climate change 
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6/25/2023
Reading Peter Frankopan's Ambitious Planetary History
by Walter G. Moss
The Oxford historian's new book is a work of immense scope that succeeds in making human interaction with the environment a central character in history and argues for urgent action against the climate change that could write the final pages of that story.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/31/2023
Can Activists Use Banking Regulations to Force Decarbonization?
by Bart Elmore
After Clinton-era reforms enabled consolidation of the banking industry, environmental groups in the early 2000s began to target the commercial banking sides of the firms that raised capital and provided credit to the fossil fuels industry.
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5/7/2023
"An Inconvenient Truth" Shows the Missed Opportunities to Act on Climate Change
by Robert Brent Toplin
Al Gore's documentary project was more influential on the public than on the political system when it came to advancing awareness of climate change. One wonders what might have been if Gore had been advancing his message from the Oval Office 20 years ago.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
5/3/2023
Climate Policy Needs a Return to Land Reform
by Jo Guldi
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations' international development agenda took its cues from struggles for decolonization from Ireland to India, making the redistribution of rural land a top priority. Is this the key to more effective climate change mitigation?
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SOURCE: Washington Post
2/14/2023
Historical Data on Mosquito Range Shows Climate Change is Spreading Malaria Risk
Data stretching back to 1898 show mosquitoes spreading further from the equator in Africa year by year, with recent acceleration consistent with climate change estimates.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/12/2023
Exxon's Scientists Predicted Warming for Decades While Exxon Executives Sowed Doubt
Predictions made by Exxon's own scientists beginning in the 1970s accurately tracked the actual progress of subsequent warming, and those scientists explicitly contradicted dismissals of anthropogenic climate change linked to fossil fuels.
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SOURCE: Science
1/13/2023
Historians of Science: What Exxon Knew About Oil and the Climate, and When
Exxon Mobil's internal documents show that since the late 1970s the company's researchers agreed with academic scientists' predictions of global warming—but continued for decades to pretend that the science was too uncertain to justify constraining the industry.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
1/4/2023
How is the Biden Doctrine Working after Two Years?
by Matt Duss and Stephen Wertheim
After pledging to reorient foreign policy around the global issues affecting Americans – climate, disease, and ending "forever wars" – progress toward a Biden Doctrine has been incremental.
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12/18/2022
We Know About Fire. What Does Ice Tell Us About Humanity's Past and Future?
by Fred Hogge
Harnessing cold – both natural and artificially-created—has been a key support for human flourishing, but also a factor in the consumption of resources that imperils the environment.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
11/1/2022
Melting European Glaciers Yielding Artifacts Faster than Archaeologists Can Keep Up
Artifacts trapped in glacial ice are valuable because they are preserved; for archaeologists, climate change means both glaciers and artifacts are at risk.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
10/25/2022
God Save Us From the Economists
by Timothy Noah
Actress Jayne Mansfield was killed in a 1967 traffic accident; a truck trailer safety regulation review prompted in part by her highly public demise was finally implemented in 1996, after nearly 9,000 people were killed in similar crashes. Why? Blame a bipartisan faith in economists as policymakers.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
10/12/2022
Will Other Elite Unis Follow Princeton's Lead in Rejecting Fossil Fuel Money?
by Ilana Cohen and Michael E. Mann
A student movement is realizing its first successes in convincing university administrators to refuse donations that, activists argue, inevitably compromise the integrity of university research on climate change.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
10/10/2022
Ancient Flood Tales May be More than Myth
The climate crisis is pushing some historians and folklorists to reconsider indigenous societies' origin stories of flooding and geographic cataclysm. Should science take this perspective into account?
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
9/29/2022
How Fossil Fuel Dollars Warped University Climate Research
Fossil fuel profit "secures favorable white papers, journals, societies, public-policy comments, courtroom testimony, and front groups that attack what the industry sees as damaging science," copying the 1950s playbook of the tobacco industry with more money and higher stakes.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
10/2/2022
The Fatal Attraction to Florida
by Diane Roberts
Growth may make the Sunshine State unlivable.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
9/7/2022
Not Just Oil: The Electricity Industry Fed Climate Change Denial for Decades
Like the petroleum industry, America's electric utilities deliberately sowed confusion about the growing scientific consensus on climate change in order to influence policy and protect profits.
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SOURCE: TIME
9/12/2022
On Climate, the British Monarchy Mortgaged the Planet's Future
by Priya Satia
The monarchy, as a cultural core of the British empire, papered over the separation and alienation among humans resulting from the conversion of the Earth to a set of exploitable commodities.
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SOURCE: The At
8/7/2022
History's Greatest Barrier to Climate Action—the Senate—May Have Fallen
Critics have legitimate disagreements with the scope and urgency of climate action enabled by the just-passed Inflation Reduction Act. But it's a departure from precedent for the Senate to do anything at all.
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8/7/2022
Climate Change Just Erased the Past in Kentucky. Where Will it Happen Next?
by Tina A. Irvine
The archives of the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County were inundated by flood waters on July 28—a devastating loss of one community's history and culture, and a warning to historians that our knowledge of the past is at risk from climate change.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
7/5/2022
Forget the Metaphorical Heat – The Literal Temperatures are the Problem
by Tom Engelhardt
"Somehow, in this country, climate change has yet to become a significant part of the national debate or mainstream politics."
News
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- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel