English references

As climate and geopolitics shocks bite, countries are rebuilding food buffers. The UK clings to neoliberal ideas while households pay the price

Bronwen Maddox says Trump’s rejection of international law leaves UK and Europe facing huge dilemma

This paper analyses General Social Survey (United States) data and provides evidence that the advent of Facebook and other social media platforms has widened the gap in scepticism towards science between low-educated Americans and their more highly educated counterparts. The same trend holds true when considering distrust in medicine, the press and television. Overall, the results suggest that education may serve as a protective factor against the influence of fake news, disinformation and misinformation. Additionally, a heterogeneity analysis shows that the increase in distrust is particularly pronounced among young people. Further analyses reveal that political affiliation plays a role in shaping attitudes towards science and that the likelihood of voting for the Republican Party has increased among low-educated individuals. A comprehensive set of robustness and placebo tests supports the reliability of these findings.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has described her plan to “maximise extraction” of the UK’s oil and gas from the North Sea as a “common sense” energy policy. Politicians are using language like this increasingly often – calling themselves “pragmatic” on climate change and invoking “common sense”. It sounds reasonable, reassuring, and grownup – the opposite of “hysterical” campaigners or “unrealistic” targets.

Fifteen years ago, smack in the middle of Barack Obama's first term, amid the rapid rise of social media and a slow recovery from the Great Recession, a professor at the University of Connecticut issued a stark warning: the United States was heading into a decade of growing political instability.

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the seventh of a series of articles on some of these signposts.

One of the world’s most climate-ambitious governments is about to fall, replaced by a likely chancellor who says green policy went too far.

Shifting responsibility to consumers minimises the role of energy industry and policymakers, University of Sydney research suggests

In this article, we’ll see why cascading disruptions of environmental and political systems are entangled and mutually reinforcing. We’ll also try to identify the next stages of global collapse, and explore the options for individuals and communities seeking to survive and to prevent as much harm and suffering as possible.

Trump could reverse the nation’s progress on climate change, but rolling back the Biden administration’s significant climate successes could be a low, slow and difficult process...

A Trump presidency can delay, but not stop, the global transition to renewable energy, but it may more effectively stymie progress than during his first term.

If modern societies are breaking down, is there a political movement ready to soften the collapse and begin anew? Or do we need new ideas and organisations for collective action? Might a local focus be the only meaningful approach as industrial consumer systems decline? Or is this a period that calls for greater international solidarity with those suffering the most? I think the conversations and initiatives in the Francophone world will provide us many insights on these questions, for a number of reasons, which I’ll come to in a moment.

Decarbonization efforts and sustainability transformations represent highly contested socio-political projects. Yet, they often encounter various forms of depoliticization. This article illuminates how a grand socio-ecological challenge like the energy transition gets depoliticized by an unusual suspect, namely Germany's Green Party. Based on a qualitative content analysis of Green Party programs, party conventions, and additional documents published between 1980 and 2021, this article traces how the Green Party has depoliticized the energy transition over time, emphasizing a shift from radical societal change to ecological modernization. The changing stance of the German Greens on the country's energy transition reflects more profound changes of a future society the party collectively envisions through their energy and climate change agenda. These changes result from a struggle between moderates advocating incremental political reforms and radicals aiming for more fundamental and systemic societal change.

Emmanuel Macron’s government is at least doing the bare minimum to avert the planetary crisis – and putting the UK to shame, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Without more legally binding and well-planned net-zero policies, the world is highly likely to miss key climate targets.

Eco-fascism, for the uninitiated, is best known as the ideology embraced by the mass shooter who killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket last year. The shooter, as E&E News reported at the time, was motivated by “the racist conspiracy theory that the ruling class is using immigration to politically and culturally ‘replace’ white people.” The Buffalo shooter called on others “to view immigration as ‘environmental warfare,’” and to “reclaim environmentalism in the name of white nationalism.” His calls echoed those of the mass shooter who killed 23 people in an El Paso, Texas Walmart in 2019, who was also a self-proclaimed eco-fascist.

Andreas Malm says he has no hope in ‘dominant classes’, and urges more radical approach to climate activism.

The politics of this new, extreme individualism will make collective responses to social crises impossible, writes Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty

Three months before COP27, new research suggests the most ambitious climate pledges are also most credible.

What kind of economic system is most conducive to human wellbeing? That question has come to define the current era, because, after 40 years of neoliberalism in the United States and other advanced economies, we know what doesn’t work.