Climate Matters: How to start an anti-carbon campaign

What can we learn from public health campaigns that will help us make progress on climate-change prevention?

Climate Matters: Lessons from a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey

The honey bee is critical to the environment and our survival. Here are some facts about honey bees, drawn from two sources.

Climate Matters: No justice without literacy

This Climate Matters column is brought to you by the letter L, the letter R, and the number 5. Five L’s guide my work and are inspired by Judy Dow’s 5 R’s.

Climate Matters: Embracing incremental progress

Yes, I’m concerned about climate change. Yet I remain optimistic about the future, a future we in Vermont have some control over.

Climate Matters: Climb the climate mountain

Two years ago, scientists were telling us that we needed to reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 and to zero by 2050.

Climate Matters: What do you call a house on fire?

Solastalgia means, “The distress caused by environmental change.”

Climate Matters: McKibben says transitions unleash creativity

16th in a series Most of the time I’m writing about vested interest as the key obstacle to making the energy transition. And it is — without the endless campaign of delay, denial and disinformation from Big Oil and its friends, we’d have started making bi … (read more)

Climate Matters: Honor and tend our waterways

I’ve been directing Addison County River Watch Collaborative for about 10 years, and I still feel like a beginner. I’m only starting to get to know the six rivers we monitor.

Climate Matters: Hard lessons in healing the climate

Studying our failures is as important as celebrating our triumphs.

Climate Matters: Our agriculture must be transformed for survival

By now, most people have seen headlines from the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: This is our “do-or-die” moment.

Climate Matters: The self education of a would-be activist

Climate change used to be a topic I thought of irregularly and in abstract terms.

Climate Matters: Vermont’s disingenuous energy portfolio

As Vermont pursues one of the most ambitious climate action plans in U.S. history, the state continues to mislead its constituents on just how clean Vermont’s electric energy sector really is.

Climate Matters: When climate change gets personal

The threat of climate change was put into sharp focus for my wife, Fran, and me with the arrival of our first two grandchildren in 2007.

Climate Matters: Learning to love ugly

This summer several tons of steel, glass and silicon will arrive near my side yard. This will be assembled, noisily, into a 30-acre power plant that will reduce my employer Middlebury College’s reliance on the electricity it currently buys from Green Moun … (read more)

Climate Matters: No free lunch for energy production

All methods of producing and distributing energy have costs, or downsides. We need to be clear-eyed about what these are, and to incorporate costs that are hard to quantify in dollar terms into our public discourse about our energy future.

34