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Category: Climate Change

Texas Public Policy Foundation is waging a national crusade against climate action

Texas Public Policy Foundation is waging a national crusade against climate action

The New York Times reports: When a lawsuit was filed to block the nation’s first major offshore wind farm off the Massachusetts coast, it appeared to be a straightforward clash between those who earn their living from the sea and others who would install turbines and underwater cables that could interfere with the harvesting of squid, fluke and other fish. The fishing companies challenging federal permits for the Vineyard Wind project were from the Bay State as well as Rhode…

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Protecting 30% of Earth’s surface for nature means thinking about connections near and far

Protecting 30% of Earth’s surface for nature means thinking about connections near and far

Red knots stop to feed along the Delaware shore as they migrate from the high Arctic to South America. Gregory Breese, USFWS/Flickr By Veronica Frans, Michigan State University and Jianguo “Jack” Liu, Michigan State University A biodiversity crisis is reducing the variety of life on Earth. Under pressure from land and water pollution, development, overhunting, poaching, climate change and species invasions, approximately 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction. One ambitious proposal for stemming these losses…

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How an early oil industry study became key in climate lawsuits

How an early oil industry study became key in climate lawsuits

Beth Gardiner writes: Carroll Muffett began wondering in 2008 when the world’s biggest oil companies had first understood the science of climate change and their product’s role in causing it. A lawyer then working as a consultant to environmental groups, he started researching the question at night and on weekends, ordering decades-old reports, books, and magazines off Amazon and eBay, or from academic libraries. It became a years-long quest, and as he pressed on, Muffett noticed one report kept coming…

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Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all

Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all

George Monbiot writes: So what do we do now? After 27 summits and no effective action, it seems that the real purpose was to keep us talking. If governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, there would have been no Cops 2-27. The major issues would have been resolved at Cop1, as the ozone depletion crisis was at a single summit in Montreal. Nothing can now be achieved without mass protest, whose aim, like that of protest movements before us,…

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Climate inaction is making the desperate choice of solar geoengineering more likely

Climate inaction is making the desperate choice of solar geoengineering more likely

Bill McKibben writes: If we decide to “solar geoengineer” the Earth—to spray highly reflective particles of a material, such as sulfur, into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight and so cool the planet—it will be the second most expansive project that humans have ever undertaken. (The first, obviously, is the ongoing emission of carbon and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.) The idea behind solar geoengineering is essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere;…

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Biden administration quietly approves huge oil export project despite climate action rhetoric

Biden administration quietly approves huge oil export project despite climate action rhetoric

Dylan Baddour reports: The Biden administration has approved plans to build the nation’s largest oil export terminal off the Gulf Coast of Texas, which would add 2 million barrels per day to the U.S. oil export capacity. The approval by the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration was filed in the federal register on Monday without any public announcement, a day after the United Nation’s annual climate conference wrapped up in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt. Earthworks, an environmental nonprofit, spotted the filing…

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The chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses

The chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses

The New Yorker: In 2018, in the Siberian Arctic, the filmmakers Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who are sister and brother, arrived on a strange beach. “The sand was of dark colour, full of bones, and smelled terrible,” Arbugaeva recalled. Arbugaeva was working on a photography project about an Indigenous Chukchi community that practices subsistence hunting (whales, walruses, and seals, following the international quotas), and the siblings were on a hunt, at sea, when they landed on the beach. “In…

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Deglobalization is a threat to climate action

Deglobalization is a threat to climate action

Raghuram G. Rajan writes: The deliberations at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) suggest that while policymakers realize the urgency of combating climate change, they are unlikely to reach a comprehensive collective agreement to address it. But there is still a way for the world to improve the chances of more effective action in the future: hit the brakes on deglobalization. Otherwise, the possibilities for climate action will be set back by the shrinkage of cross-border trade and…

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Carvings on Australia’s boab trees reveal a generation’s lost history

Carvings on Australia’s boab trees reveal a generation’s lost history

Freda Kreier writes: Brenda Garstone is on the hunt for her heritage. Parts of her cultural inheritance are scattered across the Tanami desert in northwestern Australia, where dozens of ancient boab trees are engraved with Aboriginal designs. These tree carvings — called dendroglyphs — could be hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet have received almost no attention from western researchers. That is slowly starting to change. In the winter of 2021, Garstone — who is Jaru, an Aboriginal…

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How should we think about the end of the world as we know it?

