Climate cosmopolitics: PhD thesis by Isak Stoddard
On friday 7 march 2025, my friend and colleague Isak Stoddard defended his PhD thesis Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation at Uppsala University. Below is the abstract in english from https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1929133&dswid=519. Increasingly emphatic warnings from scientists about the dire consequences of global climate change has contributed to the establishment of an international governance regime and [...]
Richer ánd cleaner? Is there an Environmental Kuznets Curve?
One unsustainable part of the industrial economy is the mining and processing of materials and fuels which creates also large flows of ‘waste’ and burdens environmental sinks. Upstream, huge amounts of solid waste are generated in mining and processing processes. One-fifth (2%) of global energy- and process-related CO2 emissions arise from the production and processing of only five materials: steel, [...]
Zen and the Art of Happiness
The aspiration of Sustainable Development (SD) is associated with well-being for life on Earth and in the long term (de Vries 2023). It is often narrowed down to human happiness, in which the long term is only involved inasfar as people’s well-being is influenced by expectations and emotions about the longer term prospects for themselves, their kin and the larger [...]
Guar gum: Indian farmers and USA gas fracking
Angkur Pailiwal and Jyotika Sood tell an interesting story about the rapidly increasing demand for guar gum for use in the exploitation of shale gas (‘frackgas’) in Down to Earth . It shows the interconnectedness in the world: oil depletion and geopolitical tensions cause investments in exploiting marginal gas deposits in the USA, which increases the demand for guar gum which… [...]
What are ‘needs’?
Needs is a broad category. It overlaps with wants and desires. It covers a broad array of items, from basic needs for food and shelter to spiritual aspirations. How needs are perceived and actualized is a key aspect of the quest for sustainable development. The goal of sustainable development is a quest for developing and sustaining qualities of life. But [...]
Ancient settlements and resource depletion
Resource overexploitation may have been around from the earliest times. There is evidence that early 9th millennium BP villages collapsed around 8500 BP, while new settlements were founded in quite variable landscapes in the same period. One of the largest, over 12 ha in size, was Ain Ghazal in southern Jordan (Rollefson 1992; Redman 1999:107-110). There is evidence that this [...]