John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged climate · everything

slate.com

Why Soylent Green Got 2022 So Wrong

A critic of science-and-society storytelling revisits Soylent Green on the 50th anniversary of its titular "future" year and argues the film's heavy-handed, dogmatic dystopianism actually undercuts its own message about overpopulation, corporate greed, and environmental collapse. He contrasts it unfavorably with Harry Harrison's more nuanced source novel Make Room! Make Room!, contending that preachy apocalyptic certainty tends to entrench existing beliefs rather than change minds, and champions ambiguous, conversation-opening sci-fi (Children of Men, Ex Machina) as a better model for grappling with real present-day crises like climate change and AI.

Permalink technologyenvironmentfilm1970s

www.bbc.com

Digger review: Tom Cruise takes the 'biggest risk of his career' in this 'love-it-or-hate-it' folly ★★★★☆

Directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu, *Digger* is an intentionally bizarre and politically uncompromising eco-satire in which Tom Cruise transforms himself into a bloated, grotesque Texas oil baron whose drilling operation causes a catastrophic iceberg to drift toward Europe, forcing a bumbling US government to respond. The film combines heavy-handed satire about environmental destruction and bureaucratic incompetence with two significant high-concept twists that reframe the entire narrative, making it a divisive "love-it-or-hate-it folly" rather than a prestige picture designed to win awards. Though audiences will likely be divided by its excessive style and sometimes exhausting runtime, *Digger* represents Cruise committing to an unconventional artistic vision with the same ambitious intensity he brings to his action films.

Permalink filmcomedyreviewsclimate

apple.news

Climate solutions most likely to reach ‘positive tipping points’ revealed by scientists — Guardian US

A report on "positive tipping points" identifies clean electricity as the highest-leverage environmental intervention because its falling costs create cascading benefits across transport, heating, and industry while simultaneously making other transitions more economically viable. Beyond energy, the analysis highlights other high-impact interventions including coordinating commodity supply chains to eliminate deforestation-linked products, rapidly cutting methane emissions (which show results within a decade), and scaling clean cooking technologies to the 2.1 billion people still relying on harmful solid fuels. The research reveals that progress in these sectors is being held back less by lack of finance than by political choices: roughly $7.3 trillion annually flows toward nature-degrading activities compared to just $220 billion for solutions, and systemic coordination among policymakers, producers, and financial institutions could accelerate tipping points by up to eight years.

Permalink sustainabilitysciencenewsclimate

Chicago Tribune

Marathon runners are training for a hotter world: ‘Our bodies don’t know pace, they know effort’

Climate change is forcing marathon runners to fundamentally rethink their training and race strategies as heat waves make traditional fall marathon seasons dangerously hot. Beyond gear like cooling headbands and moisture-wicking clothing, experts emphasize that the most effective approach is heat acclimation—training the body physiologically to handle extreme temperatures through sauna sessions, strategic timing of runs, and gradual heat exposure starting weeks before a race. Race organizers are responding by shifting marathon dates, allowing modified finisher criteria, and creating adjusted training paces based on real-time weather data, while researchers warn that the cooler conditions runners once relied on for major races are becoming increasingly rare due to climate change.

Permalink healthrunningtrainingmarathon

The Independent

Wildfires across Europe detonate forgotten World War bombs

Wildfires and drought sweeping Europe this summer are unearthing and detonating unexploded ordnance left from the two world wars, from Belgium's High Fens battlefields to receding rivers in Hungary and Slovakia. Drawing on interviews with historians, bomb disposal officials and researchers like Sarah Njeri and Christina Greene, the piece argues that climate change is ending Europe's "climatic luck," reactivating buried munitions once kept dormant by stable weather and forcing firefighters and civilians to confront wartime dangers decades after the fighting ended. It's a striking example of how climate change is colliding with historical conflict legacies in unexpected, physically dangerous ways.