How should we think about the end of the world as we know it?

Kiley Bense writes: In the 14th century, the Italian poet Petrarch wrote a letter to a friend in Avignon, describing his sense of “foreboding” after an earthquake shook the foundations of Rome’s churches. “What should I do first, lament or be frightened?” he asked. “Everywhere there is cause for fear, everywhere reason for grief.” The earthquake was only one in a series of calamities endured in the poet’s lifetime to that point: floods, storms, fires, wars and finally, “the plague…

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How to pay for climate justice when polluters have all the money

How to pay for climate justice when polluters have all the money

Bill McKibben writes: The climate summit just concluding in Egypt ran hard into one of the world’s greatest structural problems: most of the money is in the Global North, but most of the need is in the Global South. Nearly three hundred years of burning fossil fuels have produced much of that northern wealth, and now the resulting greenhouse gases are heating the planet and producing much of that southern need. So is there some way to mobilize that money…

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‘Vast’ mass of microbes being released by melting glaciers

‘Vast’ mass of microbes being released by melting glaciers

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria are being released by melting glaciers, a study has shown. The microbes being washed downstream could fertilise ecosystems, the researchers said, but needed to be much better studied to identify any potential pathogens. The scientists said the rapid melting of the ice by the climate crisis meant the glaciers and the unique microbial ecosystems they harboured were “dying before our eyes”, leaving researchers racing to understand them before they disappeared….

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90% of U.S. counties have experienced a climate disaster in the last decade, report finds

90% of U.S. counties have experienced a climate disaster in the last decade, report finds

Grist reports: Ninety percent of all counties in the United States have experienced a weather disaster over the past decade, and these climate-fueled events have caused more than $740 billion in damages, according to a new report from the climate adaptation group Rebuild by Design. The “Atlas of Disaster,” a first-of-its-kind study published on Wednesday, analyzes a decade of federal disaster spending to reveal which parts of the country have been hit hardest by climate change, and which are most…

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Should rich countries and fossil fuel companies pay for the climate losses and damages they have caused?

Should rich countries and fossil fuel companies pay for the climate losses and damages they have caused?

Isabelle Gerretsen writes: In August, Pakistan was devastated by catastrophic flooding. The unprecedented monsoon rains killed more than 1,500 people and left the inundated country with economic damages exceeding $30bn (£27bn). Within a month, a scientific study had concluded the high rainfall was “likely increased” by climate change. The link between greenhouse gas emissions and extreme weather events already happening today is now well established. Events such as Pakistan’s floods, Madagascar cyclones  and Somalia’s drought are becoming more intense and more frequent due to climate change. They have led to death and destruction…

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Are we really prisoners of geography?

Are we really prisoners of geography?

Daniel Immerwahr writes: Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved many surprises. The largest, however, is that it happened at all. Last year, Russia was at peace and enmeshed in a complex global economy. Would it really sever trade ties – and threaten nuclear war – just to expand its already vast territory? Despite the many warnings, including from Vladimir Putin himself, the invasion still came as a shock. But it wasn’t a shock to the journalist Tim Marshall. On the…

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Ukraine uses Cop27 to highlight environmental cost of Russia’s war

Ukraine uses Cop27 to highlight environmental cost of Russia’s war

The Guardian reports: Ukraine has used the Cop27 climate talks to make the case that Russia’s invasion is causing an environmental as well as humanitarian catastrophe, with fossil fuels a key catalyst of the country’s destruction. Ukraine has dispatched two dozen officials to the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to spell out the links between the war launched by Russia in February, the soaring cost of energy due to Russia’s status as a key gas supplier, and the planet-heating emissions…

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