Most recent 40 articles: VOX -Environment
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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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Maisa Rojas is putting political power behind climate science - VOX -Environment (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · Chile’s minister for the environment hopes to bring science, social equality, and decarbonization together.
As a climate scientist and professor of geophysics at the Universidad de Chile, Maisa Rojas was unhappy with political inaction around climate change - so she decided to step up to the plate, join Chile’s government, and try to enact legislation that follows the science.
Prior to becoming the minister for the environment under progressive president Gabriel Boric last year, Rojas spent the past 15 years teaching at the University of Chile. She also co-authored chapters for two multi-year assessment reports by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As ... Read more ...
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Olúf?´mi O. Táíwò is building a theory of justice for a warming world - VOX -Environment (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · The tangled nature of climate change and colonialism means justice has to account for both.
As climate change intensifies, so too does the risk that it will sustain and solidify injustices from the past well into the future. Rising sea levels and more frequent extreme weather events disproportionately affect populations who continue to suffer the legacies of colonialism and slavery, and global warming is worsening economic inequalities between the Global North and South.
The depth of the problem makes devising adequate solutions tricky, but if we succeed, we can make lasting progress in addressing both climate change and systemic inequality.
That’s precisely what ... Read more ...
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Priya Donti is harnessing AI to fight climate change - VOX -Environment (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · Donti is showing how machine learning can be a powerful ally to address the climate crisis.
When Priya Donti was asked to choose any superpower, she responded: “Maybe the ability to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into basalt.” Short of that, she’s working on turning a different kind of superhuman power into reality: using AI and machine learning to tackle climate change through her global nonprofit, Climate Change AI (CCAI).
The project, which she co-founded in 2019 and now runs, has already become a staple in the “AI for Good” example catalog, helping governments develop grant programs, companies hone in on opportunities, and individuals find ... Read more ...
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Robinson Meyer is demystifying what decarbonizing the economy really means - VOX -Environment (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · The Heatmap News cofounder wants to cover all of climate - not just science.
Earth’s climate change began in obscurity some 4.6 billion years ago, as the molten surface of the newly formed planet cooled and volcanoes huffed out the gasses that filled our early atmosphere. But today, as human activity accelerates rising temperatures beyond the boundaries of healthy habitability, we have people like journalist Robinson Meyer to ensure that everyone knows exactly how we’re changing the planet, and whether we’re decarbonizing the economy fast enough to hang around for another few billion years.
For five years, Meyer covered climate, energy, and technology as a staff writer ... Read more ...
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Zahra Biabani wants Gen Z to feel hopeful about the future - VOX -Environment (Nov 29) |
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Nov 29 · The Climate Optimism author believes focusing on victories can engender more positive action.
Zahra Biabani, a Gen Z activist and author of Climate Optimism, believes that change is worth pursuing, no matter how bleak things may at times look. Her book, she says, is not for politicians who continue to operate with a business-as-usual mindset or straight-up deny climate change is happening. It’s for everyone else - fellow Zoomers, conscious consumers, activists who don’t want to burn out - to realize that “hope is a self-fulfilling phenomenon.”
Her opening chapter explores the psychological biases that keep us from taking the steps to make the world better. If you think ... Read more ...
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What breaching 1.5C this year means for curbing climate change - VOX -Environment (Nov 27) |
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Nov 27 · 2023 may overshoot the Paris agreement target for the first time. What does that mean for climate negotiations?
Month after record-breaking month, 2023 is on track to be the hottest year measured in human history.
It has been a year of extraordinary drought, deadly rainfall, and searing heat waves. Extreme temperatures even reached underwater. Much of the southern hemisphere basked in summer-like weather through its winter, reaching all the way down to Antarctica.
Particularly notable is that 2023 may mark the first time global average temperatures have risen above a critical line, providing a glimpse into a world where humanity fails to get climate change under ... Read more ...
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The future of the planet hinges on understanding these 5 key phrases - VOX -Environment (Nov 27) |
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Nov 27 · The controversial concepts shaping climate action, defined.
Often, the highest-stake decisions impacting the planet come down to the simplest phrases. The importance of words plays out every year as world leaders and diplomats gather at the United Nations climate change conference, also known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), where they adopt a new climate agreement. Consider one especially foundational one: whether countries agree that they voluntarily “should” slash climate pollution or phase out fossil fuel subsidies or contribute to international funds, or whether they “must.”
