Attention to the Unseen

The Associated Press reports: Kathleen Maxwell has lived in Phoenix for more than 20 years, but this summer was the first time she felt fear, as daily high temperatures soared to 110 degrees or hotter and kept it up for a record-shattering 31 consecutive days. “It’s always been really hot here, but nothing like this past summer,” said Maxwell, 50, who last week opened her windows for the first time since March and walked her dog outdoors for the first…

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Bill McKibben writes: Earlier this year, the Biden Administration approved the Willow Project, a huge oil-drilling complex to be built in Alaska on thawing permafrost that may need to be mechanically refrozen before it can be drilled. Not surprisingly, Willow drew opposition—more than five million people, many of them young, signed petitions against the plan, and a million sent letters to the White House—which, the Times noted last month, could become “a wild card factor in next year’s presidential race.”…

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Climate Connnections reports: The California Legislature took a step last week that has the potential to accelerate the fight against climate change within the state and have a transformative effect across the nation. It also marked the rise of a more forceful climate caucus in the legislature, led by new Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, bucking an intense industry lobbying push that killed a similar bill last year. Senate Bill 253, which would force companies that generate revenues of more than…

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Inside Climate News reports: As world leaders gathered Wednesday at the United Nations in New York to rally for more aggressive climate action, the heads of some of the most vulnerable nations met on the sidelines to highlight the daunting challenges they face as extreme weather forces millions of people to flee their homes. The problem is here already, they said, and it will only get worse unless governments slash emissions and prepare for what will effectively be a new…

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Politico reports: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that humans are “safer than ever” from the effects of climate change, less than a month after a hurricane pounded Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. The use of the phrase “climate change” increased between 2018 and 2020, DeSantis said during a campaign speech rolling out his energy policy in Midland, Texas. Despite reports from the World Meteorological Organization showing that climate change impacts continued to worsen during that time, DeSantis attributed the…

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Bill McKibben writes: Keeping movements alive is hard work—they run on volunteer energy, and they can be derailed by too much success, too much failure, too much internal strife, too many competing interests. Or they can be hindered by a pandemic, which largely brought the climate movement to a halt just months after its biggest single day, in September of 2019, when millions of people around the world, most of them young, took to the streets; in New York City,…

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The New York Times reports: Eight years after world leaders approved a landmark agreement in Paris to fight climate change, countries have made only limited progress in staving off the most dangerous effects of global warming, according to the first official report card on the global climate treaty. Many of the worst-case climate change scenarios that were much feared in the early 2010s look far less likely today, the report said. The authors partly credit the 2015 Paris Agreement, under…

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David Spratt writes: Would you live in a building, cross a bridge, or trust a dam wall if there were a 10 percent chance of it collapsing? Or five percent? Or one percent? Of course not! In civil engineering, acceptable probabilities of failure generally range from one-in-10,000 to one-in-10-million. So why, when it comes to climate action, are policies like carbon budgets accepted when they have success rates of just 50 to 66 percent? That’s hardly better than a coin…

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