Bill McKibben writes: Last night’s scoop from the New York Times was devastating: the paper reported that Joe Manchin had exercised a firm veto over the Clean Energy Performance Plan (CEPP) at the heart of the Biden administration’s climate efforts. “As a result,” the Times story said, “White House staffers are now rewriting the legislation… Read More »
The Guardian reports: The enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era just before the car replaced the horse and cart. These temperature thresholds will again be the focus of… Read More »
The Guardian reports: World leaders must do more to prevent the destruction of nature, business leaders have warned before a summit in China that aims to draw up a draft UN agreement for biodiversity. In an open letter, the chief executives of Unilever, H&M and nine other companies have called on governments to take meaningful… Read More »
Fred Pearce writes: We know how to decarbonize energy production with renewable fuels and land transportation with electric vehicles. Blueprints for greening shipping and aircraft are being drawn up. But what about the big industrial processes? They look set to become decarbonization holdouts — the last and hardest CO2 emissions that we must eliminate if… Read More »
The New York Times reports: Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who began her political career with the Green Party and who has voiced alarm over the warming planet, wants to cut at least $100 billion from climate programs in major legislation pending on Capitol Hill, according to two people familiar with the matter. Sinema is… Read More »
CNBC reports: Climate change poses a serious threat to U.S. military operations and will lead to new sources of global political conflict, the Department of Defense wrote in its new climate adaptation plan this week. Water shortages could become a primary source of friction or conflict between U.S. military overseas and the countries where troops… Read More »
An editorial in Nature says: Wet concrete has been poured into buildings, roads, bridges and more for centuries. Structures using concrete have survived wars and natural disasters, outlasting many of the civilizations that built them. Alongside its strength and resilience, concrete is also a staple of building because it is relatively cheap and simple to… Read More »
The Guardian reports: The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply… Read More »
The Washington Post reports: An intense complex of thunderstorms stalled over northwestern Italy on Monday, unleashing a 12-hour torrent unrivaled in the history of European weather observations. It’s the latest extreme rain event supercharged by climate change that follows a summer of historic deluges in the Northern Hemisphere. In just 12 hours, 29.2 inches of… Read More »
Gizmodo reports: Urban heat is more dangerous—and even deadly—than ever. That’s true for two reasons: Globally, more people are flocking to cities, and cities themselves are getting hotter due to the climate crisis. Those are the findings of a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. In it,… Read More »
Rivka Galchen writes: Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy.… Read More »
The Guardian reports: Some of America’s most prominent companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Disney, are backing business groups that are fighting landmark climate legislation, despite their own promises to combat the climate crisis, a new analysis has found. A clutch of corporate lobby groups and organizations have mobilized to oppose the proposed $3.5tn budget… Read More »
Mark Hertsgaard writes: Joe Manchin has never been this famous. People around the world now know that the West Virginia Democrat is the essential 50th vote in the US Senate that president Joe Biden needs to pass his agenda into law. That includes Biden’s climate agenda. Which doesn’t bode well for defusing the climate emergency,… Read More »
Lucas Joppa et al write: In January this year, Microsoft made a major announcement: it had paid for the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Among its purchases were projects to expand forests in Peru, Nicaragua and the United States, as well as initiatives to regenerate soil across US farms.… Read More »
Dan Pfeiffer writes: There is no global solution to climate change without the United States; and our best chance to save the planet may be slipping through our fingers. John Podesta, the wisest of Washington wisemen, recently sent an urgent memo to every Democrat in the House and in the Senate, pleading with them to… Read More »
Inside Climate News reports: Western wildfires pose a much broader threat to human health than to just those forced to evacuate the path of the blazes. Smoke from these fires, which have burned millions of acres in California alone, is choking vast swaths of the country, an analysis of federal satellite imagery by NPR’s California… Read More »