Climate action includes vast, sometimes elusive concepts, which is what makes precise ... Read more ...
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The state of the climate crisis - VOX -Environment (Nov 27) |
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Nov 27 · COP28 takes place amid an apocalyptic backdrop. From Appalachia to Malawi, these communities offer a measure of hope.
What could a climate that’s severely out of whack look like? Could it spur devastating floods in the American Northeast? Or terrible fires, like the kind that leveled the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century? Or powerful tropical storms like Otis, the fastest accelerating hurricane on record?
In a word, yes.
And yet, even more extreme temperatures may be coming. Some research predicts that we are on the cusp of blowing past the red line to limit the planet’s temperature increase to 1.5 ... | By Anjan Sundaram (Publishing soon.) Read more ...
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How 2023 scorched our dinner plates - VOX -Environment (Nov 22) |
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Nov 22 · Are your holiday meals pricier this year? Blame the record-breaking heat around the world.
It’s the time of year when many are thinking about food. A lot of food. Thinking a lot about a lot of food.
In 2022, Americans spent an additional $2.8 billion on food for Thanksgiving compared to a typical week. Supply chain disruptions and inflation pushed the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner to record highs, according to a survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation. The survey finds costs are down this year but still higher than they were prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Those higher prices are due in part to disruptions in the global food supply, and while overall global ... Read more ...
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Biden gives center stage to the climate report Trump tried to bury - VOX -Environment (Nov 14) |
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Nov 14 · No part of the country is unscathed from climate change, according to the federal government’s new National Climate Assessment.
The White House, in coordination with 14 federal agencies, today released the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA), a comprehensive report on the impacts of climate on the United States and what future warming may hold for ecosystems, the economy, and communities across the country.
The report establishes that the effects of rising temperatures are already “worsening across every region of the United States” sending ecosystems into death spirals, reshaping crops and forests, and fueling deadly heat waves. And without deeper cuts in global ... Read more ...
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Joe Manchin deserves (some) credit for fighting climate change - VOX -Environment (Nov 11) |
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Nov 11 · You do, in this circumstance, gotta hand it to him.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) - with nearly $370 billion allocated to wind turbines, electric cars, transmission lines, heat pumps, and environmental cleanup - is the single largest piece of US legislation to keep climate change in check.
And West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who this week announced he will not seek reelection, was absolutely essential to getting it over the line. Don’t take my word for it: President Joe Biden specifically praised Manchin this week for his vote on the IRA, which passed the Senate 51-50 on August 7, 2022.
It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal the Inflation Reduction ... Read more ...
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Julia Child, the natural gas industry’s most famous influencer - VOX -Environment (Nov 4) |
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Nov 4 · Documents reveal the untold story of how the natural gas industry infiltrated American’s kitchens through the beloved chef.
For years on her popular cooking show, The French Chef, Julia Child used a crude, makeshift kitchen that she and her husband would haul to the set for each filming. When she returned to the screen for a new, 13-episode series later in her career, she had one condition: She needed a kitchen that was her own to film in, one “that we could just walk into and work in and leave.”
Child got her wish - thanks to a generous sponsorship from the American Gas Association (AGA), a powerful lobby for gas utilities, which paid for a new kitchen, complete with a ... Read more ...
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Why Norway - the poster child for electric cars - is having second thoughts - VOX -Environment (Oct 31) |
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Oct 31 · Electric cars are crucial, but not enough to solve climate change. We can’t let them crowd out car-free transit options.
OSLO, Norway - With motor vehicles generating nearly a 10th of global CO2 emissions, governments and environmentalists around the world are scrambling to mitigate the damage. In wealthy countries, strategies often revolve around electrifying cars - and for good reason, many are looking to Norway for inspiration.
Over the last decade, Norway has emerged as the world’s undisputed leader in electric vehicle adoption. With generous government incentives available, 87 percent of the country’s new car sales are now fully electric, a share that dwarfs that of ... Read more ...
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Why more fossil fuel workers aren’t joining the clean energy revolution - VOX -Environment (Oct 30) |
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Oct 30 · The auto industry strike is one facet of the mounting tension between the energy transition and workers who could lose their jobs.
Auto unions and US carmakers recently smoothed over a huge pothole on the road to electric vehicles, but workers are facing much bigger ruts ahead on the route to clean energy.
