Any analysis of an energy project should compare that project to the alternatives, not just simply that project to its absence. The Editorial Board failed to carry out such basic comparisons in its Dec. 9 editorial, “Our View: Hydro-Quebec answers key climate question.”

These seagrasses are helping stave off more destruction by keeping ocean warming and ocean acidifying carbon locked away. Unfortunately, erosion and pollution from development are killing seagrass meadows around the world. In fact, 7 percent of their habitat area is lost a year, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The Indo-Pacific, where Lizard Island is located, has the highest diversity of seagrass species in the world, but they’re still declining, per the IUCN.

Once again, a planned electric transmission line from Canada to New England has created an odd alliance between a few environmental groups and fossil fuel interests determined to stop it.

You Are Stealing Our Future: Greta Thunberg, 15, Condemns the World’s Inaction on Climate Change:- Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. plenary last night in Katowice, Poland, condemning global inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change.

Reparations is one of the key aspects that has to be introduced into the dialogue. The United States has, under all administrations, blocked this kind of approach. It is not new to Trump. The concept of reparations needs to be introduced into several different levels of the conversation. You can think of reparations in terms of financial compensation, and you can think of it in terms of decolonization—returning lands back to indigenous and colonized people subjected to the United States and Western Europe much of the past 500 years.
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The market-based capitalist extractive system has been highlighted through the World Trade Organization. You have intellectual patents that are being codified into law through the WTO, which the United States and Western Europe have pushed on the world. If we look at Monsanto, they basically took agricultural practices and indigenous knowledge, codified it with their technology of splicing genes, and now have power and control over it. Patents need to be abolished and dissolved and we need to open up space in many areas for small farmers like those aligned with the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina, to return to traditional practices of growing food. That is a major form of reparations: repairing harm that’s been done.
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What happened at Standing Rock really points the way forward for the future. I don’t think we should hide from that or step away from that. We’re going to have to take direct action on a massive scale to shut that industry down on an international level. There are a ton of alternatives that could be scaled up—solar, wind—and they need to be scaled up.
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To think that they can keep pumping and drilling, and we’ll just phase them out with alternatives, on the basis of some kind of market logic, is not going to work. There is no question that we need to adopt a “keep it in the ground” policy—like, yesterday.