The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues a new report, a new study shows that children will bear the brunt of the impact of climate change because of their increased risk of health problems, malnutrition and migration, and despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, big business continues to fund efforts to discredit climate science.

Rebecca Solnit examines why we have so much trouble looking honestly at climate change in a Tomdispath piece, “Bigger Than That: (The Difficulty of) Looking at Climate Change.”

If there is to be an effort to respond to climate change, it will need to make epic differences in economics, in ecologies, in the largest and most powerful systems around us. Though the goals may be heroic, they will be achieved mostly through an endless accumulation of small gestures.

Meanwhile, the industrial/consumer culture goes to ever greater lengths to find more fossil energy to burn. For a review of the effects of the race to extract more “extreme energy,” Alternet’s Tara Lohan took a cross-country trip and offers this chilling portrait of the landscape in “Extreme Energy Extraction Roadtrip — The Scary Ways We’re Ruining the Country to Get Fossil Fuels.”