Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Industrial Revolution”
The US Navy has been conducting war-game exercises in US waters for decades, and in the process, it has left behind tons of bombs, heavy metals, missiles, sonar buoys, high explosives and depleted uranium munitions that are extremely harmful to both humans and marine life. Truthout recently reported that the Navy has admitted to releasing chemicals into the oceans that …
Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but everybody does it. As long as we’ve had language—for tens of thousands of years, at last estimate—we’ve been able to formulate the question, “What will tomorrowbring?” The answers have ranged from idyllic to hellish, though the reality has been, more often than not, “a lot like today.” Since the Industrial Revolution, the …
Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but everybody does it. As long as we’ve had language—for tens of thousands of years, at last estimate—we’ve been able to formulate the question, “What will tomorrowbring?” The answers have ranged from idyllic to hellish, though the reality has been, more often than not, “a lot like today.” Since the Industrial Revolution, the …
Last month, geographer Richard Heede received a subpoena from Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Smith, a climate change doubter, became concerned when the attorneys general of several states launched investigations into whether ExxonMobil had committed fraud by sowing doubts about climate change even as its own scientists knew it …
Last December, officials representing more than 190 countries met in Paris to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The historic outcome from that conference was the “Paris Agreement” in which each country agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above temperatures seen near the …
The prosperity that we are enjoying today could largely be attributed to the industrial revolution of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Yet this enhancement of our standard of living has come at a steep price: the creation of the so-called linear economy. In other words, we have a “take, make and dispose” economy. We take natural resources, make things …
Hobson’s explanation of colonialism The Industrial Revolution opened up an enormous gap in military strength between the industrialized nations and the rest of the world. Taking advantage of their superior weaponry, Europe, the United States and Japan rapidly carved up the remainder of the world into colonies, which acted as sources of raw materials and food, and as markets for …
PART 1: LIMITS TO GROWTH Introduction: The need for reform The Industrial Revolution marked the start of massive human use of fossil fuels. The stored energy from several hundred million years of plant growth began to be used at roughly a million times the rate at which it had been formed. The effect on human society was like that of …
Are we going to let capitalism destroy life on Earth? According to 99 percent of climate scientists – we’ll know by the end of the century. Scientists have agreed for three decades about what is causing atmospheric temperatures to rise – humans are burning Earth’s carbon resources to fuel economic activity. But even before we knew what was causing the …
We are all patriotic. Let’s start with the Star Spangled Banner. You all are familiar with some of it, but perhaps some of you may not know this particular stanza: Don’t worry, I won’t sing it: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” Keep in mind that the …
