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Category: Climate Change

EU plans ‘massive’ increase in green energy to help end reliance on Russia

EU plans ‘massive’ increase in green energy to help end reliance on Russia

The Guardian reports: The EU plans a “massive” increase in solar and wind power, and a short-term boost for coal, to end its reliance on Russian oil and gas as fast as possible. In a plan outlined on Wednesday, the European Commission said the EU needed to find an extra €210bn (£178bn) over the next five years to pay for phasing out Russian fossil fuels and speeding up the switch to green energy. Senior officials conceded that in the short…

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Climate chaos certain if oil and gas mega-projects go ahead, warns IEA chief

Climate chaos certain if oil and gas mega-projects go ahead, warns IEA chief

The Guardian reports: The world’s leading energy economist has warned against investing in large new oil and gas developments, which would have little impact on the current energy crisis and soaring fuel prices but spell devastation to the planet. Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), was responding to an investigation in the Guardian that revealed fossil fuel companies were planning huge “carbon bomb” projects that would drive climate catastrophe. He said countries must seek to…

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The race against radon

The race against radon

Chris Baraniuk writes: Deep in the frozen ground of the north, a radioactive hazard has lain trapped for millennia. But UK scientist Paul Glover realized some years back that it wouldn’t always be that way: One day it might get out. Glover had attended a conference where a speaker described the low permeability of permafrost — ground that remains frozen for at least two years or, in some cases, thousands. It is an icy shield, a thick blanket that locks…

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The ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown

The ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown

The Guardian reports: The world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of “carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global impacts, a Guardian investigation shows. The exclusive data shows these firms are in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating. Their huge investments in new fossil fuel production could pay off only if countries fail to rapidly slash carbon emissions, which scientists say is vital….

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The race to produce green steel

The race to produce green steel

May 11, 2022 by Marcello Rossi In the city of Woburn, Massachusetts, a suburb just north of Boston, a cadre of engineers and scientists in white coats inspected an orderly stack of brick-sized, gunmetal-gray steel ingots on a desk inside a neon-illuminated lab space. What they were looking at was a batch of steel created using an innovative manufacturing method, one that Boston Metal, a company that spun out a decade ago from MIT, hopes will dramatically reshape the way…

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Climate limit of 1.5C close to being broken, scientists warn

Climate limit of 1.5C close to being broken, scientists warn

The Guardian reports: The year the world breaches for the first time the 1.5C global heating limit set by international governments is fast approaching, a new forecast shows. The probability of one of the next five years surpassing the limit is now 50%, scientists led by the UK Met Office found. As recently as 2015, there was zero chance of this happening in the following five years. But this surged to 20% in 2020 and 40% in 2021. The global…

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How much does eating meat affect nations’ greenhouse gas emissions?

How much does eating meat affect nations’ greenhouse gas emissions?

Science News reports: The food we eat is responsible for an astounding one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities, according to two comprehensive studies published in 2021. “When people talk about food systems, they always think about the cow in the field,” says statistician Francesco Tubiello, lead author of one of the reports, appearing in last June’s Environmental Research Letters. True, cows are a major source of methane, which, like other greenhouse gases, traps heat in the…

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An attack on Ukraine and climate change cooperation

An attack on Ukraine and climate change cooperation

Genevieve Kotarska and Lauren Young write: Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, energy security has been a central feature of public discourse. As Russia is one of the world’s largest suppliers of oil and gas, the energy market has become a crucial factor as the humanitarian and environmental crisis unfolds. With many countries dependent on Russia for energy supplies, the international community is now in a position where its ability to respond forcefully to the invasion is…

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The climate movement in its own way

The climate movement in its own way

Charles Komanoff writes: After decades of critically documenting nuclear power’s outsize costs, I finally admitted to myself that the carbon-reduction benefits from continuing to run US nuclear plants are substantial, and in some respects irreplaceable. I made the case for keeping them open in an April article on TheNation.com. Closing New York’s Indian Point reactors last year was a climate blunder, I wrote. Not just because fracked gas is now filling the breach, but because the need to replace the…

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‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

The Guardian reports: For the past few weeks, Nazeer Ahmed has been living in one of the hottest places on Earth. As a brutal heatwave has swept across India and Pakistan, his home in Turbat, in Pakistan’s Balochistan region, has been suffering through weeks of temperatures that have repeatedly hit almost 50C (122F), unprecedented for this time of year. Locals have been driven into their homes, unable to work except during the cooler night hours, and are facing critical shortages…

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A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

Inside Climate News reports: Lichens that help hold together soil crusts in arid lands around the world are dying off as the climate warms, new research shows. That would lead deserts to expand and also would affect areas far from the drylands, as crumbling crusts fill winds with dust that can speed snowmelt and increase the incidence of respiratory diseases. Biologically rich soil crusts, sometimes called cryptobiotic soils or biocrusts, are spread out across dry and semi-dry regions of every…

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Getting real on climate means facing necessity

Getting real on climate means facing necessity

Bill McKibben writes: “Realism” is the high ground in politics—a high ground from which to rain down artillery fire on new ideas. To wit, this week the New York Times profiled Canadian energy analyst Vaclav Smil, who—alongside others like Daniel Yergin—has long insisted that the transformation from fossil fuels to hydrocarbons must take a long time. Smil is a good writer and a smart historian; he’s documented the many-decades-long transitions from, say, wood to coal, and coal to oil as…

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How climate change impacts pandemics

How climate change impacts pandemics

Ed Yong writes: For the world’s viruses, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. An estimated 40,000 viruses lurk in the bodies of mammals, of which a quarter could conceivably infect humans. Most do not, because they have few chances to leap into our bodies. But those chances are growing. Earth’s changing climate is forcing animals to relocate to new habitats, in a bid to track their preferred environmental conditions. Species that have never coexisted will become neighbors, creating thousands…

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Why you should care about the insect crisis

Why you should care about the insect crisis

Allie Wilkinson writes: Imagine a world without insects. You might breathe a sigh of relief at the thought of mosquito-free summers, or you might worry about how agriculture will function without pollinators. What you probably won’t picture is trudging through a landscape littered with feces and rotting corpses — what a world devoid of maggots and dung beetles would look like. That’s just a snippet of the horrifying picture of an insect-free future that journalist Oliver Milman paints in the…

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Twitter bans ‘misleading’ ads about climate change

Twitter bans ‘misleading’ ads about climate change

The Verge reports: Twitter levied a new ban today on “misleading” advertisements “that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.” “We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” the company said in a blog post today. Its decisions about what’s legit content in regard to climate change will be guided by “authoritative sources,” it says, including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)….

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‘What we now know … they lied’: How big oil companies betrayed us all

‘What we now know … they lied’: How big oil companies betrayed us all

The Guardian reports: There is a moment in the revelatory PBS Frontline docuseries The Power of Big Oil, about the industry’s long campaign to stall action on the climate crisis, in which the former Republican senator Chuck Hagel reflects on his part in killing US ratification of the Kyoto climate treaty. In 1997, Hagel joined with the Democratic senator Robert Byrd to promote a resolution opposing the international agreement to limit greenhouse gases, on the grounds that it was unfair…

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