Most recent 40 articles: VOX -Environment
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Meet the EPA’s new Choose Your Own Adventure! regulation for car pollution - VOX -Environment  (Mar 21) |
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Mar 21 · Here’s what the federal rules mean for car companies, the climate, and you. The Environmental Protection Agency has officially cemented new pollution rules for cars, pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs that the Biden administration called the US’s strongest-ever clean vehicle regulations. The EPA says the new rules will avert 7 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions and provide close to $100 billion in savings per year across the country in the form of fuel costs, lower maintenance needs, and health benefits. The challenge for the government and carmakers, though, will be actually getting people to buy enough of these cleaner cars to move the needle. And that may be harder ... Read more ... |
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The next big climate deadline is for meat and dairy - VOX -Environment  (Mar 20) |
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Mar 20 · It’s a lot sooner than you think. For years, climate scientists have called for a phase-out of fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic global warming. Now, according to a first-of-its-kind survey of more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, we must also drastically reduce meat and dairy production - and fast. Global livestock emissions should peak by 2030 or sooner to meet the Paris climate agreement target of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the surveyed climate experts said. In high- and middle-income countries, which produce and consume the overwhelming majority of the global meat and dairy supply, livestock emissions should ... Read more ... |
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Many coral reefs are dying. This one is exploding with life. - VOX -Environment  (Mar 14) |
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Mar 14 · Scientists recently observed a rare phenomenon on a reef in Cambodia that left them in awe - and filled them with hope. The biodiversity crisis, explained Once a year, after dark, a bit of magic happens in the ocean. In tropical waters worldwide, large chunks of coral - those colorful rocklike structures in shallow, coastal waters, each a colony of living animals - start puffing out hundreds of little pearl-sized balls. Some are pink. Others are red, orange, or yellow. For a few minutes, the ocean is a snow globe, and then the balls float away. This phenomenon, known as spawning, is how many corals reproduce. Each ball is a bundle of eggs and sperm from an ... Read more ... |
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Under Biden, US oil production is as high as it’s ever been - VOX -Environment  (Mar 13) |
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Mar 13 · Biden is not “waging war” on American energy. He’s boosting it. The US is the largest crude oil producer in the world, pumping out nearly 13 million barrels on average every day in 2023, an all-time record, according to new data from the US Energy Information Administration. That’s an awkward milestone for President Joe Biden, who has arguably done more than any modern president to facilitate America’s transition away from fossil fuels to greener alternatives. For the last six years, America has outstripped Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other OPEC countries in crude oil production. And it has picked up the pace under Biden, who had approved more permits for oil and gas ... Read more ... |
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Spring is here very early. That’s not good. - VOX -Environment  (Mar 12) |
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Mar 12 · Winter’s insanely early end, explained in one map. Whether it’s fewer snow days or disconcertingly hot temperatures, people across the US are experiencing an increasingly common phenomenon: a winter that doesn’t feel wintry. That’s the result of warmer conditions in many places driven both by climate change and a particularly strong El Nino phenomenon this year. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 2023-2024 winter is the warmest one it’s seen in the 130 years it’s been tracking. And per the University of Arizona’s National Phenology Network, signs of spring in certain parts of the country - like the budding of the first lilac and ... Read more ... |
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Why New York is suing the world’s biggest meat company - VOX -Environment  (Mar 8) |
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Mar 8 · Meat giant JBS said it’ll reach net zero emissions by 2040. LOL. As public concern about climate change grows, so does demand for lower-emissions consumer goods. And as major meat producers face the fact that their climate impacts may turn away conscientious consumers, they are increasingly claiming to offer low-carbon meat. That includes the Brazilian multinational JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, which in 2021 began claiming that it will achieve net zero emissions by 2040, promising in a full-page New York Times ad that it could serve up “bacon, chicken wings and steak with net-zero emissions.” This claim is, on its face, dubious. Meat, especially beef, is ... Read more ... |
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Does climate change trigger earthquakes? - VOX -Environment  (Mar 8) |
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Mar 8 · Climate change is complex and will play out differently depending on where you are (and who you are). It’s confusing! It’s contradictory! And what am I to do? EVs are expensive, my house leaks heat, and my AC is nonexistent. It’s hot, it’s freezing, it’s hot, aarrggggghgbkjdhfsj! Our world’s climate is changing in ways that well-meaning scientists are trying hard to understand. But this stuff can be difficult to make sense of - even for those who are really plugged into the climate space. Plus, it’s become politicized and polarized, which obviously doesn’t help. That’s why I think our culture needs more conversations in good faith about our warming climate. And that’s ... Read more ... |
