Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me

The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me

George Monbiot writes: Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident. While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are…

Read More Read More

The 20 fossil fuel companies behind a third of all carbon emissions

The 20 fossil fuel companies behind a third of all carbon emissions

The Guardian reports: The Guardian today reveals the 20 fossil fuel companies whose relentless exploitation of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era. New data from world-renowned researchers reveals how this cohort of state-owned and multinational firms are driving the climate emergency that threatens the future of humanity, and details how they have continued to expand their operations despite being aware of the…

Read More Read More

What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

What the Bureau of Land Management shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact

InsideClimate News reports: The changes underway at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management might not seem like much: A few hundred employees are being relocated from offices near the White House and dispersed throughout the West, while agency leaders move in next door to energy companies in newly leased headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado. But along with the appointment of a self-described Sagebrush Rebel as acting director, the shuffling of staff could help position conservatives to accomplish substantial political goals:…

Read More Read More

As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

As Amazon fires burn, Pope convenes meeting on the rainforests and moral obligation to protect them

Georgina Gustin reports: Pope Francis convened nearly 200 bishops, climate experts and indigenous people from the Amazon on Sunday for an unprecedented meeting in Rome to discuss the fate of the Amazonian rainforests and the world’s moral obligation to protect them. The meeting, or Synod, is the first of its kind to address an ecosystem, rather than a particular region or theme. It comes as fires continue to consume the Amazon rainforest, destroying a critical tool for stabilizing the climate,…

Read More Read More

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions of Russians living on unstable ground

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions of Russians living on unstable ground

From Zyryanka River in Russia’s Siberia, the Washington Post reports: Andrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after millennia entombed in a frozen purgatory. “It smells like dead bodies,” Danilov said. The skeletal remains were left behind by mammoth hunters hoping to strike it rich by pulling prehistoric ivory tusks from…

Read More Read More

South America’s second-largest forest is also burning – and ‘environmentally friendly’ charcoal is subsidizing its destruction

South America’s second-largest forest is also burning – and ‘environmentally friendly’ charcoal is subsidizing its destruction

The Paraguayan Chaco, South America’s second largest forest, is rapidly disappearing as agriculture extends deeper into what was once forest. Here, isolated stands of trees remain amid the farms. Joel E. Correia, CC BY-NC-ND By Joel E. Correia, University of Florida The fires raging across the Brazilian Amazon have captured the world’s attention. Meanwhile, South America’s second-largest forest, the Gran Chaco, is disappearing in plain sight. The Gran Chaco, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is…

Read More Read More

400 million indigenous people protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity

400 million indigenous people protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity

The Guardian reports: As presidents, prime ministers and corporate executives gathered at the UN climate action summit on Monday, for the first time, an indigenous representative joined the event in a formal capacity. Tuntiak Katan of the Ecuadorian Shuar people spoke on behalf of the International Indigenous People’s Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC), a caucus of indigenous rights advocates who, for years, has been working towards more robust participation and inclusion at the UN level in response to the climate…

Read More Read More

Melting permafrost, caused by global warming, poses a huge threat to Russia’s oil and gas industry

Melting permafrost, caused by global warming, poses a huge threat to Russia’s oil and gas industry

Julian Lee writes: President Vladimir Putin needs to go green quickly to stop the permafrost from melting, so that Russian oil and gas companies can keep pumping the hydrocarbons that are warming the planet and making the permafrost melt. Even I’m struggling with the warped logic of that one, but it’s the conclusion I’ve reached from Russia’s sudden ratification of the Paris climate accord and from reading the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Until now, climate…

Read More Read More

Southern states energy officials push for as much deregulation as possible while Trump is still in power

Southern states energy officials push for as much deregulation as possible while Trump is still in power

Inside Climate News reports: The contrast could not have been greater between the political and economic conversations at the Southern States Energy Board meeting here Tuesday and Wednesday and the global chorus of urgent calls for action on climate change at the United Nations in New York. While dozens of world leaders committed at the UN to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, here at Louisville’s opulent Seelbach Hilton Hotel, officials from more than a dozen southern states huddled up in…

Read More Read More

The world’s oceans are in danger, major climate change report warns

The world’s oceans are in danger, major climate change report warns

The New York Times reports: Earth’s oceans are under severe strain from climate change, a major new United Nations report warns, which threatens everything from the ability to harvest seafood to the well-being of hundreds of millions of people living along the coasts. Rising temperatures are contributing to a drop in fish populations in many regions, and oxygen levels in the ocean are declining while acidity levels are on the rise, posing risks to important marine ecosystems, according to the…

Read More Read More

How the Little Ice Age ushered in the modern world

How the Little Ice Age ushered in the modern world

Philipp Blom writes: The Little Ice Age offers a historical point of cautious comparison for the most existentially urgent problem of the present. Cooling is not heating, of course, and the Little Ice Age was almost certainly not man-made. Yet while the cultural, economic, political, and technological context was quite different, it was exactly these areas of human life that would change dramatically as direct or indirect consequences of societies being forced to adapt to climate change. A whole world…

Read More Read More

The injustice of climate change

The injustice of climate change

Roseann Bongiovanni and John Walkey write: We do not all suffer the same climate injustices. Frontline communities — those shouldering the burdens of environmental, public health and quality of life impacts, for the benefits of our larger region — often go unnoticed. In Greater Boston, the communities along Chelsea Creek, which winds 2.6 miles through Chelsea and East Boston, is just one example. In massive tanks and open lots along the banks of Chelsea Creek are the storage depots for…

Read More Read More

If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them

If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them

At the UN Climate Action summit in New York on Monday, Greta Thunberg said: This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in…

Read More Read More

There’s evidence that climate activism could be swaying public opinion in the U.S.

There’s evidence that climate activism could be swaying public opinion in the U.S.

By Nathaniel Geiger, Indiana University Climate activists walked out of classrooms and workplaces in more than 150 countries on Friday, Sept. 20 to demand stronger action on climate change. Mass mobilizations like this have become increasingly common in recent years. I’m a scholar of environmental communication who examines how people become engaged with solving dilemmas such as climate change, and how activism motivates others to take action. A new study I worked on suggests that large rallies, such as this…

Read More Read More

Climate protesters and world leaders, on the same planet but in different worlds

Climate protesters and world leaders, on the same planet but in different worlds

Somini Sengupta writes: This is the world we live in: Punishing heat waves, catastrophic floods, huge fires and climate conditions so uncertain that children took to the streets en masse in global protests to demand action. But this is also the world we live in: A pantheon of world leaders who have deep ties to the industries that are the biggest sources of planet-warming emissions, are hostile to protests, or use climate science denial to score political points. That stark…

Read More Read More

This isn’t extinction, it’s extermination of nature

This isn’t extinction, it’s extermination of nature

Jeff Sparrow writes: We know that, as far back as the late 50s, researchers for the oil industry understood the effects of carbon on the atmosphere but did nothing about it. In 1988 George HW Bush promised on the campaign trail to fight climate change. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect.” There was, of course, no White House effect. In…

Read More Read More