Author: Errica Jensen

Being inside a big organization gives one a certain kind of knowledge, not about what the organization says in public but about what it doesn’t say, what it files away, and what it pays consultants to keep out of the public eye. People who worked in the fossil fuel industry for years before switching to climate advocacy or research typically describe a version of this knowledge. Not a single epiphany, but a gradual accumulation of insights that the discrepancy between industry knowledge and public statements was not due to uncertainty or changing science. It was a calculated decision made decades…

Standing in a contemporary city and considering its origins can cause a specific type of cognitive dissonance. The hospital walls, the parking structures, the bridges, the towers, and the highway underpasses. It’s all concrete. All of it originated from a manufacturing process that, if it were a nation, would be among the biggest carbon emitters in the world, ranking between China and the United States in terms of annual greenhouse gas output. Approximately 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions come from the production of cement alone. Most people don’t know. Only the most basic things are able to conceal the…

At first glance, the scene in a field in the northeastern French town of Amance is truly bizarre: long rows of more than 5,000 solar panels raised above the ground, with crops growing beneath them in the dappled shade the panels cast across the ground. The light shifts across the field as the day goes on, the panels are angled, and the entire arrangement feels both spontaneous and completely planned. It is, in a way. For many years, agrivoltaics—the simultaneous production of solar energy and food on the same plot of land—has been considered as a theoretical possibility. It has…

Unusual heat descended upon Paris in August 2003 and remained there. For three weeks, temperatures rose well above what the city’s older structures, which were constructed for gloomy, wet summers, could withstand. France had lost about 14,800 people by the end of it. In the first three weeks of August, the number of deaths in Paris alone increased by 140%. In French hospitals and public health offices, what ensued was a reckoning: not only about the heat, but also about how ill-prepared the public health system as a whole had been for a threat it had anticipated but had not…

A specific type of scientific concern functions differently from a typical environmental concern. It has nothing to do with the severity of individual disasters, the accumulation of damage over decades, or the compounding costs of inaction. It concerns the point at which the earth begins to react to itself rather than to our actions. Fundamentally, a climate tipping point is a transfer of control rather than a worsening of conditions. Furthermore, it’s getting more difficult to ignore the evidence that a number of them are either on their way or already in motion. A report compiled by 160 scientists from…

The modesty of the economic consensus on climate change was almost comforting for a long time. Even a severe warming of three or four degrees Celsius by the end of the century would cost the global economy between seven and twenty-three percent of GDP, according to models created by prominent economists, including Nobel laureate William Nordhaus, whose work on climate damages became something close to the professional standard. Yes, it is significant. controllable with the appropriate regulations. The kind of figure that persuasively argues for incremental action without raising real concerns. The issue is that those models had a flaw…

Before the first day of spring, Phoenix reached 100°F. Temperatures in some areas of the Southwest exceeded 112°F, which would have been remarkable in late July but were just astounding in March. Over 19,800 daily heat records were broken nationwide in a single month, and over 2,000 locations set records for March alone. These records are more difficult to break because monthly records necessitate surpassing the worst of the worst over decades. With temperatures 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average for March in the 20th century, the continental United States recently recorded its most unusually hot month in 132…

On a steamy April morning, stroll through a flour mill in central Punjab. The bags are still being filled, the conveyor belts are still moving, and the machinery is still operating. Everything appears to be working. However, a different picture begins to emerge when you ask the miller about the past two seasons: the fields that produced half of what the same soil produced ten years ago, the stunted grain, and the lighter kernels. The apparatus is in good condition. The issue is the crop. The climate that the crop is required to grow in is also becoming a bigger…

There’s a temptation to feel reassured when you drive across Minneapolis’ I-35W bridge replacement, which was built after its predecessor collapsed into the Mississippi River during evening rush hour in 2007, killing thirteen people. fresh steel. Clean the concrete. contemporary engineering. The kind of obvious, concrete solution that implies the system can self-correct when it malfunctions sufficiently. Standing on that bridge in traffic, you can’t tell if it was built for the climate that has already occurred or for the one that is truly coming. IMPORTANT INFORMATION TABLE — GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE & CLIMATE RISK CategoryDetailsCore ProblemInfrastructure designed for 20th-century climate…

Observe what people notice when they fill up at a gas station in practically any mid-sized city, whether it’s in rural Germany, Ontario, or Louisiana. They take note of the pump’s number. Not the estimated sea level in 2080, not the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, not the Lloyd’s of London actuarial models. the pump’s number. That sums up the whole political issue with the carbon tax in one instant at one machine. For decades, economists have consistently argued for carbon pricing, which is nearly unheard of in their field. It’s not a difficult argument. When burning…