In the past week, the United Auto Workers labor union reached tentative agreements with Ford, Stellantis, and GM, paving the road to ending their weeks-long strikes at the three largest US automakers.
One of the major concerns for the union was the shift toward electric vehicles. Car companies like Ford are betting big on electrification as a tactic to meet their ... Read more ...
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How China is designing flood-resistant cities - VOX -Environment (Oct 27) |
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Oct 27 · It’s time to redesign cities for climate change.
From rising sea levels in Mumbai to unbearable heat in Houston, cities around the world are feeling the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, they don’t always have the right infrastructure to handle its impacts - which is one reason why cities are beginning to reimagine urban design.
Dozens of urban areas are experimenting with “spongey” infrastructure as a potential solution. It goes by different names around the world, but they all follow a similar design philosophy: remove existing pipes and drains to manage rain and stormwater, and implement natural infrastructure like rain gardens and vegetation to absorb water ... Read more ...
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How Hurricane Otis defied forecasts and exploded into a massive storm - VOX -Environment (Oct 25) |
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Oct 25 · Hurricane forecasts have improved, but Otis still surprised meteorologists with how rapidly it intensified.
On Tuesday morning, Otis was a mere tropical storm with sustained winds of 70 miles per hour. Six hours later, the storm’s wind speed had nearly doubled, and hours later it slammed into southwest Mexico as a Category 5 storm. Nearly 1 million people in Acapulco were directly in its path.
“A nightmare scenario is unfolding for southern Mexico,” the National Hurricane Center said at the time.
By sunrise on Wednesday, Otis had weakened to Category 2 strength, with sustained winds of 110 miles per hour, yet it had already carved a path of destruction. Mexican ... Read more ...
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The World Bank can bring the world’s poor into the clean energy revolution - VOX -Environment (Oct 24) |
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Oct 24 · World Bank veteran Masood Ahmed explains why the 80-year-old lender should make a comeback, fueling the green transition.
The World Bank turns 80 next summer, which means eight decades of loans to fund infrastructure and other projects in poor countries. But it is entering its ninth decade with a bit of an identity crisis, and a widespread understanding that it needs to transform itself.
Ajay Banga, the former Mastercard CEO picked by President Joe Biden as the bank’s new leader, faces heavy pressure from climate groups to stop offering loans and other financing for carbon-emitting projects like natural gas plants. In turn, many governments in developing countries find ... Read more ...
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Cow burps are a climate problem. Can seaweed help? - VOX -Environment (Oct 20) |
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Oct 20 · Changing the diet of cows might help them release less methane.
There are around 1.5 billion cows on the planet being raised as livestock for things like meat and dairy - and they’re a climate problem we’ve struggled to solve. Cows have a specialized digestive tract that allows them to digest tough plant material like grass or hay, but in that process, methane is produced as waste, and the cows ... burp it out. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s nearly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, these burping animals are considered one of the largest sources of methane production in the United States, making up nearly 25 percent ... Read more ...
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Airlines say they’ve found a route to climate-friendly flying - VOX -Environment (Oct 19) |
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Oct 19 · Cleaner, faster, cheaper - the aviation industry’s plan to decarbonize air travel, explained.
If you’ve caught an ad for an airline lately on TV, a podcast, or the entertainment display on your flight, you’ve probably heard the company brag about what it wants to do about climate change.
Major airlines like American, Delta, Southwest, and United have all set targets of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. They’re using a suite of tactics including buying more fuel-efficient aircraft, electrifying their ground vehicles, and increasing the efficiency of their operations. They’re also testing the winds on battery- and hydrogen-powered planes, as well as some ... Read more ...
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Why Biden’s multibillion-dollar bet on hydrogen energy is such a big deal - VOX -Environment (Oct 16) |
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Oct 16 · Clean hydrogen can be a lot dirtier than it seems, especially when the fossil fuel industry gets involved.
One of the biggest bets of the Biden administration is that clean hydrogen will help the United States reach its climate goals, revitalize domestic manufacturing, and bolster a shrinking fossil fuel workforce. That’s a lot riding on an industry that barely exists today.
The term “clean hydrogen” can mean many things - some of which aren’t exactly clean. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s a very promising energy source that could power sectors of the economy that electrification and renewables currently cannot. But the pure hydrogen gas ... Read more ...
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What happens if you force companies to reveal how much they contribute to climate change? - VOX -Environment (Oct 14) |
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Oct 14 · California wants to find out.
