Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

Mike Bloomberg has a plan to clean up electricity and it doesn’t need Congress

Mike Bloomberg has a plan to clean up electricity and it doesn’t need Congress

David Roberts writes: Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is a problematic presidential candidate for all sorts of reasons. Progressives are irritated that he is attempting to brute-force his way into the Democratic primary by spending more on ad campaigns than the rest of the primary field combined. .@MikeBloomberg has officially passed the $100 million mark. In total, we have tracked $100,407,009 in advertising from Bloomberg since November 25. That's an average of $3,718,778 per day. #Election2020 — Advertising Analytics (@Ad_Analytics) December 10,…

Read More Read More

Zero-carbon ships on horizon under fuel levy plan

Zero-carbon ships on horizon under fuel levy plan

The Guardian reports: Shipping companies would have to pay a small levy on every tonne of fuel they use under proposals aimed at developing zero-carbon vessels within 10 years, transforming the high-carbon global shipping business. Ships running on hydrogen or ammonia as fuel are thought to be technically possible, but more research and development is needed to bring forward the development of prototypes. The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), which represents 80% of the global shipping industry, is proposing a…

Read More Read More

The eastern Mediterranean is dying

The eastern Mediterranean is dying

Peter Schwartzstein writes: Most of the world’s seas are in some kind of environmental trouble, but few have declined as quickly or from such precipitous heights as the Mediterranean’s eastern edge. Although it midwifed some of history’s greatest civilizations, the eastern Med has become a grubby embodiment of the current littoral states’ failures. Where the ancients sailed, many of their successors now junk industrial waste. The accomplishments of the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, and pharaonic Egyptians, among others, have only accentuated…

Read More Read More

Swiss central bank’s $800 billion could be enlisted in climate push

Swiss central bank’s $800 billion could be enlisted in climate push

Reuters reports: The Swiss central bank could be required to pull its $800 billion balance sheet out of investments in fossil fuel companies in a move by one of the world’s biggest reserve banks to tackle climate change. Swiss lawmakers are preparing a campaign that would make targeting climate change one of the policy objectives of the Swiss National Bank, alongside the traditional monetary targets of ensuring price stability and fostering economic growth. The drive will begin this month with…

Read More Read More

Richer nations accused of stalling progress on climate crisis

Richer nations accused of stalling progress on climate crisis

The Guardian reports: Poor countries have accused a handful of richer nations of holding up progress on tackling the climate crisis at UN talks in Madrid, as demonstrators and activists vented their frustration in the final hours of two weeks of negotiations. The talks dragged on to what looked set to be a late final night with no guarantee of an agreed outcome, as governments wrangled over the details of a seemingly arcane issue: carbon markets, governed by a provision…

Read More Read More

EU aims to stir global action with pledge on climate crisis

EU aims to stir global action with pledge on climate crisis

The Guardian reports: The EU will attempt to revive the world’s flagging attempts to tackle the climate crisis with a historic proposal from Brussels to halve emissions by 2030, and reach net zero carbon by mid-century. Wednesday’s announcement is seen as the vital first step towards gathering a “coalition of ambition” among key countries to fulfil the pledges of the 2015 Paris agreement, which is in danger of languishing amid deadlocked UN talks. Ursula von der Leyen, the new president…

Read More Read More

Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s

Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s

The Guardian reports: Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of the irreversible impacts of the climate emergency much closer. Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, and the scale and speed of ice loss is much higher than was predicted in the comprehensive studies of global climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to…

Read More Read More

Our oceans brim with climate solutions. We need a Blue New Deal

Our oceans brim with climate solutions. We need a Blue New Deal

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson writes: Our nation has more than 95,000 miles of shoreline, home to 40 percent of Americans who live in coastal counties. Our blue economy, including fishing, ocean farming, shipping, tourism and recreation, supports more than 3.25 million American jobs and a $300-billion annual contribution to our gross domestic product. And, for many, our cultural heritage is tied to the sea. These communities are threatened by rising sea levels, eroding coasts and climate change-fueled storms. Yet the Green…

Read More Read More

Climate, not conflict, drove many Syrian refugees to Lebanon

Climate, not conflict, drove many Syrian refugees to Lebanon

Refugees in the city of Qab Illyas in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley dig their own water wells. Hussein A. Amery, CC BY-ND By Hussein A. Amery, Colorado School of Mines People who fled Syria in recent years are often viewed as war refugees because of the violence that has engulfed much of the country since 2011. But those from the northern and northeastern parts of Syria may more accurately be viewed as climate refugees, fleeing not a worsening conflict but an…

Read More Read More

Australia burns again, and now its largest city is choking

Australia burns again, and now its largest city is choking

Damien Cave reports: Flying into Sydney usually brings stunning views of rocky cliffs and crystal waters, but when Anna Funder looked out the window before landing this week, she saw only tragedy. Thick gray smoke blanketed the skyline and the coast, stretching for miles from the fire front at the southwestern edge of the city, where dried-out forests have been burning for weeks. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Ms. Funder, an award-winning Australian novelist known for stories of…

Read More Read More

Climate change accelerates, bringing the world ‘dangerously close’ to irreversible harm

Climate change accelerates, bringing the world ‘dangerously close’ to irreversible harm

Henry Fountain reports: More devastating fires in California. Persistent drought in the Southwest. Record flooding in Europe and Africa. A heat wave, of all things, in Greenland. Climate change and its effects are accelerating, with climate related disasters piling up, season after season. “Things are getting worse,” said Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, which on Tuesday issued its annual state of the global climate report, concluding a decade of what it called exceptional global heat. “It’s…

Read More Read More

Carbon dioxide emissions hit record high in 2019, even as coal fades

Carbon dioxide emissions hit record high in 2019, even as coal fades

The New York Times reports: Emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide from fossil fuels hit a record high in 2019, researchers said Tuesday, putting countries farther off course from their goal of halting global warming. The new data contained glimmers of good news: Worldwide, industrial emissions are on track to rise 0.6 percent this year, a considerably slower pace than the 1.5 percent increase seen in 2017 and the 2.1 percent rise in 2018. The United States and the European Union…

Read More Read More

Climate change is brutal for everyone, but worse for women

Climate change is brutal for everyone, but worse for women

Matt Simon writes: The climate crisis is so epic, so vicious, so wide-reaching, that at this point there are few aspects of the human experience it isn’t transforming. Supercharged wildfires are devastating California, heat waves are killing more people and more crops, cities are struggling to adapt to strange new climates. The global transformation underway is also increasingly exposing a fundamental yet often hidden factor complicating matters: gender. Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers published an analysis of…

Read More Read More

Bushfires in Australia’s Gondwana rainforests destroy areas that have historically been too wet to burn

Bushfires in Australia’s Gondwana rainforests destroy areas that have historically been too wet to burn

The Guardian reports: The Unesco world heritage centre has expressed concern about bushfire damage to the Gondwana rainforests of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, and asked the Australian government whether it is affecting their world heritage values. In a statement on its website, the centre said members of the media and civil society had asked about the bushfires affecting the areas inscribed on the world heritage list as the “Gondwana rainforests of Australia”. The forests are considered a…

Read More Read More

There is a new way to see climate change

There is a new way to see climate change

BuzzFeed reports: The effects of climate change are undeniable: The past five years have been the warmest on record, and storms are becoming stronger. As a result, many media outlets have been revising their language regarding climate stories, with some going so far as to cover climate change as an emergency. Reuters Pictures has made climate change a topic of focus, much like the New York Times and the Guardian. However, Reuters is a newswire service, meaning that unlike a…

Read More Read More