Mark Trexler
Mark Trexler
Comparing Responses to COVID-19 vs. Climate Change
Lots of people are asking why we haven’t responded to climate change the way we’re responding to the coronavirus. They are also envisioning what a climate response paralleling the coronavirus response might look like. Upon closer examination, however, I would suggest that our response to the coronavirus HAS paralleled our response to climate change. After […]
Should You Buy Carbon Offsets?
We have completed our Should You Buy Carbon Offsets? Ebook, which adds to our collection of free climate change Ebooks (available for download here). After years of decline, carbon offset markets seem on the verge of dramatic growth. Individuals, companies, and even entire sectors (the aviation and maritime sectors in particular) increasingly look to voluntary offsets to […]
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 […]