If you order a company to reveal how much it pollutes, would it clean up its act? And if a business has to chalk out all the ways extreme weather and rising sea levels hurt its bottom line, will that force it to better prepare?
California certainly thinks so. The Golden State recently enacted two climate laws. One would make billion-dollar businesses in the state - the likes of Apple, Google, Walmart, and Chevron, more than 5,300 companies in total - disclose their greenhouse gas emissions publicly. The second requires companies making more than $500 million a year, applying to more than 10,000 companies, to report their climate-related ... Read more ...
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How a tiny island is adapting to climate change ... on its dinner plates - VOX -Environment (Oct 12) |
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Oct 12 · Dominica’s traditional foods are countering modern threats.
KALINAGO TERRITORY, Dominica - Inside a small yellow roadside shop on the edge of a lush hill, two sisters are reviving an ancient staple to serve modern tastes and stave off a future threat.
The sisters, Valary Antoine and Arnique Valmond, are members of the Kalinago people, the largest Indigenous community in the Caribbean, with almost 3,000 residents living on Dominica’s east coast. At Eezee Side Cassava Delicacies, they are refining cassava, a brown tuber with white flesh. Processing cassava, also known as manioc or yuca, is hard work. You have to peel the bark-like skin, cut it up, press out the excess ... Read more ...
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How a California tribe won their ancestral land back and saved endangered salmon - VOX -Environment (Oct 9) |
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Oct 9 · The Winnemem Wintu hopes to solidify the connection between Indigenous rights and biodiversity.
Globally, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the earth’s biodiversity on the lands they’ve maintained for centuries, despite being only 5% of the world’s population. And when Indigenous peoples have sovereignty over their lands - that is, the ability to own and care for land in accordance with their traditions and desires - everyone benefits.
No one understands that dynamic more than the Winnemem Wintu tribe.
The tribe, which is located in the Shasta Cascade region of Northern California, has been fighting for almost a decade to reintroduce their sacred salmon, the ... Read more ...
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The propane industry’s weird obsession with school buses, explained - VOX -Environment (Oct 5) |
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Oct 5 · Last year, the popular children’s magazine The Week Junior advertised a contest called “Be Like Jack” that would award $2,000 to the preteens or teens who submitted the winning ideas for an environmental project. A few dozen kids from around the country participated, submitting proposals meant to boost sustainability in their elementary or middle schools. A Colorado 9-year-old won the grand prize for her tree-planting project.
To celebrate her win, Emily Calandrelli, host of the Netflix science show Emily’s Wonder Lab, visited the winning school during a science assembly that touted, of all things, the environmental benefits of a propane-powered school bus.
But why ... Read more ...
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How do you prepare a city like New York for major floods? - VOX -Environment (Sep 30) |
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Sep 30 · The flooding on September 29 was bad. The future will be, too.
Apocalyptic flooding brought New York City to a standstill Friday, with subway service suspended and murky rainwater seeping into buses attempting to navigate the city’s flooded roads.
The city’s mayor, Eric Adams, did not directly address the public till nearly noon Friday, despite the fact that his administration knew about the potential for a major downpour and potential flooding on Thursday, before the storm hit. Now, floodwaters remain in parts of the city - along with questions about its ability to mitigate the effects of climate change as storms like Friday’s.
As major climate events - like ... Read more ...
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The US power grid quietly survived its most brutal summer yet - VOX -Environment (Sep 28) |
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Sep 28 · Despite record power demand, the grid largely avoided blackouts. Don’t take this for granted.
With little acknowledgment and no applause, the power grid across the continental United States this summer quietly pulled off what may have been its most impressive feat ever.
On July 27, the US grid served nearly 15 million megawatt-hours of electricity across the lower 48 states, about 1.6 times the electricity produced by every nuclear power plant in the world on a given day. It kept lights, fans, and air conditioners running in every home, office, factory, school, hospital, and store on one of the hottest days ever. For comparison, the average daily electricity use in 2022 ... Read more ...
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How to fight climate change with parking lots - VOX -Environment (Sep 27) |
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Sep 27 · Why haven’t we covered them in solar panels?
In 2021, President Joe Biden set an ambitious climate goal for the US to reach net-zero carbon emissions economy-wide by 2050. And as part of the transition to renewable energy, the country has drastically ramped up production of solar over the past few years. But that’s led to a new problem: finding enough land on which to put solar panels.
