Ecology & Sustainability

An ecological crisis that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore is confronting policymakers with a dilemma: they are being called upon to protect the conditions for life on Earth without overly hampering industrial production and economic growth.

Amitav Ghosh’s new book “The Great Derangement” examines climate change and climate policy from unusual perspectives. It is bound to get much international attention because it asks some fundamental new questions concerning the handling of climate change in literature and activist politics, and because it represents a well-known voice from Asia.

The attempt to connect environmental and economic objectives turn out more difficult than expected. The green transformation must be seen as a political task.

What will Brexit mean for European climate and energy policy? How will it affect the dynamics of greater climate protection that we are taking pains to maintain in the wake of Paris?

The envisaged sale of Vattenfall’s East German lignite assets to EPH has raised many questions about the sustainability of open-cast lignite mining and power generation. It has also shone a spotlight on the prospective new owner.

This report is an excellent overview of the pitiful state of environmentalism and its neoliberalisation. The issues raised are important and should be taken seriously. I would like to suggest a few areas in which the argument could benefit from some further reflection.

As a result of the climate change India and South Asia will likely have a huge economic, social, and environmental damage. Therefore climate solutions must be considered in national climate policy.

Is Gas a climate-friendly energy sources? And the gas industry a climate protector? No, says Laura Weis and explains why we delay the energy transition with this idea.

We should not completely abandon economic arguments; but instead of hectically following and reinforcing the trend, we should lessen the prominence of these arguments by strongly fostering alternative ones, especially those which relate to the very intuitions and reasons why people protect nature.

The new economy of nature tends to produce a similar right to decide what lives and what does not in the /natural world/ according to its economic value for capital, whether that world lies in the hands of corporations or of states.