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Category: Climate Change

The NYT stopped shilling for cigarettes. Why won’t it stop shilling for fossil fuels?

The NYT stopped shilling for cigarettes. Why won’t it stop shilling for fossil fuels?

Emily Atkin writes: Millions of people will be seeking information this morning about Hurricane Ida, the Caldor Fire, and the Chaparral Fire—three ongoing climate disasters leaving tremendous pain and suffering in their paths. For timely, trustworthy news on these crises, many will likely turn to the New York Times. Ida howled into Louisiana on Sunday with powerful winds and dangerously high storm surges, lashing coastal communities and battering New Orleans. “This is one of the strongest storms to make landfall…

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HHS unveils small office to address climate change as a public health issue

HHS unveils small office to address climate change as a public health issue

Politico reports: The federal health department is creating a new office to address climate change as a public health issue, in an effort to tie growing environmental concerns to the administration’s broader health equity agenda. The Office of Climate Change and Health Equity will take a wide-ranging approach to evaluating the impact that the warming planet is having on people’s health, including initiatives aimed at reducing health providers’ carbon emissions and expanding protections to the most vulnerable populations. Senior National…

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The lesson that California never learns

The lesson that California never learns

Mark Arax writes: As he guided me out to the almond orchard in the colony of Fairmead on the county’s northern fringe, Matt Angell, the well fixer, a big man with kind eyes, wasn’t sure what role he had assumed. Was he a whistleblower? Was he a communitarian? When I suggested that he had the tone and tilt of an agrarian Cassandra, he paused for a second and said, “I like that.” We pulled into the orchard, row after row…

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Russian ‘low-carbon’ climate plan sees rising emissions offset by forests

Russian ‘low-carbon’ climate plan sees rising emissions offset by forests

Bloomberg reports: Russia expects to increase greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 years and instead rely on its trees to meet its international climate obligations, according to a draft of the nation’s low-carbon development strategy. Emissions are seen rising 8.2% from 2019 levels to 2.29 billion tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050, according to the base-case scenario in the draft prepared by the Economy Ministry. The plan says the growth will be more than compensated for by doubling the…

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Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook

Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook

Rebecca Solnit writes: Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception. People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around. The very short counterargument is that individual acts of thrift and abstinence won’t get us the huge distance we need to go in this decade. We need to exit the age of fossil fuels, reinvent our…

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‘Unprecedented’ rain falls for first time in recorded history at Greenland’s ice sheet summit

‘Unprecedented’ rain falls for first time in recorded history at Greenland’s ice sheet summit

USA Today reports: It rained for several hours at the summit of Greenland’s ice sheet on Saturday, marking the first time in recorded history the area has experienced rain and at a time when temperatures there rose above freezing in an extremely rare occurrence. The rainfall occurred at the highest point on the country’s ice sheet, according to the National Snow and Ice Date Center. The weather was observed at Greenland’s Summit Station, which is 10,551 feet above sea level,…

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Court blocks a vast Alaskan oil drilling project, citing climate dangers

Court blocks a vast Alaskan oil drilling project, citing climate dangers

The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Alaska on Wednesday blocked construction permits for an expansive oil drilling project on the state’s North Slope that was designed to produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day for the next 30 years. The multibillion-dollar plan, known as Willow, by the oil giant ConocoPhillips had been approved by the Trump administration and legally backed by the Biden administration. Environmental groups sued, arguing that the federal government had failed to…

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Fossil fuel companies are quietly scoring big money for their preferred climate solution: carbon capture and storage

Fossil fuel companies are quietly scoring big money for their preferred climate solution: carbon capture and storage

Inside Climate News reports: Over the last year, energy companies, electrical utilities and other industrial sectors have been quietly pushing through a suite of policies to support a technology that stands to yield tens of billions of dollars for corporate polluters, but may do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These policies have fast-tracked environmental reviews and allocated billions in federal funding for research and development of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technologies that pull carbon dioxide out of…

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How water shortages are brewing wars

How water shortages are brewing wars

Sandy Milne writes: Speaking to me via Zoom from his flat in Amsterdam, Ali al-Sadr pauses to take a sip from a clear glass of water. The irony dawning on him, he lets out a laugh. “Before I left Iraq, I struggled every day to find clean drinking water.” Three years earlier, al-Sadr had joined protests in the streets of his native Basra, demanding the authorities address the city’s growing water crisis. “Before the war, Basra was a beautiful place,”…

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First-ever water cuts declared for Colorado River in historic drought

First-ever water cuts declared for Colorado River in historic drought

CNN reports: The federal government on Monday declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, as climate change-fueled drought pushes the level in Lake Mead to unprecedented lows. Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US by volume, has drained at an alarming rate this year. At around 1,067 feet above sea level and 35% full, the Colorado River reservoir is at its lowest since the…

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The biggest climate change threat increasingly comes from the leaders of China and India

The biggest climate change threat increasingly comes from the leaders of China and India

Pankaj Mishra writes: As apocalyptic wildfires raged in Greece, California and Turkey last week, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered a sobering assessment of the damage inflicted by human beings on their planet since the industrial revolution. Certainly, as droughts parch entire countries, fuel civil wars that spill across national borders and drive uncontrolled migration, collaborative action seems imperative, regardless of which countries industrialized first and kick-started the process of climate change. But the…

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The UN’s terrifying climate change report

The UN’s terrifying climate change report

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In 1988, the World Meteorological Organization teamed up with the United Nations Environment Programme to form a body with an even more cumbersome title, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or, as it quickly became known, the I.P.C.C. The I.P.C.C.’s structure was every bit as ungainly as its name. Any report that the group issued had to be approved not just by the researchers who collaborated on it but also by the governments of the member countries,…

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What would it take to break up Big Oil?

What would it take to break up Big Oil?

The Guardian reports: Ayisha Siddiqa doesn’t want fossil fuel companies to determine her future anymore. The industry has promoted climate denial for longer than the 22-year-old has been alive. Rather than watch companies pad their profits as the world burns, Siddiqa has a radical solution in mind. “Abolish these oil companies, finish them, get rid of them, no more,” she said. The report found that 25 oil and gas industry organisations spent at least $9.5m to place more than 25,000…

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The UN climate panel tries to cut through the smog

The UN climate panel tries to cut through the smog

Bill McKibben writes: We all live in two worlds: a physical one and a social one. The new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released on Monday, is ostensibly about the physical world. It states—even more clearly and forcefully than it has stated in all its reports back to 1995—that humans are wrecking that physical world. Setting it on fire. But precisely because none of that is news, especially after the climate events of this northern-hemisphere…

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Acceleration of global warming signals ‘code red’ for humanity

Acceleration of global warming signals ‘code red’ for humanity

Phys.org reports: We ignored the warnings, and now it’s too late: global heating has arrived with a vengeance and will see Earth’s average temperature reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels around 2030, a decade earlier than projected only three years ago, according to a landmark UN assessment published on Monday. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bombshell—landing 90 days before a key climate summit desperate to keep 1.5C in play—says the threshold will be breached around 2050, no…

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IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean

IPCC climate report: Profound changes are underway in Earth’s oceans and ice – a lead author explains what the warnings mean

What might seem like small changes, like a degree of warming, can have big consequences. AP Photo/John McConnico By Robert Kopp, Rutgers University Humans are unequivocally warming the planet, and that’s triggering rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar regions, and increasing extreme weather around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report. The IPCC released the first part of its much anticipated Sixth Assessment Report on Aug. 9, 2021. In it, 234 scientists…

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