Author: The Mound of Sound

Thank your lucky stars you don’t have to live with climate change the way the young do. They look and they see what’s coming and they know they’ll be right in the path of it. What do they see when they look at us, their elders – the boomers, Gen

With the clock ticking down on climate catastrophe, word is the global energy industry’s emissions are rising at the fastest rate in a decade. Burn baby, burn. The main cause – why, it’s getting hot – and cold – out there. Carbon emissions from the global energy industry rose by

Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is a bright guy. First in his class at West Point, JD from Harvard Law School. At times, however, Pompeo can sound downright dumb. Mikey goes wobbly when it comes to discussing climate change. Now, as secretary of state, he might be expected to

The giant re-insurer, Munich Re, wants carbon pricing to increase – massively.  The Liberal government is running into stiff resistance to its $25/tonne carbon tax. Munich Re argues the tax should be 115 Euros per tonne or $170.60 Cdn. Munich Re, which is exposed to natural catastrophes caused by extreme

It’s small comfort to recognize that most of the developed world remains in the clutches of neoliberalism. Introduced during the Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney era, the neoliberal order has been acknowledged as a failed experiment even by one of its High Priests, Milton Friedman shortly before his death. But, as noted

Think of it as an appetizer, a wee morsel to usher in the entre. Or think of it as a first installment on the butcher’s bill for catastrophic climate change. Or maybe you prefer to think of it as ‘early onset’ climate change. Whatever your choice, it’s here and it

In a consumer economy, priority is placed on stuff, ever more stuff. The measure of the economy is a function of consumption which is, more accurately, a process of extraction, production, consumption and waste. However we prefer to treat it as a transactional construct, something that obscures the dark side

The Miami-based real estate investor has a soft spot for Alabama, the state where his family lived for generations, the place where he was born and raised. My family’s roots run deep in the state and, for decades, we have been honored to celebrate that heritage by supporting the University

A team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh ran tests on Herschel Island, just off the Yukon, to observe the rate of loss of coastal permafrost in the warming Arctic. The team used drones to map a section of the coast seven times over 40-days. What they found is

It’s happening, right before our eyes, across America. Imagine you’ve been savaged by clusters of tornadoes, heavy rain has swollen your rivers to overflowing, your planted farm fields lie beneath inches of rain and now you’re told to brace for days of heavy rainfall, a deluge that can reach anywhere

There are few journalists with the intellect of the Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole. Here’s an opinion piece from June of last year in which O’Toole writes that we’re in an era of what he calls “pre-fascism.” This is an important piece and I post it in its entirely because I

Four guys from North London calling themselves “Led By Donkeys” have been posting billboards laying bare their despair of the “lies, lunacy and hypocrisy” of Brexit and the Brexiteers.  For months they worked anonymously until their incredible ordinariness was revealed in The Observer. Now they’ve turned their art on Donald

Donald Trump has been effusive in his praise of Boris Johnson and supports his bid to replace Theresa May as the next Tory prime minister of the UK. I wonder if Donald knew about this when he gave Johnson such a glowing endorsement?

D-Day memorials, today’s included, have been transformed into a photo-op for a gaggle of politicians, some of which should be ashamed not proud of their attendance.  Sabre-rattlers, likeTrump, come to mind. Trump who grotesquely basks in the ersatz glory of the thousands sent to their deaths yet who did whatever

More than half the fish that reaches store shelves around the world today is farmed fish. There are some, quite a few in fact, who claim aquaculture will become increasingly critical to humanity’s need for protein. That may be so, but… Fish farms now surpass wild fisheries as the main

A day of commemoration. Lest we forget.

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer says switching to a zero-carbon reality by 2050 would cripple the UK economy to the tune of a trillion pounds. Of course, Philip Hammond, also warned that Tory backing for same-sex marriage would leave the Conservative party gored. Hammond presumably imagines that Britain can have

Freedom House has released a report, Freedom in the World, 2019: Democracy in Retreat. The illustration speaks volumes. So far it has been antiliberal populist movements of the far right—those that emphasize national sovereignty, are hostile to immigration, and reject constitutional checks on the will of the majority—that have been

US scientists maintain there’s a direct link between the decline of sea ice in the Canadian Arctic and worsening summer severe weather events across the southern US. The study draws upon four decades of satellite data of Arctic sea ice coverage collected between 1979 and 2016, overlapped with heat wave

I’ve done several environment- related posts today: Stiglitz on the Green New Deal; the Global Footprint Network and Earth Overshoot Day, 2019; human consumption of microplastics; the magnificent Greta Thunberg; and a report out of Europe’s national academies of science on the climate crisis and how we could spare perhaps