Matt Oppenheim, PhD

Articles

The Upset about Carbon Offsets

26/05/2222

What is carbon offsetting? If you are concerned about global warming and you are the CEO of a corporation in Europe or the US, and your company’s production plants pollute the air and water with various chemicals, then you’d naturally want to do s…

To Reduce Our Carbon Footprint, We Need Another Kind of Extinction Rebellion

13/05/2222

“The world's richest ten percent are responsible for an estimated 47 percent share of global CO2 emissions,” writes Florian Zandt at Statista. This is the result of a recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. The st…

Five Ways Food Production Can Reduce Our Carbon Footprint

04/04/2222

1. Plant-Centered Diet Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash The Western diet is increasingly meat-centered and raising livestock accounts for nearly 15% of global greenhouse gasses. If livestock were a nation of their own, it would be the third gre…

Aluminum Produced in Norway Has the World’s Lowest Carbon Footprint

03/03/2222

Deep inside the Lysefjord, on the Norwegian southwestern coast, heavy rain is the main energy source in producing clean energy. Waterfalls cuts into the mountains. The fjord’s wide gorge has steep, partly overhanging rock walls on both sides. In t…

Carbon Capture and Beyond

01/02/2222

The story of how we got to climate change is familiar to most of us: our extractive human habits, free market economies, and short-sighted use of new inventions gave us coal-fired power plants, industrial farming, and gas guzzling automobiles. These …

Consumption: The Cause and the Solution to Environmental Destruction

02/12/2121

In American consumer culture there is an apt saying: “Shop, shop until you drop.” Not surprisingly, American household consumption amounts to about 70 percent of Gross National Product (GDP). On average, most countries spend between 50-80 percent of …

Beyond Carrying Capacity: Developing a Wellbeing Economy

23/11/2121

William E. Rees, in his essay ”A blot on the land“ (Nature 421, 898; 2003), uses the ecological-footprint concept to argue that the “carrying capacity” of the Earth has been exceeded because of technological and economic growth, and to counter s…

IPCC Climate Report: Capitalism is Unsustainable

10/11/2121

With COP26 still underway in Glasgow, Scotland, a leaked report from the IPCC (The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) states that the only way to avoid climate collapse is to end capitalism’s perpetual economic growth model. …

COP26 — Real Change or Just Another Blah Blah Summit for the Rich and the Powerful?

02/11/2121

At the COP26 summit in Glasgow, more than 100 world leaders representing over 85% of the planet's forests have committed to ending deforestation and land degradation by 2030, a British government statement says. Among the nations taking part are C…

The Invisible Hand: Capitalism’s Biggest and Most Destructive Myth

19/10/2121

Adam Smith’s most famous and most quoted idea is that of the invisible hand--the notion that if you work for your own selfish goals, the result would still be the same as if you worked to serve society as a whole. In economic terms this means that…

The Future of the Electric Car: A Systems Change Perspective

15/09/2121

Albert Einstein supposedly said that “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This statement, made a long time before global warming, is acutely relevant today, not only in solving chronic health problems bu…

Nine Ways to Create a Local, Regenerative Economy

30/07/2121

Summary of Workshop by Roar Bjonnes The slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” has been around for some years now. Only a few decades ago, vibrant local economies were indeed more prevalent: people grew food in their own backyards, local agriculture…

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