The easiest and cheapest places to install solar panels are often large, undeveloped plots of land. It’s why, in many places across the country, we’ve seen rural areas - including fragile desert ecosystems and valuable farmland - turned into solar farms. Many local residents and ... Read more ...
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Scientists will unleash an army of crabs to help save Florida’s dying reef - VOX -Environment (Sep 27) |
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Sep 27 · Not all heroes wear capes. Some are crabs.
The biodiversity crisis, explained
With giant pincers and rough, spider-like legs, Caribbean king crabs don’t look like your typical heroes. Yet these crustaceans may be key to solving one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: the decline of coral reefs.
In recent decades, warming seas, diseases, and other threats have wiped out half of the world’s corals and 90 percent of those in Florida. And this past summer, the problem accelerated. A devastating heat wave struck the Caribbean, pushing the reef in the Florida Keys - the largest in the continental US - closer to the brink of collapse.
This is the ... Read more ...
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The extraordinary need for disaster warning systems, explained - VOX -Environment (Sep 25) |
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Sep 25 · This tiny Caribbean country shows why early warnings are an essential climate change adaptation.
WOTTEN WAVEN, Dominica - This lush, leafy village of 200 residents, known for its hot springs, is less than 6 miles from the shore, but when Hurricane Maria battered the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica in 2017 with winds reaching 160 miles per hour, the residents here were cut off from the rest of the world for weeks.
Though regional forecasts showed that a storm was brewing a day before landfall, many people in the region had no idea that it would turn into a monster. Maria erupted from Category 1 strength to Category 5 in just 15 hours. The Dominican government issued a ... Read more ...
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A climate scientist on how to recognize the new climate change denial - VOX -Environment (Sep 22) |
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Sep 22 · Delay, deflect, downplay, and other ways fossil fuel companies block climate action.
For the past dozen years or so, every time the United Nations General Assembly holds its annual session in New York City, climate activists hit Manhattan to protest outside. They call it Climate Week. And this week has been a big one, with tens of thousands of protesters demonstrating as part of the New York March to End Fossil Fuels.
After a summer of extreme weather, Vox’s daily news podcast Today, Explained is tackling Climate Week with some help from a scientist - one who’s been at the center of climate science since before it was cool, and has some ideas on how we can keep the ... Read more ...
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Governments once imagined a future without extreme poverty. What happened? - VOX -Environment (Sep 22) |
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Sep 22 · As the UN meets in New York, progress and energy around the Sustainable Development Goals is dwindling at the worst possible time.
It’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) week, when heads of state and representatives from at least 145 countries descend upon Manhattan for the global body’s annual high-level session. For New Yorkers who aren’t participating in or covering the sessions - like my Vox colleagues Jonathan Guyer and Jen Kirby are, dashing from meeting to meeting - UNGA week means one thing: gridlock alerts, when the combination of crowds and security closures turns the east side of Manhattan into a parking lot.
Cars aren’t the only thing stuck in traffic at ... Read more ...
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What climate activists mean when they say “end fossil fuels” - VOX -Environment (Sep 21) |
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Sep 21 · The bolder, narrower message of the climate movement, explained.
“We are all here for one reason: to end fossil fuels around the planet,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told a cheering crowd on Sunday. Some 75,000 were gathered from the New York March to End Fossil Fuels on Sunday, where Ocasio-Cortez urged on, “We must be too big and too radical to ignore.”
As world leaders are in New York City for the annual United Nations General Assembly and the Climate Ambition Summit, protesters hit the streets. Members of Extinction Rebellion, a climate group dedicated to disruptive civil disobedience, staged demonstrations at the Museum of Modern Art to highlight a board ... Read more ...
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It’s time to replace urban delivery vans with e-bikes - VOX -Environment (Sep 20) |
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Sep 20 · E-bikes are cleaner and safer. So why aren’t we using them?
Remember, during lockdown, how we all got obsessed with ordering everything online and having it delivered right to our doorsteps? Yeah, turns out that isn’t going away anytime soon - and we’re starting to understand the many downsides. The delivery vans that make our next-day shipping dreams come true are driving up CO2 emissions while making our streets more crowded and less safe.
Fortunately, there’s a hero waiting in the wings: the e-cargo bike. Not only can these bad boys deliver packages in urban environments just as quickly (and sometimes faster) than delivery vans, they take up far less space and are ... Read more ...
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