Inside Climate News reports: Terms like “environmental racism” or “environmental justice” were not yet part of the national lexicon when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. And while insider records reveal that the nation’s oil and gas lobby was being briefed that same… Read More »
The Guardian reports: ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech. The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to… Read More »
Tom Chivers writes: In the deep ocean, occasionally, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. Most of the time, in the state of nature, creatures have just about enough to survive. But the first creatures to find the whale have more food than they could ever eat. These scavengers live lives of… Read More »
Inside Climate News reports: Many of the questions Jerome Powell faced at his Senate confirmation hearing last week would have been familiar to any Federal Reserve chair on Capitol Hill: Where is the economy heading? What about inflation? How fast could interest rates rise? But Powell, who is seeking his second term, also confronted a… Read More »
Integrating solar panels with farming can provide partial shade for plants. Werner Slocum/NREL By Charles F. Kutscher, University of Colorado Boulder and Jeffrey Logan, University of Colorado Boulder In the summer of 1988, scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was dangerously warming the planet. Scientific meetings were held,… Read More »
Oliver Milman writes: The climate crisis is set to profoundly alter the world around us. Humans will not be the only species to suffer from the calamity. Huge waves of die-offs will be triggered across the animal kingdom as coral reefs turn ghostly white and tropical rainforests collapse. For a period, some researchers suspected that… Read More »
Jeff Goodell writes: One of the hardest things to grasp about the climate crisis is the connectedness of all things. One recent drizzly afternoon, I drove from Charleston, West Virginia, to the John Amos coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Kanawha River, near the town of Nitro. In the rain, the plant looked… Read More »
Rebecca Altman writes: Demand for plastic has been as manufactured as plastics themselves. Society is awash in throwaway plastics not because of the logic of desire but because of the logic of history and of integrated industrial systems. For decades, the industry has created the illusion that its problems are well under control, all while… Read More »
Mark Hertsgaard writes: A year ago today, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were fleeing for their lives as a violent mob swarmed the halls of the US Capitol. With their personal safety at risk, the two most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill at last stood up to Donald Trump. In a heated phone call, McCarthy,… Read More »
David Wallace-Wells writes: On Thursday afternoon, in the space of a few hours just a day before the new year, 100-plus-mph winds carried the most destructive fire in Colorado history through the suburban sprawl of greater Denver, destroying much of the towns of Louisville and Superior and forcing tens of thousands to flee, including many… Read More »
Jeff Goodell reports: One thing that’s hard to grasp about the climate crisis is that big changes can happen fast. In 2019, I was aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long scientific research vessel, cruising in front of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. One day, we were sailing in clear seas in front of the… Read More »
African countries have faced dangerous droughts, storms and heat waves while contributing little to climate change. Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images By Sonja Klinsky, Arizona State University Climate change has hit home around the world in 2021 with record heat waves, droughts, wildfires and extreme storms. Often, the people suffering most from the effects of climate change… Read More »
Steffi Diem tells Gizmodo: If funding for fusion energy development continues to increase, then yes, fusion will power the world in the future. Since the 1990s, funding for fusion research in the United States has been for the science of fusion, not for the development of an energy source. The rest of the world has… Read More »
On the occasion of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks on the need to tackle climate change as the future of our planet is in our hands.
The Boston Globe reports: It’s been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool’s gold: the ultimate solution to clean, readily available energy or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change. For decades, scientists have been trying to harness the energy that powers stars,… Read More »
Wildfires that swept through Sequoia National Forest in California in September 2021 were so severe they killed ancient trees that had adapted to survive fires. AP Photo/Noah Berger By Shuang-Ye Wu, University of Dayton Alongside a lingering global pandemic, the year 2021 was filled with climate disasters, some so intense they surprised even the scientists… Read More »