Most recent 10 articles: VOX -Environment
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How to prepare for another season of wildfire smoke - VOX -Environment (May 14, 2024) |
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May 14, 2024 · Wildfire smoke can be hazardous, but there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself.
Several US states are again experiencing an influx of wildfire smoke as Canada’s summer fire season gets underway. Due to the scale of the wildfires and natural weather patterns, enormous amounts of smoke are drifting southward - much like last year.
North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota are among the earliest states to receive air quality warnings this week. Those alerts are a signal that it’s unhealthy for people, particularly vulnerable populations like children and the elderly, to go outside due to the pollution in the air.
More US states and cities could see similar ... Read more ...
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Something weird is happening with tornadoes - VOX -Environment (May 14, 2024) |
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May 14, 2024 · Tornado season is changing. That could have major consequences.
Tornado season is here again, with twisters striking in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Florida over the past few weeks. But while severe storms in spring are nothing new, there have been subtle changes in tornado patterns in recent years that portend a more dangerous future for communities across the country.
According to a preliminary count from the National Centers for Environmental Information, there have been 547 tornadoes documented from January through April 2024. That figure is higher than the year-to-date average - 338 - the organization calculated between 1991 and 2020 but in line with the number ... Read more ...
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Why Japan is struggling to kick its coal dependency - VOX -Environment (May 10, 2024) |
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May 10, 2024 · If a wealthy, advanced economy is having a hard time getting off coal, what does it mean for the rest of the world?
Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel by far, producing more particulate air pollution and global warming gasses than any other, per unit of energy. But for some countries - even ones with the money and the motivation to go green - coal can be hard to quit.
Last month in Italy, members of the G7 - a consortium of industrialized democracies that includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union - agreed in a communiqué to “phase out existing unabated coal power generation” by 2035. Such a pledge, if ... Read more ...
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North America’s biggest city is running out of water - VOX -Environment (May 09, 2024) |
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May 09, 2024 · Mexico City is staring down a water crisis. It won’t be the last city to do so.
Mexico City is parched.
After abysmally low amounts of rainfall over the last few years, the reservoirs of the Cutzamala water system that supplies over 20 percent of the Mexican capital’s 22 million residents’ usable water are running out.
“If it doesn’t start raining soon, as it is supposed to, these [reservoirs] will run out of water by the end of June,” Oscar Ocampo, a public policy researcher on the environment, water, and energy, told my colleagues over on the Today, Explained podcast.
Already, some households receive unusably contaminated water; at times, others receive ... Read more ...
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How the world wastes hundreds of billions of meals in a year, in three charts - VOX -Environment (May 04, 2024) |
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May 04, 2024 · Think twice before throwing out your leftovers.
A billion meals are wasted every single day, according to a recent report from the United Nations. And that’s a conservative estimate.
It’s not just food down the drain, but money, too. The 2024 UN Food Waste Index report - which measured food waste at the consumer and retail level across more than 100 countries - found that over a trillion dollars worth of food gets thrown out every year, from households to grocery stores to farms, all across the globe.
Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food - the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution ... Read more ...
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How rioting farmers unraveled Europe’s ambitious climate plan - VOX -Environment (May 02, 2024) |
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May 02, 2024 · Road-clogging, manure-dumping farmers reveal the paradox at the heart of EU agriculture.
In February 2021, in the midst of the deadly second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grégory Doucet, mayor of Lyon, France, temporarily took red meat off the menus of the city’s school cafeterias. While the change was environmentally friendly, the decision was driven by social distancing protocols: Preparing one hot meal that could be served to meat-eaters, vegetarians, and those with religious restrictions rather than serving multiple options was safer and more efficient.
The response from the French agricultural establishment was hysterical. “We need to stop putting ideology on our ... Read more ...
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How La Niña will shape heat and hurricanes this year - VOX -Environment (May 01, 2024) |
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May 01, 2024 · Climate change and the outgoing El Niño will likely ignite more weather extremes.
The Pacific Ocean - Earth’s largest body of water - is an engine for weather around the planet, and it’s about to shift gears this year.
The warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, known as El Niño, is now winding down and is poised to move into its counterphase, La Niña. During an El Niño year, warm water starts to spread eastward across the surface of the equatorial Pacific. That warm water evaporates readily, adding moisture to the atmosphere and triggering a cascade that alters rainfall, heat waves, and drought patterns across the world.
The current El Niño is among ... Read more ...
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The reckless policies that helped fill our streets with ridiculously large cars - VOX -Environment (Apr 28, 2024) |
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Apr 28, 2024 · Cars, you might have noticed, have grown enormous.
Low-slung station wagons are all but extinct on American roads, and even sedans have become an endangered species. (Ford, producer of the iconic Model T a century ago, no longer sells any sedans in its home market.) Bulky SUVs and pickup trucks - which have themselves steadily added pounds and inches - now comprise more than four out of every five new cars sold in the US, up from just over half in 2013, even as national household size steadily declines.
The expanding size of automobiles - a phenomenon I call car bloat - has deepened a slew of national problems. Take road safety: Unlike peer nations, the US has endured a ... Read more ...
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The end of coral reefs as we know them - VOX -Environment (Apr 26, 2024) |
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Apr 26, 2024 · The biodiversity crisis, explained
More than five years ago, the world’s top climate scientists made a frightening prediction: If the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius, relative to preindustrial times, 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs globally would die off. At 2°C, that number jumps to more than 99 percent.
In not so great news, the planet is now approaching that 1.5°C mark. In 2023, the hottest year ever measured, the average global temperature was 1.52°C above the preindustrial average, as my colleague Umair Irfan reported. That doesn’t mean Earth has officially blown past this important threshold - typically, scientists measure these sorts of averages over decades, ... Read more ...
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We might be closer to changing course on climate change than we realized - VOX -Environment (Apr 25, 2024) |
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Apr 25, 2024 · Greenhouse gas emissions might have already peaked. Now they need to fall - fast.
Earth is coming out of the hottest year on record, amplifying the destruction from hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and drought. The oceans remain alarmingly warm, triggering the fourth global coral bleaching event in history. Concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere have reached levels not seen on this planet for millions of years, while humanity’s demand for the fossil fuels that produce this pollution is the highest it has ever been.
Yet at the same time, the world may be closer than ever to turning a corner in the effort to corral climate change.
Last year, more ... Read more ...
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