In many parts of the world, the cool blast of an air-conditioner on a hot day is nowadays seen as a luxury rather than a necessity. Climate change is tipping the balance. Average global temperatures are now roughly 1.2°C higher than they were before
At this year’s U.N. climate conference in Egypt, COP27, Pakistan and a group of other frustrated developing countries are pushing to develop a pool of money for “loss and damages.” It would be a fund, financed by the developed nations most responsibl
Bruno Latour was one of the last specimens of a once thriving species now on the brink of extinction: the intellectual. To be precise, he was a typical example of a no less prestigious and no less threatened subclass thereof: the French intellectual.
In 2020 james lovelock told the Observer, a British Sunday paper, that “the biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives”. He was wrong about himself, by a factor of about two: he died on July 26th, his 103rd birthday. Dr Lovelock was one of
If humanity invests just an extra 2% of Global GDP in developing eco-friendly technologies and infrastructure every year, this would be enough to prevent catastrophic climate change, while also creating lots of new jobs and economic opportunities...
Microplastics from Africa and North America found airborne in French Pyrenees, 2,877 metres above sea level. From Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, microplastics are everywhere – even high in the Earth’s troposphere where wind speeds allow them to
From snow to lava, in Spain this has been a year of extreme events. Nothing relates the Filomena storm with the eruption of Cumbre Vieja, but both scares happen when we try to recover from a historic pandemic that has halted the life of the planet. T
Looking northward from the Top of the Rock, Rockefeller Center’s observation deck, the skyline is defined by three supertall pencil towers, from left to right: Central Park Tower, the tallest residential building in the world at 98 stories; 53 West 5
The American Jason W. Moore and the Swedish Andreas Malm are part of what they call ‘radical academy,’ a group of Marxist writers who teach on both sides of the Atlantic. Capitalism in the Web of Life and Fossil Capital present complementary (and som
Norrland is the largest of Sweden’s three historical “lands”. It spans the top half of the country and is sparsely populated, the more so the farther north you go. The few people who live there have long relied for work on mining, the army and forest
Since the Romans began doing it with great panache more than 2,000 years ago, road-building has been a sweaty, grubby business, involving heaving great quantities of rocks and stones into place and, in more recent times, covering the surface with asp
When I worked at Microsoft, it was always a thrill to see a product we’d been working on for years finally get released to the public. I’m feeling the same sense of anticipation today. My new book on climate change is available now online and in book
China revealed plans to drastically expand an experimental weather modification program to cover an area of over 5.5 million square kilometers (2.1 million square miles) -- more than 1.5 times the total size of India. According to a statement from th
The air breathed by an average Pole may not be Europe’s dirtiest. According to the European Environment Agency, Balkan nations like Serbia do worse on metrics like years of life lost per person. However, Poland’s effluvia stand out for their geograph
The giant human footprint stamped across the world in 2020 is greater than the impact on the planet of all other living things, research suggests. The amount of plastic alone is greater in mass than all land animals and marine creatures combined, the
Covid-19 is not all bad, as any city-dweller who stepped outside this year will have seen. The virus has killed hundreds of thousands of people...
The air in modern homes and offices is pretty clean, but not as clean as it might be. Often, it contains small amounts of volatile, toxic, organic compounds such as benzene, formaldehyde, butadiene, carbon tetrachloride, naphthalene and chloroform. C
Environment always clings to culture, conditioning people’s responses, limiting their potential, stimulating their inventiveness. It seems reasonable to suppose that in the early stages of cultural divergence environment drove innovation, as human co
Con un título que no deja lugar a dudas, este libro constituye la primera de una serie de aproximaciones a la debatida relación entre arquitectura e ingeniería. Profesores en Cardiff, los autores de The Enviromental Tradition (1996) y The Selective E
