These are the CASSE blog articles on climate change.


Existential Dread: We Need to Talk About our Feelings

By James Magnus-Johnston

Just as the smoke disperses from fire-ravaged parts of the world, the specter of ecological breakdown is creeping into humanity’s collective psyche. Whether that manifests as a bit of anxiety or full-on dread of mass extinction, we need to start talking about our feelings. If we don’t, we may avoid rather than confront the reforms needed for the planet to continue supporting life.

As a university instructor in Canada,


Book Review: Falter by Bill McKibben

By Herman Daly

Thanks to Bill McKibben, not just for his new book but for 30 years of honest, eloquent, and insightful environmental writing and activism.

He begins Falter by pointing out that the human game we’ve been playing has no rules and no end, but it does come with two logical imperatives. The first is to keep it going, and the second is to keep it human.”


The Green New Deal: What’s Really Green and What’s Really New

by Brian Czech

Ask Americans what the Green New Deal is all about, and you’ll get two basic answers. Most often you’ll hear, “It’s about moving to renewable energy in order to fight climate change.” You’ll also hear, from a camp further right, “It’s all about socialism!”

Either way, the really green, really new feature is overlooked. What the Green New Deal is really about is the transition to a steady state economy.


A Not-So-Nobel Prize for Growth Economists

by Brian Czech

How ironic for the Washington Post to opine “Earth may have no tomorrow” and, two pages later, offer up the mini-bios of William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, described as Nobel Prize winners.

Without more rigorous news coverage, few indeed will know that Nordhaus and Romer are epitomes of neoclassical economics, that 20th century occupation isolated from the realities of natural science.


Conflict of Interest at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? A Deal Some Couldn’t Refuse

By Richard McCorkle, Guest Author

As a fish and wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, I’ve been concerned about global warming and climate change for more than a quarter century. In the late 1990s, when I finally had the means to do so, I began privately investing in socially and environmentally screened mutual funds. I felt it was the right thing to do; I was putting my money where my mouth was.


Thoughts on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si

by Herman Daly

As a Protestant Christian, my devotion to the Catholic Church has been rather minimal, based largely on respect for early church history and for the love of an aunt who was a nun. In recent times, the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control, plus the pedophile and cover-up scandals, further alienated me. Like many others, I first viewed Pope Francis as perhaps a breath of fresh air, but little more. After reading his encyclical on environment and justice,


A Medical Missionary’s Environmental Epiphany

What can leprosy and its treatment teach us about ourselves and how to manage our environmental crises?


Uneconomic Growth Deepens Depression

Herman Daly makes the case against using obsolete growth policies to dig out of the recession, and he issues a challenge to technological optimists.


Opportunity Cost of Growth

Herman Daly swims upstream like a salmon, fighting the flow of fallacious philosophy from growth economists — you won’t want to miss his final refrain on this one.


Modernizing Henry George

Herman Daly elaborates on the economics of Henry George — reckoning with resources, redistributing rents, and a supplying a sane strategy for serving people and planet.