This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

(in 1980, new installations were subsidiz...

“In many cases the green jobs argument is the deciding factor that convinces governments to dole out support. And such requirements, if attached to subsidies or investment privileges, violate WTO obligations.”16

Any attempt by a government to regulate the sale or extraction of particularly dirty kinds of fossil fuels is also vulnerable to similar trade challenges.

The European Union, for instance, is considering new fuel quality standards that would effectively restrict the sales of oil derived from such high-carbon sources as the Alberta tar sands.

If rules and guidelines aren’t developed soon (including, as some are suggesting, banning field tests outright), we could end up with a research Wild

That’s what happened after Pinatubo. The year after the eruption, global temperatures dropped by half a degree Celsius, and as Oliver Morton noted in Nature, “Had there not been a simultaneous El Niño, 1992 would have been 0.7 degrees cooler, worldwide, than

The cons are that, depending on which sun-blocking method is used and how intensively, a permanent haze could appear over the earth, potentially making clear blue skies a thing of the

The haze could prevent astronomers from seeing the stars and planets clearly and weaker sunlight could reduce the capacity of solar power generators to produce energy (irony alert).

it would basically be impossible to stop because if you did, all the warming that you had artificially suppressed by putting up that virtual sunshade would hit the planet’s surface in one single tidal wave of heat, with no time for gradual adaptation.