Equity is the Missing Key for Climate Roadmaps
In March of 2017, Johan Rockström, the author of Big World, Small Planet: Abundance within Planetary Boundaries, along with a extremely high-tone list of co-authors, published A roadmap for rapid...
View ArticleGreat Transitions roundtable on Global Capitalism
The Great Transition Initiative, of which I am a member, just held a roundtable debate of an interesting new paper by William I. Robinson called Global Capitalism: Reflections on a Brave New World....
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Building Just Climate Futures Together – an online conference
If you’re in the mood for a half hour of of me, along in my room talking into a microphone, and you’d like to see a sketch of the book I have under development (it’s called Fair Enough?), you might...
View Article1.5 to Stay Alive, Says Landmark UN Climate Report
A 2 degrees C rise would be catastrophic, and avoiding it requires radical change and climate justice. Click here for Tom Athanasiou’s review of the IPCC’s Special Report Global Warming of 1.5ºC, as...
View ArticleTom A – Five minutes of brief clips
If, just hypothetically, anyone was interested in early 2019, this 5 minute highlight video of an interview I did with Eric Simon might be interesting. See here.
View ArticleA conversation cum debate between Rupert Read and Tom Athanasiou
Back in March, I debated Rupert Reed at the Center for European Studies at Berkeley. Rupert is a British Green politician and philosopher (a Wittgenstein expert, actually) who has recently emerged as...
View ArticleWERN talk: Climate Emergency and the New Age of Inequality
A friend of mine encouraged to speak at the World Ecology Research Network conference in San Fransisco earlier this year, and I’m glad he did. The WERN crowd tilts to the eclectic, with a strong...
View ArticleThe State of the Climate Movement
Recently, the Great Transition Initiative ran an extended online debate which it called The Climate Movement: What’s Next? Participants were asked to give special attention to three questions: What is...
View ArticleBernie Sanders’ Emergency Internationalism
You may have missed it, but Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal proposal contains a hugely important internationalist idea—that nations should do their fair share in the global effort as part of a true...
View ArticleDespair Watch: Jonathan Franzen Edition
Jonathan Franzen, the novelist, recently published a piece in the New Yorker that caused a bit of stir, including with me. The piece is called What If We Stopped Pretending?, and let’s just say it’s...
View ArticleUnflinching Truth, Unwavering Hope
I just published, in the Earth Island Journal, a very brief review of “the two exemplary climate crisis books of the current moment.” They are, in case you were wondering, The Uninhabitable Earth:...
View ArticleInterview with Doug Henwood
On Sunday September 29th, I was interviewed by the excellent Doug Henwood for his Behind the News program. The link is here. Go to 25:04 to miss the first interview but pick up some of the modernist...
View ArticleThe Global Right vs. the Global Green New Deal
The indefatigable John Feffer has just authored a fairly amazing report — based on dozens and dozens of interviews around the world — on the global new right, which he has entitled The Battle for...
View ArticleGlobalizing the movement
Globalizing the Movement was my contribution to the Great Transition Initiative‘s 2019 forum: The Climate Movement: What’s Next?, which was kicked off with a fine essay by Bill McKibben. It was a fine...
View ArticleWhy “Planet of the Humans” is crap
Mostly, Planet of the Humans is just so fucking bad. So bad that its good points are useless. It does have some good points – there seem to be a lot of rock festivals in Vermont that claim,...
View ArticleThe Pandemic Pivot
Earlier this year, the prolific and admirably lucid John Feffer, currently based at the Institute for Policy Studies, invited me to participate in an international conversation that he called The...
View ArticleKim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”
I have, as per my demographic and political / cultural leanings, been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate novels since he started writing them. But I’ve never been moved to review one before The...
View ArticleIt’s Time for the US to Carry Its Fair Share on Climate Change
This essay was first published in Sierra Magazine The term “climate injustice” is easy to understand. When the poor and vulnerable people of New Orleans or Nicaragua are abandoned to the ravages of a...
View ArticleOver 50,000 people & 195 global groups demand Biden commit the U.S. to do its...
February 17, 2021 The petition is the latest call for Biden administration to walk the walk on climate by taking responsibility for historical emissions Washington — Just days before the reentry of...
View ArticleTom speaks, this time to Doug Henwood
Following the publication of The US Returns to the Paris Agreement Today—With Lots of Work Ahead for the World in The Nation, I spent some time expounding my very conditional optimism on Doug...
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