November, 2015 | ModeShift

Paris Negotiators Expected to Reach First Global Climate Pact

by Keith SchneiderNovember 26, 2015November 29, 20150

French authorities issued an alert on November 18 about the upcoming COP 21 Paris global climate summit that needed almost no explanation. Two big public demonstrations planned for November 29 and December 12 would not take place, French officials declared, because of the risk they would be terrorist targets. The Paris Climate Conference, which opens on November 30 and closes December 11, is the 21st United Nations-sponsored annual global gathering meant to â€œstabilize atmospheric concentrations …

Drought Influenced Syrian Civil War; So What?, Says U.S. Congress

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2015November 21, 20150

A paper earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States added fresh, peer-reviewed details about how a malicious four-year (2007 to 2010) drought in Syria played a role in touching off a calamitous civil war in 2011. The long rein of water scarcity ruined the farm economy, and drove over 1 million farmers and their families into unstable resource-scarce cities inspired by the Arab Spring to rebel …

China Joins Global Pivot Away From Carbon

by Keith SchneiderNovember 7, 2015November 19, 20150

SHENZHEN, China â€“ Although it is a distinctive way to view the world, to some extent the contemporary industrial age is a global narrative of substance abuse and recovery. Sixty years ago the basic elements at the center of political and ecological concern were uranium and plutonium. Reckless Soviet and American atomic bomb blasts put so much deadly radiation in the atmosphere that milk and water became contaminated. Nations heeded the warnings of scientists and …