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Category: Climate Change

Concrete is tipping us into climate catastrophe. We need to tax it, now

Concrete is tipping us into climate catastrophe. We need to tax it, now

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John Vidal writes: Cement, the key component of concrete and one of the most widely used manmade materials, is now the cornerstone of global construction. It has shaped the modern environment, but its production has a massive footprint that neither the industry nor governments have been willing to address. Because of the heat needed to decompose rock and the natural chemical processes involved in making cement, every tonne made releases one tonne of C02, the main greenhouse warming gas. Including…

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A world that neglects to save its children can’t hope to be saved by its children

A world that neglects to save its children can’t hope to be saved by its children

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  The New York Times reports: It’s complicated being Greta. Small, shy, survivor of crippling depression, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl skipping school to shame the world into addressing climate change, drew a parade of fans one Friday in February on a frozen square in Stockholm. Six Swiss students had traveled 26 hours by train to seek her support for their petition for a tougher Swiss carbon emissions law. An Italian scientist told her she reminded him of his…

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Feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss may push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point

Feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss may push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point

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Natalie Wolchover writes: Clouds currently cover about two-thirds of the planet at any moment. But computer simulations of clouds have begun to suggest that as the Earth warms, clouds become scarcer. With fewer white surfaces reflecting sunlight back to space, the Earth gets even warmer, leading to more cloud loss. This feedback loop causes warming to spiral out of control. For decades, rough calculations have suggested that cloud loss could significantly impact climate, but this concern remained speculative until the…

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Costa Rica lays out ground-breaking decarbonisation plan

Costa Rica lays out ground-breaking decarbonisation plan

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Renew Economy reports: The Central American nation of Costa Rica has laid out its long-term decarbonisation plans to become one of the world’s first, if not the first, zero-emissions nations. Costa Rica’s Decarbonization Plan includes both short-term goals out to 2022 which are intended to support the country’s longer-term 2050 goals and also serves as the basis for Costa Rica’s plans to update its Nationally Determined Contributions in line with the Paris Agreement in 2020. With a population of nearly…

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Pay attention to the growing wave of climate change lawsuits

Pay attention to the growing wave of climate change lawsuits

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Vox reports: In 1998, 46 states and the District of Columbia signed on to the largest civil litigation settlement in US history, the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. Stunning in its scope and scale, the agreement forced the four largest tobacco companies to stop advertising to youth, limit lobbying, restrict product placement in media, and fund anti-smoking campaigns. It also required them to pay out more than $206 billion over 25 years. Tobacco companies had in previous decades successfully swatted down…

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White House plans to set up panel whose mission is to disrupt climate science and promote fossil fuel use

White House plans to set up panel whose mission is to disrupt climate science and promote fossil fuel use

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The Washington Post reports: The White House plans to create an ad hoc group of select federal scientists to reassess the government’s analysis of climate science and counter conclusions that the continued burning of fossil fuels is harming the planet, according to three administration officials. The National Security Council initiative would include scientists who question the severity of climate impacts and the extent to which humans contribute to the problem, according to these individuals, who asked for anonymity to discuss…

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Youth carry the moral authority in dealing with climate change

Youth carry the moral authority in dealing with climate change

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Bill McKibben writes: One imagines that Senator Dianne Feinstein would like a do-over of her colloquy with some young people on Friday afternoon. A group of school students, at least one as young as seven, went to the senator’s San Francisco office to ask her to support the Green New Deal climate legislation. In a video posted online by the Sunrise Movement, she tells them that the resolution isn’t a good one, because it can’t be paid for, and the…

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85-year-old Sen Feinstein responds to children imploring her to support the Green New Deal: ‘I know what I’m doing… I just won a big election’

85-year-old Sen Feinstein responds to children imploring her to support the Green New Deal: ‘I know what I’m doing… I just won a big election’

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This is how @SenFeinstein reacted to children asking her to support the #GreenNewDeal resolution — with smugness + disrespect. This is a fight for our generation's survival. Her reaction is why young people desperately want new leadership in Congress. pic.twitter.com/0zAkaxruMI — Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) February 22, 2019

White House forms panel to look at national security threat posed by climate change led by adviser who claims climate science is a ‘cult’

White House forms panel to look at national security threat posed by climate change led by adviser who claims climate science is a ‘cult’

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The Washington Post reports: The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have affirmed several times since President Trump took office. The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security, which would be established by executive order, is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton…

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January was one of the warmest in all of recorded history

January was one of the warmest in all of recorded history

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Eric Holthaus writes: January 2019 was the third-warmest January in the history of global weather record-keeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The only warmer global Januarys in the instrumental record, which dates back to the 1880s, were 2016 and 2017, and there’s evidence that the planet hasn’t been this warm in a very long time. The last time January global temperatures were below average was in 1976 — before millennials were even a thing. So here’s the…

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Surge in U.S. economists’ support for carbon tax to tackle climate change

Surge in U.S. economists’ support for carbon tax to tackle climate change

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The Financial Times reports: US economists led by former US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen are uniting in record numbers to back the idea of a carbon tax as the most effective and immediate way of tackling climate change. At a time when Democrats including New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pushing a sweeping “Green New Deal” programme to reduce greenhouse emissions, climate change is shaping up to be a major 2020 election issue. The US is the world’s second-biggest…

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Sorry, y’all, but climate change ain’t the first existential threat

Sorry, y’all, but climate change ain’t the first existential threat

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Mary Annaïse Heglar writes: Dear Climate Movement: I’m with you when you say that climate change is the most important issue facing mankind. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s the most important one ever. But, when I hear folks say — and I have heard it — that the environmental movement is the first in history to stare down an existential threat, I have to get off the train. This game of what I call “existential exceptionalism” is a losing one….

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The necessary idealism of the Green New Deal

The necessary idealism of the Green New Deal

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Michelle Goldberg writes: Amid the unceasing awfulness of the Trump administration, I’ve lately found comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time,” which has in turn informed my thinking about the almost utopian ambitions of the Green New Deal. Surveying the American presidency, Skowronek sees politics unfolding in cycles. Every so often, insurgent coalitions bring an agenda-setting president to power who sweeps away the verities of the old regime, fundamentally restructuring our politics. These “reconstructive presidents,”…

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The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. It’s time to panic

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. It’s time to panic

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David Wallace-Wells writes: The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island. We are…

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My generation trashed the planet. I salute the children striking back

My generation trashed the planet. I salute the children striking back

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Wow this is really quite something. Thousands and thousands of children protesting against climate change in Westminster. pic.twitter.com/umE5ZtcpS6 — Joey D'Urso (@josephmdurso) February 15, 2019 George Monbiot writes: The disasters I feared my grandchildren would see in their old age are happening already: insect populations collapsing, mass extinction, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, floods. This is the world we have bequeathed to you. Yours is among the first of the unborn generations we failed to consider as our consumption rocketed. But those…

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The Green New Deal battle ahead

The Green New Deal battle ahead

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Naomi Klein writes: “I really don’t like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!’” So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more. It’s worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last words of a…

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