Economics

Credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's warns that climate change will have a negative effect on credit ratings. | Fotosearch Value via Getty Images

huffingtonpost.com - by Sara Gates - May 17, 2014

Add credit ratings to the list of things climate change might ruin.

According to a recent report released by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, rising global temperatures will put downward pressure on sovereign credit ratings. The international credit-rating firm warns that poorer countries and nations with already low ratings will be hit the hardest by the effects of climate change.

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Image: “No standard in Europe will be lowered because of this trade deal; not on food, not on the environment, not on social protection, not on data protection,” EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht said in February, before meetings this week in Brussels to negotiate the details of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP

theguardian.com - March 14th, 2014 - Karl Mathiesen

Both the EU and US are adamant TTIP will not affect both regions’ environmental protection standards. But green groups, forewarned by past experiences of free trade agreements, are incredulous.

This Nasa Earth Observatory image shows a storm system circling around an area of extreme low pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to climate change. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system

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theguardian.com - by Nafeez Ahmed - March 14, 2014

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

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A protester in Ukraine swings a metal chain during clashes - a taste of things to come? Photograph: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

submitted by Mikayla McDonald

From South America to South Asia, a new age of unrest is in full swing as industrial civilisation transitions to post-carbon reality

theguardian.com - by Nafeez Ahmed - February 28, 2014

If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession. . .

. . . The recent cases illustrate not just an explicit link between civil unrest and an increasingly volatile global food system, but also the root of this problem in the increasing unsustainability of our chronic civilisational addiction to fossil fuels. . .

. . . Of course, the elephant in the room is climate change.