture, the design of cities and transportation systems. It is possible to imagine how a revolution like this might happen, but it’s even easier to imagine how it would not.

Read the story from Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell - “The Truth About These Climate Change Numbers.”

‘No gas supply shortage forecast,' energy operator says

A commitment from producers to increase domestic gas supplies after government threats to curtail exports will stave off gas shortages until at least 2030, a new report shows.

The ACCC forecast gas shortages of between 55 and 108
 petajoules if more domestic supplies weren't immediately secured.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2018 gas outlook for the east coast said the forecast domestic gas shortfall that was predicted late last year by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had now been averted.

Read the story from The Age by Cole Latimer -“‘No gas supply shortage forecast,' energy operator says.”