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Why is Biden blocking the cheapest, most popular EVs in the world? - VOX -Environment  (Mar 4) |
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Mar 4 · Biden needs to decide if he likes the climate more than he hates China. You can’t buy the Seagull in the US. But I bet you wish you could. A small hatchback around the size of a Mini Cooper, the Seagull is a fast-charging electric car and claims a range of up to 250 miles (at least according to its home country’s generous tests); BYD, its Chinese manufacturer, claims it can go from 30 percent to 80 percent charged in a half-hour using a DC plug. It’s hardly a luxury car but it’s well-equipped, with a power driver’s seat and cruise control. “If I were looking for an inexpensive commuter car … this would be perfect,” veteran car journalist John McElroy said after taking a ... Read more ... |
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Texas fires happen in the winter. Just never at this scale before. - VOX -Environment  (Feb 29) |
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Feb 29 · The Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Texas Panhandle is the state’s largest blaze on record. Dozens of wildfires are tearing through the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma after igniting earlier this week, including what’s now the second-largest wildfire in US history. Dubbed the Smokehouse Creek Fire, the massive blaze, the largest in Texas’s history, has engulfed more than 1.1 million acres and was 3 percent contained as of Thursday morning, spurred by dry weather and high winds. The fire has killed at least one person, triggered evacuations, and shrouded a swath of the country in smoke. The encroaching flames forced the Pantex nuclear weapons manufacturing plant in Amarillo to ... Read more ... |
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This chart of ocean temperatures should really scare you - VOX -Environment  (Feb 28) |
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Feb 28 · The Atlantic Ocean is unusually warm right now. Here’s why scientists say that’s “deeply troubling.” If you were to dip your toes into the middle of the North Atlantic - say, somewhere between South Carolina and Spain - the water would feel frigid. You definitely wouldn’t want to swim. It’s winter. Yet that water would, in fact, be very warm, relatively speaking. Right now, the North Atlantic ocean is, on average, warmer than any other time on record, running about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the average temperature over the last three decades. To understand just how unusual this is, take a look at the chart below. The wave of squiggly lines represents the sea ... Read more ... |
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Winter heat waves are now a thing. Here’s how to make sense of them. - VOX -Environment  (Feb 27) |
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Feb 27 · 2024 is already shattering heat records as temperatures soar around the world After last year was the warmest on record, 2024 is already off to a ripping hot start. January 2024 was the warmest January ever measured, and February is likely to follow. Many parts of the world are experiencing unprecedented heat - both in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s summer, and in the Northern Hemisphere, where it’s winter. The list of countries is varied and far-reaching: Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand, Australia, and Spain have all experienced extreme or record-breaking temperatures in the past few weeks. The US, which experienced a bitter cold snap across ... Read more ... |
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What’s happening to our winters? - VOX -Environment  (Feb 27) |
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Feb 27 · This winter has been unseasonably hot. In fact, last month the world experienced its warmest January ever measured, and February is likely to continue that streak. This rise in temperatures is not isolated to any one part of the world. It’s happening everywhere, like in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s summer, and in the Northern Hemisphere, where it’s winter. Even the oceans are at never-before-seen temperatures, which portends more danger for corals and could fuel more intense hurricanes and typhoons. As temperatures rise, ocean waters warm, providing fuel for storms. It’s a mix that makes hurricanes more intense and unpredictable. The stories below reveal how our ... Read more ... |
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We know how to save these beloved endangered whales. Yet we’re mindlessly killing them. - VOX -Environment  (Feb 22) |
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Feb 22 · The biodiversity crisis, explained The story of the North Atlantic right whale, an icon of the East Coast, should be one of hope - a tale of recovery. Humanity’s strongest tools have been mobilized for their protection. For centuries, whalers hunted these graceful giants, which were once found throughout the North Atlantic, for their baleen and oily blubber. By the early 20th century, they were nearly extinct. But in 1935, alarmed by the shrinking number of right whales, international authorities banned commercial hunting of these animals. Decades later, as North Atlantic right whales were starting to recover, the US gave them another lifeline, listing them as endangered ... Read more ... |
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Why you probably shouldn’t blow up a pipeline - VOX -Environment  (Feb 21) |
