Climate Change – TWC Interactive

Rethinking Economics

Joe Mancini September 13, 2026

The United Nations (UNEP) report, Limiting Overshoot, confronts the reality that the world needs to face the inevitability of exceeding 1.5°C global warming beyond the 2015 Paris climate accord threshold. Do the warnings against increased extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas fall on deaf ears even while we face decades of increased weather-related disasters, rising seas, melting ice and glaciers, and extinctions?

Determined Hope

Rebecca Mancini March 1, 2024

This year, the Mayors’ Dinner helps us to reflect on the importance of determined hopefulness in the face of despair. Determined hopefulness is not a gentle wish for the future, it is an intentional act to choose the kind of world that we want to live in. It will take courage and it will take care. Looking at the world around us, the need for courage is clear.

International Climate Justice

Isaiah Ritzmann September 30, 2023

Canada’s fair share of climate action is greater than what our governments are promising, let alone doing. In fact Canada’s fair share of climate action is greater than our society’s capacity. The amount we would need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to be fair to other nations is greater than our ability to do so, technically and physically. The gap between what we should do and what we can do becomes what we owe – our climate debt – to those countries whose fair shares we are, in effect, borrowing.

The Climate Emergency is Here

Isaiah Ritzmann September 30, 2022

We are living through a climate emergency. But are we acting like it? Imagine you are in a crowded building – a school, a mall, maybe an office. The fire alarm starts to sound. But nobody does anything. They just keep doing what they were doing before: the students sit in class, shoppers keep shopping, and the office workers go about their business. It’s an emergency. But nobody is acting like it. To keep doing what we were doing before is not what we need to do now. Is this a parable for an age where we declare climate emergencies and go on acting like we always have?

Heat Pumps to the Rescue

Isaiah Ritzmann April 1, 2022

We have the power to stop war and help solve the climate emergency if we act now. Bill McKibben argues that installing millions of heat pumps in European homes ahead of next winter will dramatically reduce reliance on Russian natural gas, cutting off a key source of Vladmir Putin’s power. Currently oil and gas make up 60% of Russia’s export earnings, and 40% of Europe’s natural gas comes from Russia. Such a project would not only help slow the Russian war machine, but would contribute meaningfully to lowering carbon emissions and addressing the climate emergency. It’s a win-win situation.

Changing Our Relationship to the Living World

Joe Mancini March 31, 2021

The decade of the 2020’s will be momentous for turning away from the endless growth economy by learning to walk more gently on the Earth. If we don’t, these coming decades will be characterized by attempts to hopelessly navigate around the climate and ecological barriers that are directly in our path.

Walking gently is a new priority. If we don’t start revising society’s relationship to the living world, the next generations will inherit a world that will not be recognizable – and eventually not habitable.

Climate Crisis and the Good Life: A Review of Seth Klein’s A Good War

Kiegan Irish March 31, 2021

In June of 2019 Canada officially declared the climate crisis an emergency. But are we acting as if this were really an emergency situation? Author Seth Klein contends the Canadian government is not stepping up to the urgency of the moment. He argues for a wartime level of mobilization to respond to the climate crisis, modelled after Canada’s response to the Second World War.

The New Normal

Isaiah Ritzmann September 1, 2020

What was normal before COVID-19 was a world of ecological, economic, and social woe: climate change, the sixth great mass extinction, extreme wealth inequality, rising xenophobia, drug addictions, epidemic anxiety, depression, and loneliness. In a COVID-19 world what we need is not only a vaccine and a bail-out package – we need a new normal.

Making Carbon Neutral, Carbon Normal

Isaiah Ritzmann September 1, 2020

We now have less than a decade to avoid catastrophic climate change. As has become common knowledge, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that to keep average global warming below 1.5 degrees humanity needs to cut our carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. This is a tall order. To do this requires a deep transformation of our whole society and of ourselves.

A Moral Philosophy of Limits

Kiegan Irish June 1, 2020

The effects of human activity on the climate has resulted in massive biodiversity loss, increasingly volatile weather conditions (including hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, etc.), and many other adverse effects which impacts the daily lives of more and more people. In this article I want to consider what effect this has on our understanding of freedom.

In North America, freedom is commonly understood to refer to the absence of limits on our actions. Any constraint or rule represents the limits of freedom. In philosophical circles, this understanding of freedom is usually referred to as “negative freedom.” It is defined by what it is not.

Tag: Climate Change