Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

Bill McKibben: ‘Clean Air Act can’t really be used to protect clean air now

Bill McKibben: ‘Clean Air Act can’t really be used to protect clean air now

  After a bitter 50-year fight over climate change policy, the Supreme Court delivered another win to the right wing on Thursday. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court decided that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for existing power plants. “The Clean Air Act can’t really be used to protect clean air now,” says leading environmentalist, Bill McKibben. He says fossil fuel tycoons have successfully lobbied against decades of progress and shifting…

Read More Read More

Summer in America is becoming hotter, longer and more dangerous

Summer in America is becoming hotter, longer and more dangerous

The Washington Post reports: Wildfires had been burning for weeks, shrouding Reno, Nev., in harmful smoke, when Jillian Abney and her eight-year-old daughter Izi drove into the Sierras last year in search of cleaner air. The eerie yellow haze that filled the sky had brought summer to an abrupt halt, canceling all of the season’s usual delights. Abney headed for Donner Lake, hoping the higher elevation would put them above the smoke. But instead of the blue skies that had…

Read More Read More

The genetic power of ancient trees

The genetic power of ancient trees

Jim Robbins writes: In 2005, several of the centuries-old ponderosa pine trees on my 15 acres (0.06 sq km) of forest in the northern Rocky Mountains in Montana suddenly died. I soon discovered they were being brought down by mountain pine beetles, pernicious killers the size of the eraser on a pencil that burrow into the tree. The next year the number of dying trees grew exponentially. I felt powerless and grief-stricken as I saw these giant, sky-scraping trees fading…

Read More Read More

‘Perfect storm’ of crises is widening global inequality, says UN chief

‘Perfect storm’ of crises is widening global inequality, says UN chief

The Guardian reports: Humanity is facing a “perfect storm” of crises that is widening inequality between the north and south, the UN secretary general has warned. The divide is not only “morally unacceptable” but dangerous, further threatening peace and security in a conflicted world. The global food, energy and financial crises unleashed by the war in Ukraine have hit countries already reeling from the pandemic and the climate crisis, reversing what had been a growing convergence between developed and developing…

Read More Read More

How the Supreme Court ruling will gut the EPA’s ability to fight the climate crisis

How the Supreme Court ruling will gut the EPA’s ability to fight the climate crisis

CNN reports: The Supreme Court on Thursday dealt a major blow to climate action by handcuffing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate planet-warming emissions from the country’s power plants, just as scientists warn the world is running out of time to get the climate crisis under control. It is a major loss for not only the Biden administration’s climate goals, but it also calls into question the future of federal-level climate action and puts even more pressure on Congress…

Read More Read More

Biden, 11 U.S. states to boost support for offshore wind energy

Biden, 11 U.S. states to boost support for offshore wind energy

Reuters reports: The Biden administration is partnering with 11 East Coast states to accelerate development of offshore wind facilities and create jobs by supporting a domestic supply chain for the industry, the White House said on Thursday. The move is part of President Joe Biden’s push to fight climate change by expanding clean energy technologies. That agenda has been weighed down recently by rising prices, particularly for gasoline. Offshore wind is a major component of that strategy. The administration has…

Read More Read More

Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely — what does the future hold?

Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely — what does the future hold?

Nature reports: An ongoing La Niña event that has contributed to flooding in eastern Australia and exacerbated droughts in the United States and East Africa could persist into 2023, according to the latest forecasts. The occurrence of two consecutive La Niña winters in the Northern Hemisphere is common, but having three in a row is relatively rare. A ‘triple dip’ La Niña — lasting three years in a row — has happened only twice since 1950. This particularly long La…

Read More Read More

Republican strategy to tilt courts against climate action reaches a crucial moment

Republican strategy to tilt courts against climate action reaches a crucial moment

The New York Times reports: Within days, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision that could severely limit the federal government’s authority to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants — pollution that is dangerously heating the planet. But it’s only a start. The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the…

Read More Read More

Record-shattering events spur advances in tying climate change to extreme weather

