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What if the world phased out meat consumption over 15 years? The numbers are stunning — and instructive

What if the world phased out meat consumption over 15 years? The numbers are stunning — and instructive

Emma Bryce writes: The climate impact of livestock is so powerful, that if we phased out the consumption of meat over the next 15 years, we could start stabilising greenhouse gas emissions from 2030 onwards. This would require a difficult culinary sacrifice — but it would get us more than halfway to achieving the emissions reductions laid out by the Paris Climate Agreement. These bold findings come from a recent study published in PLOS Climate, which joins several recent papers…

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How fires across the world have grown weirder

How fires across the world have grown weirder

Daniel Immerwahr writes: The hundreds of bush fires that hit southern Australia on 7 February 2009 felt, according to witnesses, apocalyptic. It was already hellishly hot that day: 46.4C in Melbourne. As the fires erupted, day turned to night, flaming embers the size of pillows rained down, burning birds fell from the trees and the ash-filled air grew so hot that breathing it, one survivor said, was like “sucking on a hairdryer”. More than 2,000 homes burned down, and 173…

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White House warns Russian invasion of Ukraine could come ‘any day now’

White House warns Russian invasion of Ukraine could come ‘any day now’

The Wall Street Journal reports: White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Sunday that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could be imminent and might entail a high cost for the civilians living there. “We are in the window,” Mr. Sullivan told Fox News Sunday. “Any day now, Russia could take military action against Ukraine or it could be a couple of weeks from now, or Russia could choose to take the diplomatic path instead.” Russia has 83 battalion tactical…

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Russia could seize Kyiv in days and cause 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine, U.S. assessments find

Russia could seize Kyiv in days and cause 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine, U.S. assessments find

The Washington Post reports: Russia is close to completing preparations for what appears to be a large-scale invasion of Ukraine that could leave up to 50,000 civilians killed or wounded, decapitate the government in Kyiv within two days, and launch a humanitarian crisis with up to 5 million refugees fleeing the resulting chaos, according to updated U.S. military and intelligence assessments briefed to lawmakers and European partners over the past several days. The rising concerns come as the Russian military…

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Macron vows ‘de-escalation,’ but hints at concessions to Putin

Macron vows ‘de-escalation,’ but hints at concessions to Putin

Politico reports: French President Emmanuel Macron is optimistic he can secure a de-escalation over Ukraine when he travels to Moscow to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Monday, but hinted that Western countries could have to make concessions to the Kremlin. His bullish prognosis of a diplomatic compromise will trigger alarm bells among those who advocate a more hawkish line on Russia, particularly in Central and Eastern European capitals that fear Russian aggression. In an interview with the weekly…

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The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

The Covid policy that really mattered wasn’t a policy

Ezra Klein writes: If the C.D.C. had recommended better masks from the beginning, how many people would have worn them and for how long? If the Biden administration had flooded stores with cheap rapid tests, would people have used them? If boosters had been pushed earlier, and more loudly, would the United States no longer trail peer nations in vaccinations? Put differently: How much would getting our pandemic policies right have mattered? It’s easy to speak as if policy smoothly…

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Climate change enters the therapy room

Climate change enters the therapy room

The New York Times reports: It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl. Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth….

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How Big Oil used Facebook to push Joe Manchin to kill Build Back Better

How Big Oil used Facebook to push Joe Manchin to kill Build Back Better

Vice News reports: Last August, during the hottest summer in U.S. history, the Senate began debating the country’s most ambitious plan ever to fight the climate crisis: President Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better bill. The next day, Big Oil swung into action against it. The industry knew exactly who to target: the voters of Sen. Joe Manchin, the all-powerful Democrat who infamously refused to support Build Back Better, and this week, declared the plan “dead.” America’s top oil industry group,…

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One year later: The Texas freeze revealed a fragile energy system and inspired lasting misinformation

One year later: The Texas freeze revealed a fragile energy system and inspired lasting misinformation

Inside Climate News reports: Texas is recovering from this week’s winter storm, nearly a year after a much more severe set of storms led to a devastating failure of the electricity system and about 250 deaths. The February 2021 storms showed the fragility of the grid at a time when climate change is contributing to an increase in extreme weather. But the most enduring legacy of the 2021 blackouts may be the spread of a falsehood: the idea that the…

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Dismal Russian record in occupied eastern Ukraine serves as warning

Dismal Russian record in occupied eastern Ukraine serves as warning

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions were once the engines of the country’s economy and dominated its politics. They produced its richest man, billionaire industrialist Rinat Akhmetov, as well as former President Viktor Yanukovych, ousted by the street protests that triggered the Russian invasion in 2014. Since then, however, the two areas—now nominally independent “people’s republics” inside the larger regions of Luhansk and Donetsk—have turned into impoverished, depopulated enclaves that increasingly rely…

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More people ill at the same time than in any period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic

More people ill at the same time than in any period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic

The Wall Street Journal reports: The world is living through a unique moment: In the past five or six weeks, the Omicron coronavirus variant has likely gotten more people sick than any similar period since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, according to global health expert While Omicron infections have peaked in many places, February is likely to see similar case loads as the variant continues to spread before it flames out, causing worker shortages from hospitals to factories and spurring debate…

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Why ‘trust us’ is often reason enough not to trust the government

Why ‘trust us’ is often reason enough not to trust the government

Charlie Savage writes: The dramatic national security stories recounted in two official news briefings on Thursday centered on very different subjects, but they featured the same indignant pushback to questioning reporters: just trust us, unless you are more inclined to believe America’s enemies. Pressed for evidence supporting an official narrative about how children had died during a commando raid in Syria — specifically, that an ISIS leader’s bomb, not American forces, had killed them — the White House press secretary,…

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Trump’s ‘circular firing squad’ threatens GOP midterm gains

Trump’s ‘circular firing squad’ threatens GOP midterm gains

Politico reports: Nine months before the midterm elections, nearly everything is falling the Republican Party’s way, from President Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings to rising gas prices and a seemingly never-ending pandemic. Yet as the Republican National Committee concluded its winter meeting here on Friday, it was censuring two of its own, Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), and decrying the House’s Jan. 6 select committee for what Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, called the “persecution of ordinary…

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GOP dubs January 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’

GOP dubs January 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’

The New York Times reports: The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it. The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at…

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