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Category: Climate Change

The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic

The world isn’t building back better after the pandemic

Akshat Rathi writes: The exuberance of vaccine rollouts in rich countries is masking an ugly reality. Greenhouse gas emissions are already creeping higher than before the pandemic as economies come back to life. That shouldn’t be a total surprise. Even as governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars to aid their nation’s recoveries, only a tiny fraction has gone toward initiatives that would also cut pollution. Many politicians, including U.S. president Joe Biden, have adopted the phrase “build…

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Biden administration backs nation’s biggest wind farm off Martha’s Vineyard

Biden administration backs nation’s biggest wind farm off Martha’s Vineyard

The Washington Post reports: The Biden administration took a crucial step Monday toward approving the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm to date about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., a project that officials say will launch a massive clean-power expansion in the fight against climate change. In completing a final environmental review of Vineyard Wind, the Interior Department endorsed an idea that had been conceived two decades ago but had run into a well-funded and…

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Asbestos could be a powerful weapon against climate change

Asbestos could be a powerful weapon against climate change

James Temple writes: On a scorching day this August, Caleb Woodall wielded his shovel like a spear, stabbing it into the hardened crust of an asbestos-filled pit near Coalinga, California. Woodall, a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, was digging out samples from an asbestos mine that’s been shuttered since 1980, a Superfund site on the highest peak in the state’s Diablo Range. He extracted pounds of the material from several locations across San Benito Mountain, shoveled them…

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We can’t plant or log our way out of climate change

We can’t plant or log our way out of climate change

Danna Smith writes: CNN published an opinion piece on Feb. 10 with the headline, “Plant trees, sure. But to save the climate, we should also cut them down.” This piece omitted some vital facts and science. While the piece did not call for a broad expansion of logging, I think it’s important for readers to understand these facts. Industrial logging and wood production are major drivers of climate disruption. The US is the world’s largest consumer and producer of wood…

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Climate activist who took on BlackRock now takes aim at Vanguard

Climate activist who took on BlackRock now takes aim at Vanguard

Bloomberg reports: Casey Harrell, the campaigner whose sustained pressure was instrumental in pushing BlackRock Inc. to act against climate change, approaches his work as if locked in a race against time. That was true even before the 42-year-old environmental activist was diagnosed last year with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Harrell’s latest effort, focused on Vanguard Group Inc., is likely to be his last. “My diagnosis has put me on the ALS clock, which is a…

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Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest in a millennium, say scientists

Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest in a millennium, say scientists

The Guardian reports: The Atlantic Ocean circulation that underpins the Gulf Stream, the weather system that brings warm and mild weather to Europe, is at its weakest in more than a millennium, and climate breakdown is the probable cause, according to new data. Further weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could result in more storms battering the UK, more intense winters and an increase in damaging heatwaves and droughts across Europe. Scientists predict that the AMOC will weaken…

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Oil trade group considers endorsing carbon pricing

Oil trade group considers endorsing carbon pricing

The Wall Street Journal reports: The oil industry’s top lobbying group is preparing to endorse setting a price on carbon emissions in what would be the strongest signal yet that oil and gas producers are ready to accept government efforts to confront climate change. The American Petroleum Institute, one of the most powerful trade associations in Washington, is poised to embrace putting a price on carbon emissions as a policy that would “lead to the most economic paths to achieve…

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Book review: The unintended consequences of taming nature

Book review: The unintended consequences of taming nature

By John Schwartz, Undark, February 26, 2021 Elizabeth Kolbert lives her stories. In the course of reporting her new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,” she got hit by a leaping carp near Ottawa, Illinois (“It felt like someone had slammed me in the shin with a Wiffle-ball bat”) and visited tiny endangered pupfish at Devils Hole, a small pool in a cave near Pahrump, Nevada. She got her socks wet walking across a mockup of the…

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India targets climate activists with the help of tech giants

India targets climate activists with the help of tech giants

Naomi Klein writes: The bank of cameras that camped outside Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail was the sort of media frenzy you would expect to await a prime minister caught in an embezzlement scandal, or perhaps a Bollywood star caught in the wrong bed. Instead, the cameras were waiting for Disha Ravi, a nature-loving 22-year-old vegan climate activist who against all odds has found herself ensnared in an Orwellian legal saga that includes accusations of sedition, incitement, and involvement in an…

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On climate, Wall Street out-Orwells Orwell

On climate, Wall Street out-Orwells Orwell

Bill McKibben writes: It was likely too much to hope that the Biden Administration, as it tries to get a handle on climate change, might find some help from Wall Street. Instead, last week, we saw financial heavyweights turn in a performance so rigid and so short-sighted that it makes one wonder whether capitalism in anything resembling its current form can, or should, survive. The scene was a virtual forum organized by the Institute of International Finance, and the participants…

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Why Texas Republicans fear the Green New Deal

Why Texas Republicans fear the Green New Deal

Naomi Klein writes: Since the power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent Republicans have tried to pin the blame for the crisis on, of all things, a sweeping progressive mobilization to fight poverty, inequality and climate change. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said Wednesday on Fox News. Pointing to snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a former governor who was later an energy secretary for the Trump…

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Texas crisis exposes a nation’s vulnerability to climate change

Texas crisis exposes a nation’s vulnerability to climate change

The New York Times reports: Even as Texas struggled to restore electricity and water over the past week, signs of the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging infrastructure were cropping up across the country. The week’s continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and several other states. One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were…

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Making peace with nature

Making peace with nature

UN Environment Programme: The world can transform its relationship with nature and tackle the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises together to secure a sustainable future and prevent future pandemics, according to a new report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) that offers a comprehensive blueprint for addressing our triple planetary emergency. The report, Making Peace with Nature, lays out the gravity of these three environmental crises by drawing on global assessments, including those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…

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Blaming the wind for the mess in Texas is ridiculous

Blaming the wind for the mess in Texas is ridiculous

Wind turbines in Antarctica. Spoiler: they work in the cold. pic.twitter.com/Ws2nItJLhF — ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) February 17, 2021 Bill McKibben writes: Sometimes, all you need is a map. In the wake of this week’s power failures in Texas, which have left millions without heat in subfreezing conditions, right-wing politicians and news networks decided that the emergency was down to “frozen wind turbines,” a phrase that has now been repeated ad infinitum on all the various ganglia that make up the…

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Bitcoin is now worth $50,000 — and it’s ruining the planet faster than ever

Bitcoin is now worth $50,000 — and it’s ruining the planet faster than ever

Eric Holthaus writes: You might have already heard, but Bitcoin hit $50,000 this week. A lot of anarcho-nerds are very rich right now. What you might not have heard – and what I wrote about a couple of times (1, 2) the last time Bitcoin’s price surged three years ago – is that the massive computer network that created and maintains the Bitcoin system uses an incredibly huge amount of energy. Nothing fundamental has really changed since then. In fact,…

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How the largest energy-producing state in the U.S. failed in freezing temperatures

How the largest energy-producing state in the U.S. failed in freezing temperatures

WFAA reports: Many Texans are rightfully asking why the largest energy producing state in the country cannot produce enough energy to get through a week of below-freezing temperatures. So, what happened? Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem. “Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s…

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