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Feb 21 · The revolutionary left’s theory of the climate crisis puts ideology above inconvenient truths. Seventeen years ago, the British novelist John Lanchester puzzled over a “strange and striking” fact: No one was blowing anything up to fight climate change. This was strange, Lanchester wrote, because “terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action.” What’s more, there was no shortage of soft targets for an anti-carbon terror cell to attack. Gas stations were highly flammable. SUVs, ripe to be keyed, sat unguarded along every city’s streets. So why was no one engaging in such property destruction? Why did activists remain ... Read more ... |
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Carmakers pumped the brakes on hybrid cars too soon - VOX -Environment  (Feb 14) |
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Feb 14 · In the age of electric vehicles, the hybrid is still a contender. Are electric vehicles hitting a pothole? Ford announced last month that it was cutting production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. General Motors and Volkswagen last year said they would reduce electric vehicle manufacturing. All-electric and plug-in hybrid carmakers are struggling too, with layoffs or slowing assembly lines at companies like BYD, Lucid, Polestar, and Fisker. Tesla, the world’s most valuable car company, lost $80 billion in value in January - 12 percent of its market capitalization - after CEO Elon Musk projected lower sales this year. Meanwhile, EV users are running ... Read more ... |
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Can we protect and profit from the oceans? - VOX -Environment  (Feb 12) |
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Feb 12 · The ocean is home to most animal life on Earth. It’s also vital to human survival, regulating the climate, capturing 90 percent of the heat caused by carbon emissions, and producing 50 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. But most of the ocean is poorly regulated, amounting to a free-for-all of resource extraction - from commercial fishing to drilling for oil - that severely damages the marine ecosystems we all depend on. Now, world governments are inching closer to the most decisive step ever to safeguard the ocean’s future. The United Nations High Seas Treaty, which was drafted last March and will take effect once 60 countries ratify it, aims to protect 30 percent of the ocean by ... Read more ... |
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What to do when you’re completely overwhelmed by climate anxiety - VOX -Environment  (Feb 8) |
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Feb 8 · How to act in service of the planet - and your values. When the subject of climate change is a catastrophe in itself, it becomes incredibly easy to catastrophize the fate of the planet. Alarming news headlines, the increased frequency of natural disasters, and politicians’ failure to promote genuine solutions may lead some to believe in an inevitable future in which extreme temperatures and weather events are constant and currently populated parts of the globe are uninhabitable. It’s important not to turn a blind eye to the effects of climate change, but to view these events realistically rather than project future probabilities as fact. When we catastrophize - or think ... Read more ... |
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The Earth is getting greener. Hurray? - VOX -Environment  (Feb 7) |
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Feb 7 · Humans are literally changing the color of the planet. Scientists are worried. The biodiversity crisis, explained Maybe you’ve heard: Earth, our planet, is not doing great. Tropical forests are getting cut down. Parking lots are replacing bird-filled grasslands. Climate change is fueling forest-razing wildfires. On the whole, natural, plant-filled habitats, seem to be disappearing. Despite this destruction, scientists keep coming to an odd conclusion: The Earth is growing greener. Not green in the metaphorical “sustainable” sense, but in the literal color green. In the last four decades, the extent of green vegetation - i.e., the amount of leaves in a given ... Read more ... |
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This camel has a very important job - VOX -Environment  (Feb 2) |
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Feb 2 · A new solution to save the iconic Joshua tree uses a distant relative of one of the Mojave’s ancient seed distributors: The camel. The biodiversity crisis, explained In the summer of 2020, the Dome Fire leaped across the Mojave National Preserve in southeastern California, killing more than 1.3 million Joshua trees. Three years later in 2023, which would go on to become the hottest year on Earth since record-keeping began, the 93,078-acre York Fire more than doubled the acreage of the Dome Fire, scorching large forests of the eastern species of the wild-armed yuccas. Entering these burn scars is surreal. A majority of the trees stand like tombstones, their trunks ... Read more ... |
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The great American natural gas reckoning is upon us - VOX -Environment  (Jan 30) |
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Jan 30 · So, Biden paused LNG exports. Does this … fix climate change? The Biden administration last week announced that it was pausing the permitting process for some new natural gas export projects, including a facility that would be the second-largest gas export terminal in the United States. It’s a move the White House said will help the US meet its climate change goals, but it’s not clear how it will affect the economy, energy markets, or the environment. It’s worth parsing this announcement carefully. The White House said on January 26 that it’s issuing a “temporary pause on pending decisions on exports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to non-FTA [free trade agreement] ... Read more ... |