Record-shattering events spur advances in tying climate change to extreme weather

Science reports: In June 2021, a jet stream charged with heat and chaotic energy from a nearby cyclone stalled over the Pacific Northwest. The mass of trapped air baked the already hot landscape below to a record 49.6°C. More than 1000 people died from heat exposure. Scientists quickly began working to figure out how much of the blame for the heat wave could be laid to global warming. But the heat was so unusual, the weather so weird, that it…

Read More Read More

New data reveals extraordinary global heating in the Arctic

New data reveals extraordinary global heating in the Arctic

The Guardian reports: New data has revealed extraordinary rates of global heating in the Arctic, up to seven times faster than the global average. The heating is occurring in the North Barents Sea, a region where fast rising temperatures are suspected to trigger increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. The researchers said the heating in this region was an “early warning” of what could happen across the rest of the Arctic. The new figures show annual…

Read More Read More

How fashion giants rebrand plastic as good for the planet

How fashion giants rebrand plastic as good for the planet

The New York Times reports: It’s soft. It’s vegan. It looks just like leather. It’s also made from fossil fuels. An explosion in the use of inexpensive, petroleum-based materials has transformed the fashion industry, aided by the successful rebranding of synthetic materials like plastic leather (once less flatteringly referred to as “pleather”) into hip alternatives like “vegan leather,” a marketing masterstroke meant to suggest environmental virtue. Underlying that effort has been an influential rating system assessing the environmental impact of…

Read More Read More

Online disinformation uses culture wars to delay climate action, study says

Online disinformation uses culture wars to delay climate action, study says

Inside Climate News reports: A team of researchers and environmental advocates are urging governments and Big Tech companies to do far more to stop rampant online disinformation campaigns, which they say aim to delay action on the climate crisis by intentionally dragging the issue into the culture wars now dominating Western politics. Failing to stop such campaigns, the groups warned in a new report, could further splinter unity at November’s climate talks and jeopardize a global effort that has struggled…

Read More Read More

John Kerry: ‘We have to push back hard’ on efforts to build new fossil fuel infrastructure

John Kerry: ‘We have to push back hard’ on efforts to build new fossil fuel infrastructure

Time reports: John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate change, warned Tuesday that the war in Ukraine could undermine international progress to cut carbon emissions. “You have this new revisionism suggesting that we have to be pumping oil like crazy, and we have to be moving into long term [fossil fuel] infrastructure building, which would be absolutely disastrous,” Kerry said, speaking on June 7 at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City. “We have to push back,…

Read More Read More

Big Oil is suing countries to block climate action

Big Oil is suing countries to block climate action

The Lever reports: Fossil fuel investors are adopting a bold new legal tactic in response to efforts to limit global warming: They are going to private international tribunals to argue that climate change policies are illegally cutting into their profits, and they must therefore be compensated. Now governments are scrambling to figure out how to not get sued for billions when enacting climate policies. Termed “investor-state dispute settlement” legal actions, such moves could have a chilling effect on countries’ ability…

Read More Read More

A detailed roadmap for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030

A detailed roadmap for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030

Inside Climate News reports: Researchers of a new peer-reviewed study say they’ve developed the “first detailed roadmap” for how the United States can achieve its ambitious climate pledge to slash the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. It’s a critical target that, if missed, would likely jeopardize the larger global efforts to prevent devastating runaway climate change. The study, published in Science late last month by some of the nation’s leading research institutions, found that it is both…

Read More Read More

The war in Ukraine could eventually help save the planet

The war in Ukraine could eventually help save the planet

Tom Friedman writes: [I]f we have a year or two of astronomical gasoline and heating oil prices because of the Ukraine war, “you are going to see a massive shift in investment by mutual funds and industry into electric vehicles, grid enhancements, transmission lines and long-duration storage that could tip the whole market away from reliance on fossil fuels toward renewables,” said Tom Burke, director of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, the climate research group. “The Ukraine war is already forcing…

Read More Read More