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Category: Climate Change

Oil industry writes executive orders for Trump to sign

Oil industry writes executive orders for Trump to sign

Politico reports: The U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term, according to energy executives with direct knowledge of the work. The effort stems from the industry’s skepticism that the Trump campaign will be able to focus on energy issues as Election Day draws closer — and worries that the former president is too distracted…

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Vermont poised to become first state to charge big oil for climate damage

Vermont poised to become first state to charge big oil for climate damage

The Guardian reports: Vermont is poised to pass a groundbreaking measure forcing major polluting companies to help pay for damages caused by the climate crisis, in a move being closely watched by other states including New York and California. Modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, which forces companies to pay for toxic waste cleanup, the climate superfund bill would charge major fossil fuel companies doing business within the state billions of dollars for their past emissions. The measure…

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A U.S. push to use ethanol as aviation fuel raises major climate concerns

A U.S. push to use ethanol as aviation fuel raises major climate concerns

MIT Technology Review reports: Eliminating carbon pollution from aviation is one of the most challenging parts of the climate puzzle, simply because large commercial airlines are too heavy and need too much power during takeoff for today’s batteries to do the job. But one way that companies and governments are striving to make some progress is through the use of various types of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), which are derived from non-petroleum sources and promise to be less polluting than…

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Renewables cover 56 percent of Germany electricity use in March quarter

Renewables cover 56 percent of Germany electricity use in March quarter

Renew Economy reports: Renewable energy sources covered around 56 percent of electricity consumption in Germany in the first three months of the year, according to preliminary calculations by the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and utility association BDEW. “In total, renewable energy plants generated around 75.9 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity from January to March, around nine percent more than in the same period last year,” BDEW said. Onshore wind energy plants alone produced 39.4…

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Trump will dismantle key U.S. weather and science agency, climate experts fear

Trump will dismantle key U.S. weather and science agency, climate experts fear

The Guardian reports: Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests. Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen. The plan to “break up Noaa…

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Nixon advisers’ 1971 climate research plan — another lost chance on the road to crisis

Nixon advisers’ 1971 climate research plan — another lost chance on the road to crisis

Marianne Lavelle writes: In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News. The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and…

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Bill McKibben on Climate Crisis: How we got here and what we can do now

Bill McKibben on Climate Crisis: How we got here and what we can do now

  Over forty years ago, the publication of ‘The End of Nature’ popularized a topic that was then largely unfamiliar to the general public. The book’s author, Bill McKibben, brought the subject of global warming to light and has advocated for climate solutions ever since. In this #EarthDay special on environmental protection, he talks about the oil industry’s PR campaign, how renewable energies can not only help the planet but also curb power abuse, and why global warming is an…

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California wants to harness more than half its land to combat climate change by 2045. Here’s how

California wants to harness more than half its land to combat climate change by 2045. Here’s how

The Los Angeles Times reports: California has unveiled an ambitious plan to help combat the worsening climate crisis with one of its invaluable assets: its land. Over the next 20 years, the state will work to transform more than half of its 100 million acres into multi-benefit landscapes that can absorb more carbon than they release, officials announced Monday. The so-called nature-based solutions will span natural and working lands such as forests, farms, grasslands, chaparral, deserts and other types of…

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2023 was even hotter than predicted, raising fears we’re in uncharted territory

2023 was even hotter than predicted, raising fears we’re in uncharted territory

Science Alert reports: Last year Earth warmed around 0.2 °C more than climate models predicted. While that may not seem like much in isolation, when you consider it’s a measure across an entire planet it amounts to a heck of a lot of unexplained heat. “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has,” writes NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt in an article for Nature. “The 2023 temperature anomaly…

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The paradox that’s supercharging climate change

The paradox that’s supercharging climate change

Wired reports: No good deed goes unpunished—and that includes trying to slow climate change. By cutting greenhouse gas emissions, humanity will spew out fewer planet-cooling aerosols—small particles of pollution that act like tiny umbrellas to bounce some of the sun’s energy back into space. “Even more important than this direct reflection effect, they alter the properties of clouds,” says Øivind Hodnebrog, a climate researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “In essence, they make the clouds…

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World set to quadruple oil and gas production by 2030, led by new U.S. projects

World set to quadruple oil and gas production by 2030, led by new U.S. projects

Oliver Milman writes: The world’s fossil-fuel producers are on track to nearly quadruple the amount of extracted oil and gas from newly approved projects by the end of this decade, with the US leading the way in a surge of activity that threatens to blow apart agreed climate goals, a new report has found. There can be no new oil and gas infrastructure if the planet is to avoid careering past 1.5C (2.7F) of global heating, above pre-industrial times, the…

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Save our seabed – the bottom of the ocean needs to become a top priority, and the UN agrees

Save our seabed – the bottom of the ocean needs to become a top priority, and the UN agrees

Seagrass meadows are a hugely important store of blue carbon – and so is the rest of the ocean sea floor. Philip Schubert/Shutterstock By William Austin, University of St Andrews “The science we need for the ocean we want” – this is the tagline for the UN Ocean Decade (2021-2030), which has just held its first conference in Barcelona, Spain. Marine scientists from around the world, including me, gathered alongside global leaders to chart the progress of this ten-year mission…

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Fears of massive ‘forest collapse’ event as Western Australia’s record dry spell continues

Fears of massive ‘forest collapse’ event as Western Australia’s record dry spell continues

  ABC News (AU) reports: After a record-breaking hot summer and significant dry spell, ecologists are warning large pockets of WA’s central to south-west coast are facing a potential forest collapse event, where trees and other smaller plants get so dry they die. One expert has likened it to coral bleaching on land, and just like in the ocean, such an event can have serious implications on the wider ecosystem, impacting breeding habitats and potentially populations of entire species. Murdoch…

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Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

Exxon declares war on its dissenting investors

The Lever reports: ExxonMobil has launched an extraordinary lawsuit against two investment firms for the alleged offense of filing climate-focused shareholder proposals. The fossil fuel giant’s underlying goal: killing a federal regulatory effort that would make it easier for all U.S. shareholders to voice environmental and social concerns about the companies they own. Critics say the company is also trying to intimidate shareholders from ever proposing such resolutions again in the future — under threat of being tied up in…

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European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction

European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction

BBC News reports: A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change. The court said Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate. It is the first time the powerful court has ruled on global warming. Swedish campaigner Greta…

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Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists

Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists

The Guardian reports: Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health. Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming…

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