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Bats have a unique superpower. Climate change is turning it into a liability. - VOX -Environment  (Jan 30) |
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Jan 30 · It’s good news for bat-haters and bad news for everyone else. The biodiversity crisis, explained Not all bats are unbelievably, overwhelmingly adorable, like the one below. Many of them have wrinkly faces and large ears that help them “see” in the dark, using echolocation. But all bats are, without a doubt, exceptional creatures. Not only do bats pollinate our crops, prey on pests like mosquitos, and spread seeds that help damaged ecosystems recover, but they also possess a superpower that’s unique among mammals: flight. Indeed, bats are the only mammals on the planet that can fly. Yes, some squirrels and frogs can glide through the forest. That’s neat, but ... Read more ... |
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Surprise! There’s a reason to be (cautiously) optimistic about the climate. - VOX -Environment  (Jan 24) |
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Jan 24 · Don’t let climate doom win. It’s no secret that the environmental health of the planet is in dire straits right now. The Earth was its hottest in recorded history in 2023. Our winters are shorter, our summers hotter, and our natural disasters more extreme. The doom and gloom around climate change is understandable when you take it all into account. Global governments struggled to stay under the goal of 1.5 Celsius temperature increase last year, meaning we could be barreling toward even worse outcomes. There’s a sense of existential dread, a feeling that we’ve gone too far and that there’s no stopping the inevitable demise of Earth and all the creatures that inhabit it, ... Read more ... |
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Your home’s cleaner, better heating system comes with one major cost - VOX -Environment  (Jan 23) |
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Jan 23 · American energy needs are changing. So far, the US power grid has been able to keep you warm. The recent deep, biting chill that froze the United States forced millions of furnaces to switch on at the same time, raising energy demand to new seasonal highs during one of the diciest times of year for power reliability. In fact, the Tennessee Valley Authority - the federal power utility that covers states including Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky - set a new power demand record last week, not just for winter, but for all time. The good news is that for the most part, the lights stayed on and toes stayed warm as most of the US avoided sweeping blackouts. ... Read more ... |
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Why have our winters gotten so weird? - VOX -Environment  (Jan 19) |
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Jan 19 · Yes, it’s freezing now. But winters are actually warming dangerously fast. Bitter cold continues to grip the United States as unusual freezing temperatures stretch as far south as Florida this week. Even more chilly weather is in store through the weekend, putting more than 80 percent of the US population under some type of cold weather advisory. But this jarring cold snap is sandwiched between the end of what was the hottest year on record and the start of another year that could be even hotter. And even as temperatures plunge to new depths, the recent weather isn’t remotely enough to derail an ominous trend. As the climate changes, the bottom of the temperature ... Read more ... |
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Something weird is happening to these Alpine goats. Scientists say it’s an ominous sign. - VOX -Environment  (Jan 17) |
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Jan 17 · Climate change and other human impacts are turning some animals nocturnal. The biodiversity crisis, explained A day in the life of a goat in the Alps is, perhaps, as idyllic as it sounds. Wake up when the sun rises. Eat some grass and wildflowers. Rest. Go to sleep when the sun sets, high up on the mountain, among protective rocks. For thousands of years, this has more or less been the life of Alpine ibexes, a type of mountain goat in the European Alps with almost comically large horns. But life for these goats - however quaint it once was - is rapidly changing. As our cars and factories continue warming the Earth with a blanket of greenhouse gases, Alpine ... Read more ... |
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Why saving old trees is weirdly controversial - VOX -Environment  (Jan 12) |
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Jan 12 · Biden wants to restrict commercial logging in old-growth forests. Could that make wildfires worse? The biodiversity crisis, explained In the dry mountains east of Fresno stands a pine tree that’s more than 4,800 years old. The tree, a bristlecone pine with a thick trunk and cartoonish branches, was alive when Egyptians built the pyramids, when Romans constructed their capital city, and hundreds of years before English settlers arrived on the East Coast. Known as Methuselah, the pine is perhaps the planet’s oldest living organism, though it’s just one of the nation’s many ancient trees. Some giant sequoias, found elsewhere in California, are more than 2,000 years ... Read more ... |
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How 7 scientists feel after the hottest year on record - VOX -Environment  (Dec 27) |
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Dec 27 · What it’s like to study a world facing unprecedented changes. 2023 is the hottest year in at least 174 years and recent months have been the hottest in 125,000 years. All of that warming led to deadly heat waves, disease outbreaks, floods, droughts, and record low ice levels around Antarctica. The extreme weather this year stems in part from natural variability, including a powerful El Niño warming pattern in the Pacific Ocean that reshaped weather around the world. But beneath these cycles, humanity’s ravenous appetite for coal, oil, and natural gas is driving up concentrations of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere to levels the Earth hasn’t witnessed for 3 million ... Read more ... |
