Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

Children change their parents’ minds about climate change

Children change their parents’ minds about climate change

Comments 0 Comment

Lydia Denworth writes: Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg became famous this spring for launching a student movement to compel adults to take action on climate change. Instead of going to school, Greta has been spending her Fridays in front of the Swedish parliament with a sign reading: “School Strike for Climate.” Students in more than 70 countries have since followed her lead. But before she started trying to convince the world to take action, Thunberg worked on her parents. She showered…

Read More Read More

Trump team kills Arctic accord after cheering on sea ice melt

Trump team kills Arctic accord after cheering on sea ice melt

Comments 0 Comment

Joe Romm writes: On Tuesday, the United States killed an accord with other Arctic nations on how to address regional challenges. Why? The Trump delegation, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, would not accept an agreement that stated climate change seriously threatened the polar region, Reuters reported. Yet, just last year, the White House released a 1,000-page report by top U.S. scientists explaining that Trump’s anti-climate policies would devastate the Arctic. So, for the first time since its creation…

Read More Read More

Once again, the U.S. embarrasses itself on climate change

Once again, the U.S. embarrasses itself on climate change

Comments 0 Comment

Joel Clement writes: The Trump administration is so fearful of acknowledging the reality of climate change that White House negotiators are trying to erase all mention of it and the Paris Agreement from a multinational statement about the Arctic region, The Post reported last week. In doing so, the Trump administration has demonstrated its cowardly denial that the region is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet, putting its own people in harm’s way and…

Read More Read More

Humans are wiping out life on Earth

Humans are wiping out life on Earth

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded. The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in…

Read More Read More

A new brain study shows a better way to engage voters on the climate crisis

A new brain study shows a better way to engage voters on the climate crisis

Comments 0 Comment

Joe Romm writes: The phrase “climate crisis” engages voters emotionally better than either “climate change” or “global warming.” That’s the new finding from the brain science startup SPARK Neuro, which used an electroencephalogram (EEG) and other bio-measurements to examine how 120 Democrats, Republicans, and independents responded to different terms for the growing threat we face from rising levels of carbon pollution. According to the study, “climate crisis” got a 60% higher emotional response from Democrats than “climate change.” It triggered…

Read More Read More

Biodiversity crisis is about to put humanity at risk, UN scientists to warn

Biodiversity crisis is about to put humanity at risk, UN scientists to warn

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken. Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature. The 1,800-page study will show people living…

Read More Read More

Inslee rolls out sweeping climate plan, setting new standard for 2020 Democrats

Inslee rolls out sweeping climate plan, setting new standard for 2020 Democrats

Comments 0 Comment

Think Progress reports: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democratic presidential candidate who has dedicated his entire campaign to addressing the climate crisis, unveiled his first major policy proposal Friday morning. The ambitious plan charts a course other presidential contenders may follow as climate change becomes a top issue for the crowded primary field. Calling climate change “the defining challenge of our time” in a statement, Inslee described his proposal as “a bold and aggressive national policy” to slash greenhouse gas…

Read More Read More

House passes bill to force U.S. to stay in Paris climate agreement

House passes bill to force U.S. to stay in Paris climate agreement

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: The House of Representatives passed a bill on Thursday designed to force the United States to stay in the Paris accord, in a rebuke to President Trump, who has promised to withdraw from the landmark climate agreement inked under his predecessor, Barack Obama. The Democratic bill, which passed 231 to 190 in a vote largely along party lines, stands little chance of approval in the GOP-controlled Senate. But House Democrats seized on the measure to portray…

Read More Read More

Beto O’Rourke is the latest Democrat to make climate change central to his campaign

Beto O’Rourke is the latest Democrat to make climate change central to his campaign

Comments 0 Comment

BuzzFeed reports: Beto O’Rourke on Monday pledged to spend trillions to combat the climate crisis in the first major policy proposal of his presidential campaign, making him the latest Democrat in the 2020 race to embrace climate change as a top issue. “The greatest threat we face — which will test our country, our democracy, every single one of us — is climate change,” O’Rourke told supporters in a campaign email. His plan, starting day one in the White House,…

Read More Read More

The rise of the climate vote bloc

The rise of the climate vote bloc

Comments 0 Comment

Anna Taylor writes: April has been quite the month for climate action. The organisation I co-founded, the UK Student Climate Network, held its third Youth Strike 4 Climate demonstrations just two weeks ago which for the third month in succession saw tens of thousands take to the streets across the UK demanding climate justice and a Green New Deal. Extinction Rebellion also kicked off a huge act of extended nonviolent civil disobedience by reclaiming public spaces in London and causing…

Read More Read More

Corbyn launches bid to declare UK climate emergency

Corbyn launches bid to declare UK climate emergency

Comments 0 Comment

The Observer reports: Labour will this week force a vote in parliament to declare a national environmental and climate change emergency as confidential documents show the government has spent only a fraction of a £100m fund allocated in 2015 to support clean air projects. Jeremy Corbyn’s party will demand on Wednesday that the country wakes up to the threat and acts with urgency to avoid more than 1.5°C of warming, which will require global emissions to fall by about 45%…

Read More Read More

The uncanny power of Greta Thunberg’s climate-change rhetoric

The uncanny power of Greta Thunberg’s climate-change rhetoric

Comments 0 Comment

Sam Knight writes: Thunberg—along with her younger sister—has been given a diagnosis of autism and A.D.H.D. In interviews, she sometimes ascribes her unusual focus, and her absolute intolerance of adult bullshit on the subject of climate change, to her neurological condition. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told my colleague Masha Gessen. In 2015, the year Thunberg turned twelve, she gave up flying. She travelled to London by train, which took two days. Her voice,…

Read More Read More

Anthropocene unburials are proliferating around the world

Anthropocene unburials are proliferating around the world

Comments 0 Comment

Robert Macfarlane writes: We live in an age of untimely surfacings. Across the Arctic, ancient methane deposits are leaking through “windows” in the Earth opened by thawing permafrost. In the forests of eastern Siberia a vast crater yawns in softening ground, swallowing thousands of trees; local Yakutian people refer to it as the “doorway to the underworld”. In the “cursed fields” of northern Russia, permafrost melt is exposing 19th-century animal burial grounds containing naturally occurring anthrax spores; a 2016 outbreak…

Read More Read More

Deregulation and climate change result in growing number of Americans breathing polluted air

Deregulation and climate change result in growing number of Americans breathing polluted air

Comments 0 Comment

CNN reports: More Americans are breathing air that will make them sick, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report. The country had been making progress in cleaning up air pollution, but during the Trump administration, it has been backsliding, the report says. Deregulation and climate change are largely to blame. President Donald Trump made a pledge in his 2017 State of the Union address to “promote clean air and water,” but his administration has reversed…

Read More Read More

To stop global catastrophe, we must believe in humans again

To stop global catastrophe, we must believe in humans again

Comments 0 Comment

Bill McKibben writes: Because I am concerned about inequality and about the environment, I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past: a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between; a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into…

Read More Read More