Articles 2020

Sujet tabou, la droite aurait pourtant beaucoup à gagner en se saisissant de ces dossiers, analyse Ferréol Delmas, directeur général du think tank Ecologie responsable.

Le think-tank de Jean-Marc Jancovici propose d’imposer un plafond de consommation énergétique au secteur du numérique pour limiter son empreinte carbone.

In a simulation game, five off-the-shelf large language models or LLMs were confronted with fictional crisis situations that resembled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threat to Taiwan. The results? Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars — even to the point of launching nuclear weapons.

Earth’s average temperature rose more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in 2024 for the first time – a critical threshold in the climate crisis. At the same time, major armed conflicts continue to rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere. What should be increasingly clear is that war now needs to be understood as unfolding in the shadow of climate breakdown. The relationship between war and climate change is complex. But here are three reasons why the climate crisis must reshape how we think about war.

The author of Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination discusses the cost of Big Tech’s huge investment in technologies that may do more harm than good

This Contemplation is the result of my beginning to put together a different one that’s focussing upon an academic article I’ve been reading (Collapse, Environment, and Society) but that got me thinking about the academic ‘debate’ regarding what ‘societal collapse’ is, how it may–or may not–unfold for our current experiment in large, complex societies, and how things are perceived in the moment by those experiencing societal change. The ‘debate’ (centred more-or-less on the question: Do societies actually ‘collapse’ or are they ‘merely’ shifting/transforming/adapting to changing conditions?) is rather ‘academic’ in that in the grand scheme of things it’s intellectually interesting but doesn’t have much to do with the on-the-ground, real-life experiences and concerns of most humans in a society–especially if they are experiencing some of the more ‘problematic’ consequences of collapse/transformation.

When people reflect on how their actions shape the future, they are more likely to support solutions to present-day issues like poverty and inequality.

Face à des incidents suspects en Ukraine et à des informations relayées par le Robert Lansing Institute, l'Europe se prépare à une possible vague d'attentats-suicides orchestrée par la Russie

The network of Atlantic ocean currents keeping the Earth's climate stable are far closer to collapse than first estimated, scientists warn.

Rarement un homme comme Charles Gave aura été capable d'enchainer autant de mensonges en 30mn comme il l'a fait sur Thinkerview.

Oil in the North Sea is expected to be net-energy negative by 2031. This means that in 2031, it’ll cost more energy to extract the fossil fuels than we would gain by using them, rendering extraction unfeasibly expensive. Yet, rather than use our remaining years of access to these fuels to turbo-charge new energy infrastructure, fossil fuels are being extracted and burned for business as usual: quick cash. Around the world, the lights will go off in nations that don’t have back-up renewables. That’s most of them.

Le think tank de Jean-Marc Jancovici, publie ce jeudi 28 mars deux rapports invitant à prendre en compte l’objectif de réduction des émissions de carbone dans les choix technologiques et l’avènement des nouveaux usages.

With the help of the contingency concept, the article explores the reasons behind these surprises by introducing a new category of threats that complements the ones in the existing literature on surprise. It adds the concept of ‘known—corporally unknown’ threats to the list of known-unknowns, unknown-unknowns as a way to emsphasize the difference between abstract knowledge of ‘facts and figures’ (of e.g., global warming) and the acquiring of knowledge through personal, bodily experience (tangere) (of flooding and draughts). T

Resilience here, then, is not the naïve faith in riding the storm and putting the world back together more or less as it was, issue by issue, but recognising the necessity to fundamentally reorganise and reorient human society in ways that can allow human flourishing and ecological sustainability in symbiotic and mutually supportive relations of reciprocity and regeneration - and in a multiplicity of ways.

Rishi Sunak has confirmed that a fossil fuel-funded think tank helped to draft his government’s laws targeting climate protests.

The world is at risk of descending into a climate “doom loop”, a thinktank report has warned. It said simply coping with the escalating impacts of the climate crisis could draw resources and focus away from the efforts to slash carbon emissions, making the situation even worse.

We face so many concurrent threats that commentators have argued that we now face an unprecedented "polycrisis" – where multiple interacting global crises produce greater harms to the planet and humanity than those crises would produce in isolation. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance has argued that the current economic design is at the root cause of this polycrisis, and with good reason.

Methane emissions in the UK could be cut by more than 40% by 2030 with a raft of inexpensive policies, according to an environmental thinktank. The government has pledged to cut emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that has more than 80 times the global heating power of CO2, by at least 30% by 2030. The move was trumpeted by Boris Johnson when he was prime minister after the UK joined more than 100 other countries to make the pledge at Cop26 in Glasgow.

Voilà un fait assez rare pour être souligné : la France serait l’une des meilleures élèves du continent dans l’élimination progressive du plastique à usage unique. Chapeau bas. C’est du moins ce que l’on dirait si l’on se contentait de survoler le rapport, publié mercredi 21 septembre, par une coalition d’ONG appelée Rethink Plastic Alliance. En réalité, le pays a bel et bien voté des mesures antiplastique... mais elles sont peu appliquées.

Despite decades of studies and climate summits, greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar. Energy scientist Vaclav Smil says it’s time to stop ricocheting between apocalyptic forecasts and rosy models of rapid CO2 cuts and focus on the difficult task of remaking our energy system.