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Indigenous activists are risking their lives for butterflies - VOX -Environment  (Dec 20) |
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Dec 20 · Every winter, northwest of Mexico City, the branches of the Oyamel fir trees ignite in orange, colored by the wings of monarch butterflies that have made the epic journey south from Canada and the United States. The forest is home to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, created by presidential decree in 1986 and designated as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2008. The reserve shelters nearly 90 percent of the region’s over-wintering monarch butterfly population. Despite the fact that the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve is internationally protected, decades of degradation of the forest have posed an existential threat to this fragile ecosystem. Over the past four ... Read more ... |
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3 wins and 3 losses at the biggest climate conference ever - VOX -Environment  (Dec 13) |
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Dec 13 · The largest international climate change conference in history closed Wednesday in the United Arab Emirates in the waning days of the hottest year on record with yet another limp agreement between countries to do more to address global warming as the problem gets worse. The accord did, for the first time, explicitly call for countries to use less fossil fuel, but it did not specify by when or how much. “It is a balanced plan that tackles emissions, bridges the gap on adaptation, reimagines global finance, and delivers on loss and damage,” said Sultan al-Jaber, the president of COP28, this year’s summit, in his closing remarks. United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary ... Read more ... |
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Don’t be satisfied with a pledge to end fossil fuels - VOX -Environment  (Dec 13) |
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Dec 13 · Climate activist Bill McKibben on how to make sense of COP28: “Let’s make that concession hurt.” For nearly three decades, the United Nations convening of the parties on climate change, known as COP, has failed to do much about the climate crisis. Since the first global climate summit in 1995, countries have continued to emit harmful greenhouse gases that are heating the planet to increasingly dangerous levels. But this year, for the first time since its inaugural conference in Berlin, diplomats from nearly 200 countries approved a global agreement that explicitly calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable ... Read more ... |
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In Malawi, a blueprint for recovery from climate disaster - VOX -Environment  (Dec 12) |
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Dec 12 · For several days in March, the record-breaking Tropical Cyclone Freddy poured heavy rains onto the city of Blantyre in Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa no bigger than Pennsylvania. Freddy roared in the Indian Ocean for over a month, longer than any other recorded tropical cyclone, while also becoming the most energetic storm in the planet’s recorded history. The cyclone displaced over half a million and killed more than 1,400 people across Malawi, making it one of the deadliest in Africa’s history. Christina Mphepo, a 42-year-old mother living in an affected neighborhood at the foot of Mount Soche in southern Malawi, barely got out alive on March 13 when a mudslide ... Read more ... |
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Pledges to slash methane pollution at COP28 are leaving out one big thing - VOX -Environment  (Dec 11) |
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Dec 11 · Negotiators from around the world meeting at the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last week agreed to put more money behind pledges to cut methane pollution. If met, these commitments would avert a significant amount of warming before the end of the decade. But that’s a big ”if,” especially since countries remain reluctant to tackle the biggest source of methane emissions. Methane is a mighty greenhouse gas, roughly 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. About 60 percent of global methane emissions come from human activity, accounting for a quarter of all warming. But unlike carbon dioxide, it ... Read more ... |
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The severe El Niño in South America is a preview of a climate-changed world - VOX -Environment  (Dec 11) |
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Dec 11 · Dengue, drought, and floods are hammering Peru and Bolivia this year. At the UN climate talks, they’re seeking justice. For centuries, off the coast of what’s now Peru and Ecuador, fishers noticed that every few years, around Christmas, the sea surface warmed up. Ordinarily, a chilly swirl of currents would churn up nutrients that feed wildlife near the surface, yielding a bountiful catch. The arrival of warm water slowed the currents, and thus slowed the upwelling of phosphorus and nitrogen from deep in the ocean that normally fed plankton that in turn fed fish. As a result, the fishermen would often return home with empty nets. Spanish settlers later dubbed this ... Read more ... |
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Scaling slaughter-free meat is hard. Here’s one way to make it easier. - VOX -Environment  (Dec 1) |
