These are the CASSE blog articles on climate change.


Labour’s Military Spending Undermines Climate Goals

by Darryl Rigby

As Edwin Starr once sang: “War, what is it good for?” If we’re to believe the United Kingdom’s Labour Party government, it’s good for boosting GDP and protecting your population from the existential threat of Russia.

But one thing increased militarisation most certainly isn’t good for is the environment. Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced his plan to steadily increase the defence budget over the next decade.


Carbon Footprint Tramples Planetary Boundaries

by Amelia Jaycen

The carbon footprint of an individual, organization, or country is the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that must be produced to accommodate their choices: the types of transportation, heating and cooling, and diet they adopt and the manufacture and disposal of products they use. As a component of the total impact on the environment, called ecological footprint, a carbon footprint can be expressed as the amount of land or biocapacity required to absorb CO2 emissions.


Hitting Freshwater Rock Bottom

by Alix Underwood and Marwa Ebrahem

Freshwater is arguably the single most essential resource for human life. Yet, its use seems more abstract than that of solid materials. Freshwater sources exist everywhere that humans do, but they are often hidden from view, buried underground or frozen in glaciers. It’s hard to fathom the scope and the impact of the 3.95 trillion cubic meters of freshwater the human economy extracted in 2021.


Growth of an Economy, Death of a River

by Amelia Jaycen

The Colorado River has a simple math problem: More water is taken out than nature refills every year. The gap between the two is also widening. Every year, an increasing amount of water is taken out of the Colorado River, as demand for water increases across the arid American West. Meanwhile, every year less water is available in the river and its tributaries as climate change and other manmade stressors cause imbalances in natural systems.


Has the Hunger-GDP Relationship Crossed a Threshold?

by Alix Underwood

The world looked poised to end hunger in the mid-2010s, after decades of decline in the percentage of the population that is undernourished. People often attribute progress in the late 20th century to the technological advances of the “Green Revolution.” However, the revolution’s costs and benefits, and their distribution, are hotly contested. Many experts instead point simply to economic growth as the primary factor responsible for poverty reduction and,


Carbon and Canada’s Cars: “Business As Usual, Electrified”

by Bart Hawkins Kreps

Auto industry voices in Canada have made headlines recently by urging a longer timeline for the transition to electric cars. We should hope that Prime Minister Mark Carney does not give in to this demand.

Yet even if Canada’s federal government sticks to the current policy, and Canadian new car sales are 100 percent zero-emission by 2035, carbon emissions will decline much more slowly than the world needs.


Greenwashing in the Amazon: Debunking False Green Solutions

by Mauricio López

The concept of greenwashing has gained unfortunate relevance, especially regarding the energy transition. Greenwashing occurs when companies, governments, or institutions promote products, services, or projects as ecologically responsible, while minimizing or hiding their negative impacts. The inhabitants of the Amazon, particularly Indigenous peoples, are witnessing how greenwashing is not only problematic from an environmental perspective. It is also detrimental to human rights and social justice.

Renewable energies, such as solar,


Technocene Ground Zero: Counties Face Off with Data Centers

by Amelia Jaycen

In counties across the U.S.—rural and urban, democrat and republican—communities are living up close and personal with data centers. And the new neighbor is a real nightmare.

The number of data centers in the U.S., whether planned, under construction, or operating, is 3,897. This is by far the most anywhere in the world, and the number is increasing weekly.

We are hitting our heads on the ceiling of limits to growth.


Corporate Conservation Funding: A Contradictory Conundrum

by Kali Young

Apple, Cargill, Walmart, United Airlines, Chevron, BlackRock, Starbucks, Ford Motor Company, Amazon, McDonald’s, Sotheby’s…What do they all have in common? They are among many megacorporations that fund Conservation International, one of the most prominent conservation foundations in the world. World Wildlife Fund and the Conservation Fund, also conservation powerhouses, have similar though less expansive funder profiles.

Walmart and BlackRock are two of the world’s top deforestation perpetrators.


Unsafe at Top Speed: “SAFE” Summit Shoots Off the Rails

by Brian Czech

The 2025 SAFE Summit in Washington, DC, was anything but. Sure, the hallways of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center were free of hooligans, and the attentive staff kept the floors cleared of banana peels. Yet if your idea of safety is big-picture, long-term—as expected at an energy-security conference—you could have left the summit fearing for your children’s future.

The three main themes percolating on stage were “energy dominance,” “all of the above” (as in all forms of energy),