Permalink historyeuropenewsclimate

www.theatlantic.com

A New Reckoning for Nuclear Energy

After decades of stagnation caused by public opposition, economic barriers, and safety concerns, nuclear energy is experiencing unprecedented political and corporate support as a climate solution, with the U.S. government targeting a massive expansion and major tech companies investing heavily in new facilities. However, this represents the country's third major nuclear revival attempt, and the industry faces a critical test: it must successfully demonstrate that it can build large fleets of new reactors on time and within budget, particularly using smaller "advanced" reactor designs that have long promised breakthroughs but never achieved commercial deployment. If expectations outpace actual delivery over the next five to ten years, another failure could undermine nuclear's role in the climate transition at a time when abundant carbon-free electricity is increasingly essential.

Permalink technologyenvironmentamazonunited states

www.self.com

Eco-Conscious Tips: 8 Habits to Start to Live More Eco-Consciously

The piece outlines eight practical daily habits individuals can adopt to reduce their environmental impact, including reducing food waste, avoiding single-use plastics, eating more plant-based meals, composting, buying secondhand clothes, researching eco-conscious brands, walking or biking instead of driving, and conserving water. While acknowledging that individual actions alone won't solve systemic environmental problems, it frames these changes as meaningful personal contributions that collectively matter. The article emphasizes that reducing consumption and reusing items are more effective than buying new "green" products, though it includes guidance on choosing sustainable brands when purchases are necessary.

Permalink sustainabilitywatertagsclimate

www.nytimes.com

How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?

Beyond gradual climate change, scientists have identified seven vast natural systems—from coral reefs to Atlantic currents—that could undergo sudden, irreversible collapse if planetary warming crosses critical thresholds. These "tipping points" operate like switches rather than dials: once flipped, they would trigger cascading effects difficult or impossible to reverse, such as permafrost releasing massive carbon stores, Greenland's ice sheet melting irreversibly, or the Amazon rainforest degrading into savanna. The timing of these potential collapses ranges from already underway to sometime this century, but the uncertainty around predictions shouldn't obscure the genuine risks—each additional increment of warming makes these catastrophic shifts more likely.

Permalink amazonscienceresearchclimate

time.com

AC Feels Great, But It’s Terrible for the Planet. Here’s How to Fix That

Traces air conditioning's history from a business tool for factories and stock exchanges to a symbol of American class and racial status, showing how Freon's ozone-destroying properties nearly caused catastrophe before the Montreal Protocol, and how its replacement, HFCs, became a potent greenhouse gas driving the very heatwaves AC is used to combat. Argues that swapping refrigerants alone won't solve the problem since cooling still demands massive energy and individual AC units worsen urban heat for those without access to them. Concludes that the real fix is cultural and infrastructural—shifting from private comfort toward public cooling solutions like shade, green space, and water infrastructure, since equitable communal cooling is both more effective and less destructive than everyone chasing personal comfort.

Permalink environmentenergyurbanenvironmental

www.bbc.com

The insiders changing how we think about flying

This piece traces how the aviation industry's climate reckoning is unfolding on two fronts simultaneously: international policy, via a new coalition of countries (France, Spain, Kenya, Barbados and others) pushing a levy on private jets and premium-class seats to fund climate adaptation, and personal disillusionment among industry insiders—a former commercial pilot, a private-jet pilot turned sustainability consultant, and an aerospace engineer—who left their careers after confronting the gap between aviation's "sustainability" rhetoric and its actual, exponentially rising emissions. It's built around the stark statistic that 1% of people cause over half of aviation's emissions, and offers concrete near-term fixes (contrail avoidance, taxing frequent flyers, electric short-haul planes) alongside practical advice for ordinary travelers on flying more intentionally.