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Dec 1 · Why there should be more collaboration in cellular agriculture. In a perfect world, no meal would come at the cost of the environment or the welfare of an animal. A juicy steak with freshly ground pepper and a pat of butter wouldn’t contribute to climate change. Nor would bacon fat’s sizzle mean that a pig had been slaughtered on a factory farm. These are gastronomic dreams of astronomical proportions. The good news is that we’re inching closer and closer to achieving such goals through the development of cell-cultivated meat, or meat grown directly from animal cells in a lab. The United Nations sees cellular meat, alongside other shifts like plant-based diets, as a ... Read more ... |
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There’s less meat at this year’s climate talks. But there’s plenty of bull. - VOX -Environment  (Nov 30) |
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Nov 30 · Meat and dairy are driving the climate crisis. Why won’t world leaders at COP28 do anything about it? Over the next two weeks, an estimated 70,000 people will gather in Dubai for the United Nations COP28 summit. It’s the world’s largest and highest-stakes climate conference, where world leaders gather every year to assess the state of global warming and set targets to slow it down. As attendees break for meals between meetings, negotiations, and panel discussions, they may notice one striking difference between COP28 and past UN climate conferences: There won’t be much meat on the menu. After a months-long effort by the youth-led Food@COP coalition, the United Arab ... Read more ... |
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Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney have a plan for national progress - VOX -Environment  (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · The co-founders and co-CEOs of the Institute for Progress want to kick-start America’s innovation engine. Sometime in the 1970s, the US lost the future. Productivity growth in the decades since has been in decline. Building things has gotten harder and harder and more and more expensive. Real scientific progress has stagnated, as has the length of our lives. We’re even flying slower than we did in the days when the supersonic Concorde could cross the Atlantic Ocean in three and a half hours. Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney want to bring the US back to the future it should have had. As co-CEOs of the Institute for Progress, a DC-based think tank they co-founded in 2022, Stapp ... Read more ... |
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Genesis Butler is leading the next generation of animal and climate activists - VOX -Environment  (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · At just 17, Butler is drawing attention to the connections between animal rights and the climate crisis. Genesis Butler has quickly become one of the world’s best-known animal rights activists - and she’s only 17. She’s leading a global movement of young people fighting factory farming’s impacts on animals and the climate. Butler’s story began, like it did for many animal advocates, when she was a small child: She stopped eating animals when she was 3, after finding out where her then-favorite food - chicken nuggets - came from. By 6, she’d converted her family to veganism. She has activism in her family - she’s the great-grandniece of famed labor organizer César Chávez ... Read more ... |
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Hannah Ritchie fights climate doomerism with facts - VOX -Environment  (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · Ritchie believes we can be the first generation to build a sustainable world. In many ways, 2023 has been a record-breaking year. Since January, the world experienced the hottest day on record, the continent of Africa faced its deadliest flood in over a century, and Canada withstood its most destructive wildfire season ever. This series of tragic headlines paints a dire picture. Yet, a wholly pessimistic view of the future of the planet is incomplete. Alongside these devastating stories are ones of hope: Solar and wind power prices have plunged, deforestation rates have slowed, and natural disaster-related deaths are lower than they used to be. For these reasons, ... Read more ... |
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Jane Flegal is doing whatever she can to fight climate change - VOX -Environment  (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · Flegal takes an “all of the above” approach to climate action - and she’s racking up big wins. Debates about how to beat back climate change often turn into battles between different technologies and policies. Are you a solar person or a nuclear person? Do you care about better grid capacity or more about higher-capacity batteries? Are you more into clean energy standards or carbon prices? But with the effects of global warming becoming more noticeable and severe with each passing month, the future seems to belong to advocates of an “all of the above” strategy. Few people have had more success promoting this approach than the scholar, funder, and policymaker Jane Flegal. Read more ... |
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Jesse Jenkins is figuring out how to electrify America’s power grid - VOX -Environment  (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · Reaching net-zero emissions requires a historic overhaul of America’s infrastructure. Jenkins is mapping the way. One thing Jesse Jenkins likes to tell his undergraduate students at Princeton: It took about 140 years to build America’s current power grid. Now, we need to triple the grid’s output and shift electricity from 40 percent carbon-free to 100 percent in the next 30 years to stay on track with the US pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. As Jenkins points out, net-zero is just “the point where we stop digging a deeper hole.” Overhauling the power grid is necessary, but not sufficient to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as the ... Read more ... |
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