Mark Trexler
Mark Trexler
When 17 Climate Narratives Add Up to No Narrative
How many climate narratives are in use today, even if we limit the list to narratives being used to advocate for a serious societal response to climate change? Quite a few, and the list below could be a lot longer if narrower narratives were separated out, e.g. the Soil Carbon Narrative (which right now is […]
A Climate Web Topical Roadmap: Carbon Offsets
The Climate Web is a large climate change knowledge management system. Our Topical Roadmaps help you explore specific topics in more depth, taking advantage of specially curated collections of documents, news stories, websites, and more. Topical Roadmaps like this one are intended to provide the context for pointing you to those information collections, rather than to […]
Challenging Sustainability Greenwishing With . . . More Greenwishing?
When it comes to investment manager Duncan Austin’s new paper “Greenwish: The Wishful Thinking Undermining the Ambition of Sustainable Business,” I first want to congratulate him on inventing (as far as I can tell) the term “Greenwish.” It is a great term that offers flexibility in characterizing the wide divergence between corporate good intentions and […]
Living Up to the Potential of Actionable Climate Knowledge
Ten years ago I saw a presentation by the authors of the book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything about the ability of the right information at the right time — actionable knowledge — to influence human decisions. That’s because every human decision is based on the answers to two questions: 1) Is the topic […]
The Five Truths of Climate Change
Climate change is a wicked problem, making it really hard to tackle. The Earth is committed to about as much warming as a million species (and a few billion humans) can handle without dangerous disruption. A low-carbon transition is currently underway, and will dramatically reduce the warming impact of human activities. There are virtually no […]
The Fourth National Climate Assessment: Catastrophic Messaging?
The recently released Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) has received a great deal of attention due to the severity of climate change impacts the report portrays. The NCA and the IPCC’s recently released 1.5 Degrees Special Report together have been widely characterized as portraying a climate change state of emergency. Some observers have gone […]
Climate Fiction is Dead! Long Live Climate Fiction!
I’ve been following the evolving Climate Fiction (CliFi) genre for several years. But what IS CliFi? I suspected we were in trouble when the media began referring to the recent movie remake of Godzilla as a CliFi movie (for reasons I’ve never figured out). In other cases, it seems all it takes is mention of […]
Are You Really Ready to Take One for Climate Change?
There is no doubt that any push to rapidly tackle climate change would disrupt the global energy economy. It would also affect the business models of millions of companies tied into that global system. Advocates for climate action often try to portray the low carbon transition required to tackle climate change as a societal and […]
If Blockchain and Bitcoin are the Solution, What Was the Problem?
If you’re interested in climate change, you’ve probably seen a lot of discussion not only about how blockchain and cryptocurrencies (like bitcoin) will change the world, but how they’ll help solve climate change. There is no question that these new digital technologies will change the world. They already are. How much of an impact they’ll […]
If Only We Knew What We Know About Climate Change in Oregon
When it comes to climate change, Carla Odell’s “if only we knew what we know,” is an apt metaphor, particularly given Woodrow Wilson’s point that “there is not an idea in our heads that has not been worn shiny by someone else’s brains.” Imagine what we could accomplish on climate change in Oregon if everyone […]