Permalink sustainabilitytravelaviationclimate

NOEMA

The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance

New York's R32 subway trains—the unpainted "Brightliners" that operated for 58 years despite being designed to last only 35—exemplify how meticulous maintenance can extend the life of infrastructure far beyond its predicted lifespan, a feat the MTA achieved through scheduled preventive maintenance practices implemented since 1990. The piece argues that maintenance is fundamentally undervalued in capitalist economies that prioritize cheap disposal over labor-intensive upkeep, and proposes that treating maintenance as a serious economic and political framework—rather than an afterthought—could better address both climate change and resource scarcity than the dominant "reduce, reuse, recycle" paradigm. Rather than waiting for climate catastrophe to force behavioral change, Vuocolo contends we need to rebuild economic systems that value the practical knowledge and skilled labor that keeps society functioning, even if that means fundamentally challenging how capitalism organizes work and social value.

Permalink sustainabilitymaintenanceinfrastructureclimate

Boing Boing

the Guardian

Eyewitness: The Earth at night | World news | guardian.co.uk

NASA's new satellite has captured nighttime imagery of Earth revealing human settlement patterns and activity across continents with far greater resolution than previously possible, showing the distribution of cities, infrastructure, and population density through light emissions from Europe, Asia, and Africa. The photographs demonstrate how artificial lighting from human civilization creates a visible glow that can be detected from space, providing scientists with detailed data about urbanization, energy use, and human geography across the globe.

Permalink photographysciencenewsclimate

Businessweek.com

It's Global Warming, Stupid - Businessweek

Hurricane Sandy's devastating impact—40 deaths, $50 billion in losses, millions without power—illustrates how climate change amplifies severe weather events even if it doesn't directly cause individual storms. Scientists and corporate reinsurers increasingly agree that warming oceans provide more energy for storms, the atmosphere retains more moisture, and altered Arctic patterns can intensify coastal hurricanes, with evidence suggesting these mechanisms were at work in Sandy specifically. The piece argues that despite political gridlock and declining public concern about climate change, the U.S. must pursue pragmatic solutions including natural gas as a bridge fuel, carbon pricing mechanisms, improved disaster infrastructure, and renewed federal commitment to climate negotiations—otherwise, increasingly frequent catastrophic storms will continue destabilizing the economy.

Permalink sciencenewseconomicsclimate

Scientific American

The Smart Way to Play God with Earth's Limited Land: Scientific American

Lynas argues that 83 percent of Earth's ice-free land is already human-influenced and that "wilderness" is effectively extinct, making traditional conservation approaches obsolete. Rather than pursuing low-impact rural living or halting land conversion, he contends that humanity should concentrate its impact through intensified agriculture on existing farmland, aggressive urbanization, and electrified transport, while allowing marginal lands to rewild and protecting high-biodiversity areas—a strategy that also slows population growth through demographic transition. He specifically advocates scrapping biofuel subsidies (except potentially for aviation), switching ground vehicles to electricity, and recognizing that cities, despite their apparent sprawl, actually represent the most environmentally efficient way to house the world's growing population.

Permalink environmentsustainabilityscienceagriculture

Daily Kos

Daily Kos: ExxonMobil says wind is cheapest form of electricity generation

ExxonMobil's own energy outlook chart shows wind power becoming cost-competitive with coal and gas by 2030, even without accounting for carbon's true costs. The author argues that wind's apparent disadvantages—the need for backup capacity and transmission upgrades—are not unique costs but standard features of any power system, and that even high wind penetration wouldn't require prohibitive investment in additional backup generation. The piece concludes that wind matches traditional energy sources on price while avoiding their genuine externalities: geopolitical entanglements, mining hazards, and long-term environmental damage.

Permalink energyclimate

Daily Kos

Daily Kos: ExxonMobil says wind is cheapest form of electricity generation

ExxonMobil's own energy outlook data shows wind power costs are competitive with coal and gas when carbon emissions are priced, and the author argues that common criticisms of wind—needing backup capacity and grid transmission upgrades—are misleading since traditional power plants require the same infrastructure investments that the power system already accommodates. Wind's intermittency is manageable at current penetration levels (5-10%), and even in high-wind scenarios decades away, backup costs would only modestly increase wind's price while ignoring the massive geopolitical, health, and security costs embedded in coal and gas production.

Permalink energyeconomicsclimate