Fast Company reports: The U.K. plans to ban new fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2030. The Netherlands and Germany have the same goal. Now the state of Washington plans to follow, making it the first in the U.S. to move as quickly to phase out polluting cars. In nine years, if you want to buy a new car or light truck in Washington, it will have to be electric. “When you really look at the issue, there’s not any single factor that…
Mark Fischetti writes: An emergency is a serious situation that requires immediate action. When someone calls 911 because they can’t breathe, that’s an emergency. When someone stumbles on the sidewalk because their chest is pounding and their lips are turning blue, that’s an emergency. Both people require help right away. Multiply those individuals by millions of people who have similar symptoms, and it constitutes the biggest global health emergency in a century: the COVID-19 pandemic. Now consider the following scenarios:…
A little seaweed with that? Cowirrie/Flickr, CC BY-SA By Ermias Kebreab, University of California, Davis and Breanna Roque, University of California, Davis Methane is a short-lived but powerful greenhouse gas and the second-largest contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide. And the majority of human-induced methane emissions comes from livestock. About 70% of agricultural methane comes from enteric fermentation – chemical reactions in the stomachs of cows and other grazing animals as they break down plants. The animals burp out…
The New York Times reports: Children pry at the dirt with sticks, trying to dig out parts of homes that have sunk below ground. Their parents, unable to feed them, scavenge the rubble for remnants of roofs to sell for scrap metal. They live on top of the mud that swallowed fridges, stoves, beds — their entire lives buried beneath them. “We are doomed here,” said Magdalena Flores, a mother of seven, standing on a mattress that peeked out from…
Elizabeth Kolbert writes: Last week, as the [cherry] blooms in Kyoto were prematurely fading, President Joe Biden travelled to Pennsylvania to pitch his latest spending plan, aimed, in part, at combatting global warming. The proposal, which the Administration has dubbed the American Jobs Plan, includes eighty-five billion dollars for mass-transit systems, another eighty billion dollars for Amtrak to expand service and make needed repairs, and a hundred billion to upgrade the nation’s electrical grid. It would allocate a hundred and…
The New York Times reports: A test flight for researching ways to cool Earth by blocking sunlight will not take place as planned in Sweden this June, following objections from environmentalists, scientists and Indigenous groups there. The Swedish Space Corporation said this week it had canceled plans for the flight, in which it would have launched a high-altitude balloon, on behalf of researchers, from its facility in the Arctic. It would have been the first flight of a long-planned experiment…
Rebecca Solnit writes: It is undeniably horrific that more than 2.8 million people have died of Covid-19 in the past 15 months. In roughly the same period, however, more than three times as many likely died of air pollution. This should disturb us for two reasons. One is the sheer number of air pollution deaths – 8.7 million a year, according to a recent study – and another is how invisible those deaths are, how accepted, how unquestioned. The coronavirus…
Alex Fox writes: The Amazon rainforest may now emit more greenhouse gases than the famously lush ecosystem absorbs, according to new research. Long considered to be a bulwark against climate change because of its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, a new study suggests rising temperatures, increasing drought and rampant deforestation have likely overwhelmed the Amazon’s ability to absorb more greenhouse gases than it emits, reports Craig Welch for National Geographic. The sobering findings appear in a new study published earlier…
Bill McKibben writes: The “crisis” at the border is dominating the news, and, as my colleague Jonathan Blitzer has written, the immediate focus is on the political battle to prevent Joe Biden from passing meaningful immigration reform. But this might also be a moment for thinking about what globalism means in a world where borders ultimately can’t offer protection against the most serious threats. To give an example: owing in part to climate change, there was a record hurricane season…
The Washington Post reports: Amid an exceptionally warm March in Japan, the cherry blossoms in Kyoto peaked Friday, the earliest in more than 1,200 years of records. The record bloom fits into a long-term pattern toward earlier spring flowering, a compelling indicator of climate change, experts say. The March 26, 2021, peak bloom date surpassed the previous record holder of March 27, 1409, nearly a century before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. The long-term record dates back to A.D. 812,…
AFP reports: Rising demand in wealthy countries for dozens of commodities ranging from coffee to soybeans has stepped up the pace of deforestation in the tropics, researchers said on Monday. Even as North America and Europe expand forest cover within their own borders, efforts to slow forest loss in the global south through offset schemes and direct payments have been overwhelmed by these appetites, they reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The first country-by-country quantification of how rich-nation…
Vox reports: The White House is preparing for its next big swing on the economy. Shortly after passing his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, President Joe Biden is preparing to unveil his “Build Back Better” plan Wednesday during a public address in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The White House discussed an approximately $3 trillion infrastructure package on a call last week with Senate Democrats, but the price tag and final details are still under discussion, a person familiar with the plan told…
Michael Grunwald writes: Here’s a multibillion-dollar question that could help determine the fate of the global climate: If a tree falls in a forest—and then it’s driven to a mill, where it’s chopped and chipped and compressed into wood pellets, which are then driven to a port and shipped across the ocean to be burned for electricity in European power plants—does it warm the planet? Most scientists and environmentalists say yes: By definition, clear-cutting trees and combusting their carbon emits…
Bill McKibben writes: If we’re really going to change, sooner or later we’ll have to actually make a change. The latest front in the fight against fossil fuels—so far, one confined to a couple of California towns—concerns what might be the most iconic element of the American commercial landscape: the gas station. Beginning in 2019, activists from the Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations have questioned whether there’s a need for big new versions of the filling station, or whether—since both…
Anna Funk writes: Deforestation in the Amazon has long been the poster child of man-made environmental destruction. But recent trends reveal that the changing climate will likely come for this beloved rainforest long before the last tree is cut down. One researcher has even put a date on his prediction for the Amazon’s impending death: 2064. That’s the year the Amazon rainforest will be completely wiped out. Dramatic? Yes. “I’m a doom-sayer,” admits Robert Walker, a quantitative geographer at the…
Ben Ehrenreich writes: On January 13, one week before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States and seven long days after the storming of the Capitol by an armed right-wing mob, it was easy enough to miss an article published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, despite its eye-catching title: “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” The headline was itself a train wreck: six dully innocuous words piling up in front…