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Category: Climate Change

Joe Manchin’s coal corruption is much worse than you knew

Joe Manchin’s coal corruption is much worse than you knew

Jeff Goodell writes: One of the hardest things to grasp about the climate crisis is the connectedness of all things. One recent drizzly afternoon, I drove from Charleston, West Virginia, to the John Amos coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Kanawha River, near the town of Nitro. In the rain, the plant looked like one of the dark satanic mills that poet William Blake wrote about, with three enormous cooling towers that steamed like giant witches’ cauldrons. Across…

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Plastic production just keeps expanding, and now is becoming a driving cause of climate change

Plastic production just keeps expanding, and now is becoming a driving cause of climate change

Rebecca Altman writes: Demand for plastic has been as manufactured as plastics themselves. Society is awash in throwaway plastics not because of the logic of desire but because of the logic of history and of integrated industrial systems. For decades, the industry has created the illusion that its problems are well under control, all while intensifying production and promotion. More plastics have been made over the past two decades than during the second half of the 20th century. Today, recycling…

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Defusing the climate emergency depends on defusing the democracy emergency

Defusing the climate emergency depends on defusing the democracy emergency

Mark Hertsgaard writes: A year ago today, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were fleeing for their lives as a violent mob swarmed the halls of the US Capitol. With their personal safety at risk, the two most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill at last stood up to Donald Trump. In a heated phone call, McCarthy, the House minority leader, fruitlessly implored the president to call off the mob. Senate majority leader McConnell later called the rioters “terrorists” and said Trump…

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What happened in Colorado was much scarier than a wildfire

What happened in Colorado was much scarier than a wildfire

David Wallace-Wells writes: On Thursday afternoon, in the space of a few hours just a day before the new year, 100-plus-mph winds carried the most destructive fire in Colorado history through the suburban sprawl of greater Denver, destroying much of the towns of Louisville and Superior and forcing tens of thousands to flee, including many who had entered shopping malls from sunny skies just a few minutes before. As many as 1,000 homes were destroyed. Two people currently remain missing;…

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New data suggests a massive collapse of Antarctic’s Thwaites Glacier in as little as five years

New data suggests a massive collapse of Antarctic’s Thwaites Glacier in as little as five years

Jeff Goodell reports: One thing that’s hard to grasp about the climate crisis is that big changes can happen fast. In 2019, I was aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot-long scientific research vessel, cruising in front of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. One day, we were sailing in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next day, we were surrounded by icebergs the size of aircraft carriers. As we later learned from satellite images, in a matter of…

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Climate change is a justice issue – these 6 charts show why

Climate change is a justice issue – these 6 charts show why

African countries have faced dangerous droughts, storms and heat waves while contributing little to climate change. Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images By Sonja Klinsky, Arizona State University Climate change has hit home around the world in 2021 with record heat waves, droughts, wildfires and extreme storms. Often, the people suffering most from the effects of climate change are those who have done the least to cause it. To reduce climate change and protect those who are most vulnerable, it’s important to understand…

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Will nuclear fusion ever power the world?

Will nuclear fusion ever power the world?

Steffi Diem tells Gizmodo: If funding for fusion energy development continues to increase, then yes, fusion will power the world in the future. Since the 1990s, funding for fusion research in the United States has been for the science of fusion, not for the development of an energy source. The rest of the world has a wide portfolio of fusion research as well, and we are all racing to harness the power of fusion. Major recent advances in technology and…

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Hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address climate change

Hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address climate change

The Boston Globe reports: It’s been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool’s gold: the ultimate solution to clean, readily available energy or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change. For decades, scientists have been trying to harness the energy that powers stars, a complex, atomic-level process known as nuclear fusion, which requires heating a plasma fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius and finding a way…

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2021’s climate disasters revealed an east-west weather divide

2021’s climate disasters revealed an east-west weather divide

Wildfires that swept through Sequoia National Forest in California in September 2021 were so severe they killed ancient trees that had adapted to survive fires. AP Photo/Noah Berger By Shuang-Ye Wu, University of Dayton Alongside a lingering global pandemic, the year 2021 was filled with climate disasters, some so intense they surprised even the scientists who study them. Extreme rainstorms turned to raging flash floods that swept through mountain towns in Europe, killing over 200 people. Across Asia, excessive rainfall…

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How will our warming climate stabilize? Scientists look to the distant past

How will our warming climate stabilize? Scientists look to the distant past

Ars Technica reports: Thanks to unbridled greenhouse gas emissions, our planet is stitching together a climate version of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. We still have ice from the warmer parts of the Pleistocene even as our temperature approaches the warmer Pliocene levels of 3 million years ago. Meanwhile, our CO2 level is between the Pliocene and the Miocene of 10 million years ago, and we risk an Eocene hothouse not seen in 40 million years. At some point, this unnatural fusion…

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Behind Manchin’s opposition, a long history of fighting measures for tackling climate change

Behind Manchin’s opposition, a long history of fighting measures for tackling climate change

The New York Times reports: Senator Joe Manchin III on Monday cited a litany of issues that drove him to oppose President Biden’s $2 trillion Build Back Better bill, from Democrats’ refusal to attach work requirements to social benefits to their failure to raise tax rates on the rich. But left almost unsaid was the issue that has always propelled his political career as a Democratic maverick: climate change. The version of the bill that passed the House last month…

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Coal in America: A legacy of environmental catastrophe

Coal in America: A legacy of environmental catastrophe

James Bruggers writes: Along the winding, two lane road that leads to Tracy Neece’s mountain in Floyd County, Kentucky, there’s no hint of the huge scars in the hills beyond the oaks and the pines. Green forests cover steep slopes on each side of the road, which turns from blacktop to dusty gravel. Modest homes are nestled into the bottomlands along a creek with gardens that grow corn and zucchini under a hot summer sun. The first sign of the…

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A relentless assault on the Amazon rainforest poses a threat to the planet

A relentless assault on the Amazon rainforest poses a threat to the planet

Georgina Gustin writes: The Amazon is enveloping and lush, a place of stupefying richness. But a powerful web of extractive forces is also at work here. Every day, thousands of miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers burn or cut roughly 10,000 acres of forest, working to satisfy a growing demand for the resources it contains. They are tiny cogs in a sprawling global machine that has destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Brazilian rainforest—an area about the size of California—over the last…

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Global warming can set the stage for deadly tornadoes

Global warming can set the stage for deadly tornadoes

Inside Climate News reports: Adding a grim exclamation point to a year of deadly climate extremes, the early December tornadoes that killed at least 90 people in the Southeast were some of the most intense storms on record so late in the year. The storms fired up in Arkansas the night of Dec. 10, during weather far too hot and humid for the season, and raced across Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky on Dec. 11. It will take weeks of…

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2021 Arctic Report Card reveals a (human) story of cascading disruptions, extreme events and global connections

2021 Arctic Report Card reveals a (human) story of cascading disruptions, extreme events and global connections

Community members from Utqiagvik, Alaska, look to open water from the edge of shorefast sea ice. Matthew Druckenmiller By Matthew Druckenmiller, University of Colorado Boulder; Rick Thoman, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Twila Moon, University of Colorado Boulder The Arctic has long been portrayed as a distant end-of-the-Earth place, disconnected from everyday common experience. But as the planet rapidly warms, what happens in this icy region, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the globe, increasingly…

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