The subway is more than mass transit – it’s the city’s very roots. The idea of the metro swamped by cold, salt water is unbearable New York is the city I love best, and I’m trying to imagine it from a distance tonight. The lurid, flash-lit instagram images of floating cars in Alphabet City or water [...]

“If There Was Ever a Wake-up Call, This Is It” Much of the East Coast is shut down today as residents prepare for Hurricane Sandy, a massive storm that could impact up to 50 million people from the Carolinas to Boston. The storm has already killed 66 people in the Caribbean, where it battered Haiti and [...]

Sandy, the hurricane that appears set to pummel the East Coast, promises a historic potential for damage and a terrifying look at what may be in store for us—ever more frequent assaults of not-so-natural origin. Watching Sandy on her careening path toward the Eastern Seaboard scares me more than it would have 15 months ago. [...]

Ahora que el espectáculo cuatrienal de la elección presidencial está alcanzando la cúspide, es útil preguntar cómo las campañas políticas están abordando los temas más cruciales que enfrentamos. La respuesta es sencilla: mal, o para nada. En tal caso, surgen algunas preguntas importantes: ¿por qué, y qué podemos hacer al respecto? Estos son dos temas [...]

With the quadrennial presidential election extravaganza reaching its peak, it’s useful to ask how the political campaigns are dealing with the most crucial issues we face. The simple answer is: badly, or not at all. If so, some important questions arise: why, and what can we do about it? There are two issues of overwhelming significance, [...]

Más de tres mil científicos concluyeron en el congreso denominado “Planet under pressure” (“Planeta bajo presión”) desarrollado esta semana en Londres que el planeta Tierra corre el riesgo de sufrir una falta estructural de agua, alimentos y otros recursos esenciales sino se combate el cambio climático. “Esta década es crítica para el futuro del planeta. Si [...]

Introducción del editor de TomDispatch Hace dos sábados, iba caminando con un amigo por un parque aquí en la Ciudad de Nueva York. Era fines de enero, pero yo iba vestido con un sweater ligero y una delgada chaqueta de otoño, que me acababa de sacar y llevaba atada alrededor de la cintura. Íbamos pasando [...]

Deficit hawks try to scare us about the debt we’re leaving. That’s economic nonsense – unlike the costs of global warming It is remarkable how efforts to reduce the government deficit/debt are often portrayed as a generational issue, while efforts to reduce global warming are almost never framed in this way. This contrast is striking because [...]

Una tarea de la Convención Marco sobre Cambio Climático de Naciones Unidas, que en la actualidad está teniendo lugar en Durban, Sudáfrica, es extender las decisiones políticas previas, limitadas en alcance y solamente parcialmente aplicadas. Estas decisiones se remontan a la Convención de 1992 de la ONU y al Protocolo de Kyoto de 1997, al que [...]

A task of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, now under way in Durban, South Africa, is to extend earlier policy decisions that were limited in scope and only partially implemented. These decisions trace back to the U.N. Convention of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the U.S. refused to join. The [...]