Burning gas and propane for cooking, water heating and space heating in California homes and businesses creates 10% of the state's greenhouse gas emissions. It also releases pollutants indoors.
Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life. This condition calls for new readings and approaches.
One of the key reasons for India's withdrawal appears to be the steadily declining relevance of COP in driving meaningful global climate action. The complete erosion of trust among countries at the Belem summit in Brazil, where several nations reneged on previously agreed commitments, seems to have contributed significantly to this decision.
At a young age, I learned quickly how oil wealth and power could burn the land while people struggled. I saw heat rise off the streets, the Nile strained, and the air thickened with injustice. In my teenage years, through Aotearoa, being on the edge of the Pacific, I felt the ocean breathing heavy, swallowing the shores of islands that have done the least to cause this harm.
When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world "to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."
In Indra's Net of pearls and jewels, every gem reflects every other, a shimmering image of interdependence. This ancient Vedic metaphor for connection across the cosmos also illuminates what the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht first proposed in 2014as 'theSymbiocene': the era after the Anthropocene, in which human technologies take their cues from living systems and work in partnership rather than through dominance.
The world spends 30 times more money destroying nature than protecting it. That's according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that exposes a massive gulf between so-called "harmful investments" and financing that promotes nature preservation. The global environment agency's latest "State of Finance for Nature" (SNF) report is calling to phase out the US$7.3 trillion (6.2 trillion) in global investments that damage nature including into high-emissions energy infrastructure and manufacturing, for example.
Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had ploughed more than $180bn (130bn) into plastic plants in the US since 2010. It was a kick in the teeth, says Gardiner. You're telling me that while I am beating myself up because I forgot to bring my water bottle, all these huge oil companies are pouring billions She looks appalled. It was just such a shock.