Steve Martin

Revisiting the Challenges Facing Canadian Higher Education: The Limits of Crisis-Thinking

By Sharon Stein UBC Are our individual and institutional responses appropriately calibrated to the scale and complexity of the moment we are actually in? After all, we cannot “solve” planetary and geopolitical challenges at the level of curriculum, technology, or individual resilience. We cannot, and arguably should not, seek to extend an extractive system indefinitely.Continue reading “Revisiting the Challenges Facing Canadian Higher Education: The Limits of Crisis-Thinking”

JOHN RUSKIN and CLIMATE CHANGE

In 1884, John Ruskin delivered one of the first lectures to discuss climate change and make a link to industrial pollution. Now, with the help of a group of 13- to 16-year-olds, a new exhibition Sheffield’s unrivalled Ruskin collection is taking place at the city’s Millennium Gallery. Storm-Cloud brings together work from the Guild ofContinue reading “JOHN RUSKIN and CLIMATE CHANGE”

David v Goliath :Community Flood Resilience in the Derbyshire Dales

Community Resilience

Battered by the storm, Cornwall was emblematic of our institutional systemic failure to confront a rapidly changing reality. In one of the richest countries in the world, entire communities lost power for weeks, and running water for days. Had the British government addressed climate change, and made contingency plans for these mega-storms, which will onlyContinue reading “Community Resilience”

Recalibration Climate Risk

This wide ranging and impressive report addresses two distinct but interconnected dimensions of climate impacts, each relevant to different decision-makers: (1) economic impacts affecting financial asset values and portfolio performance over investment horizons, and (2) broader social and human welfare impacts, including mortality, health burdens, inequality, ecosystem degradation, and quality of life. The first isContinue reading “Recalibration Climate Risk”

Planning and the Risk From Surface Water Flooding

The purpose of house building should be to increase the stock of homes for local people. If new developments cause flooding of existing housing stock, and this renders existing housing uninhabitable and uninsurable there is no net increase in housing stock (What if floods left your home unsellable? 2 January Guardian). Matlock repeatedly suffers fromContinue reading “Planning and the Risk From Surface Water Flooding”

The Coming of the Ecological University

“Universities have been with us on this Earth for at least one thousand years and will surely be with us in the future; perhaps so long as there is life on this planet that has any well-being. There is now something in not just the name of the institution but in the idea of the university that seemsContinue reading “The Coming of the Ecological University”

The Future is Bright

Solar Power Reviewed by Carbon Choices 22 August Falling Costs The cost of electricity produced by solar power has been falling for the last two decades. This trend is likely to continue due to the increased efficiency of panels, lower cost of silicon, improved manufacturing techniques, and economies of scale – the higher the demandContinue reading “The Future is Bright”

Fear got us this Far- Hope will get us Further and Possibly Faster

By Tobias Brosch, Edward Mishaud, and Disa Sauter “An elevator-pitch definition of fear might be a neurobiological process to keep us alive,” writes cultural historian Robert Peckham in his 2023 book, ‘Fear: An Alternative History of the World.’ Indeed, fear – that full-on jolt of adrenaline we feel throughout our body – has served humanityContinue reading “Fear got us this Far- Hope will get us Further and Possibly Faster”

Carbon capture project ‘to boost hundreds of jobs’ in Cement works in Derbyshire

A project to develop a pipeline to capture carbon emitted by cement and lime factories in the Peak District and bury it below the Irish Sea will create hundreds of jobs, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said. The pipeline will be created to transfer carbon dioxide (CO2) from Derbyshire, Staffordshire and the Northwest to be storedContinue reading “Carbon capture project ‘to boost hundreds of jobs’ in Cement works in Derbyshire”