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The Blue Green Alliance between labour unions and environmental organisations wants to create jobs in the United States' environmental sector and has become part of the Washington scene.

While the US government is being internationally lambasted for its lame climate policies, researchers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists go beyond politics to find, on their own account, openings for green energies.

We have almost used up our emissions budget. Should we continue to emit at the current rate, our budget will be used up within ten years. Thus, we have to ask ourselves: Is continuous growth the right approach? Can we afford more economic growth? Is our present economic system able to increase and sustain wealth on a worldwide scale? The Böll.Thema essay by Claudia Kemfert tries to give answers to these questions. 

In 2050, three billion more people will inhabit the earth, while at the same time a large section of humanity will need greater access to energy in order to escape poverty. Eventually, we will have to become “CO2 negative” by capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and channelling it back underground.

The coalition treaty between Christian Democrats and Liberals provides that subsidies for the extraction of coal will continue until 2018. Additional subsidies for new coal-fired power plants will come from the implementation of EU rules on CCS and from income generated by emissions trading. Thus, the current German government is promoting an increase in coal-fired power plants, a policy that undermines climate protection. The idea seems to be to greenwash coal by means of CCS.

Opinions about the future of the Desertec project on the African continent.

With giant strides humanity is approaching a population level of ten billion. Fossil fuels have been almost fully exploited. According to Gerhard Knies, initiator and chairman of the supervisory board of Desertec, Desertec’s approach seems to be the best solution to face these problems.

Concepts of decentralised energy production such as Lichtblick and the centralised approach of the Desertec consortium to produce solar energy in the desert do not have to clash.

Anthony Giddens, author of The Third Way, in conversation with Ralf Fücks about the politics of climate change, the reshaping of our civilisation, the relationship between utopianism and realism, climate policy beyond left and right, and the role of the state.

LGBTI people have increased their visibility through the formation of national and Pan-African organisations working at grassroots level in the struggle for decriminalization and sensitising their respective communities. The campaign for LGBTI rights in Africa needs to be framed within a global context of growing homophobia and transphobia.