My Climate Change News

When the United Nations began holding an annual climate summit in 1995, it was a small and sleepy affair that attracted fewer than 4,000 diplomats and scientists.

Today, the conference has ballooned into a gathering of corporate bigwigs and political power brokers. More than 84,000 people have swarmed this year’s climate talks in Dubai, which feature a dizzying array of panel discussions, corporate-sponsored happy hours and flashy pavilions handing out coffee and chocolate.

Once quick to dismiss the summits, many business lobbyists and C-suite executives now see the gatherings as imperative to attend, whether to meet with government officials, broker business deals or tout their climate credentials to a global audience.

“The negotiations, we’re not really part of that,” said Marty Durbin, senior vice president for policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “But we do have the opportunity to meet with officials and other companies and dig into these critical issues.”

The only road that leads to the village is decrepit and hasn't been paved in decades, and residents say this only deepens their sense of isolation. Some villagers have felt pushed to move to urban areas or abroad. About 300,000 of Tunisia's 12 million people have no drinking water in their homes, according to the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights. Ounissa's cousin, Djamila Mazhoud, 60, said her son and two daughters had all left in search of better lives. "We educated our children so that when we grow old, they take care of us, but they couldn't," she said. "People are either unemployed or eaten by the fish in the sea," she added, using a common phrase for migrants who attempt the dangerous sea voyages for Europe. Entire families have already left the village, said Djamila. "Their houses remain empty," she said, explaining that elderly people feel they have no choice but to follow their sons and daughters. "Can an 80-year-old go to the river to get water?" © 2023 AFP

The technology to capture and bury carbon dioxide has struggled to ramp up and has real limits. But experts say it could play a valuable role.

World leaders at the annual United Nations climate talks have battled for years over whether they should “phase out” fossil fuels like coal or just phase them “down.”

Now, another phrase has taken center stage at this year’s summit in Dubai: Should countries agree to end the use of “unabated” fossil fuels?

That peculiar word choice might allow nations to continue to burn coal, natural gas or oil as long as they trap and bury the resulting carbon dioxide, and stop the gas from heating the planet.

One big dispute is over how big a role this technology, known as carbon capture and storage, should play in the fight against global warming. Some oil and gas producers say it should be central in planning for the future. Others, including many activists and world leaders, dismiss carbon capture as too unproven and too risky.

This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).

War, conflict and climate change are tearing apart lives across the world. But these aren't separate harms - they're intricately connected. Wars and militaries drive emissions in myriad ways, soak up vital cash, and derail climate deals. So, whether it's the Israel-Hamas conflict or the invasion of Ukraine, war and conflict are fuelling the changes to our climate.

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THE ESCALATOR (free to republish)

Delegates around the Cop28 venue (Photo: IISD/ENB | Mike Muzurakis)

Negotiators are locked in feverish marathon talks to hammer out the final technical draft of the global stocktake. The version published early Tuesday is a 24-page smörgåsbord of wildly ranging alternatives.

Take the energy package. On the defining battle of Cop28 – the fossil fuels conundrum – the draft text lays out two phase out options.

The first simply calls for “an orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels”, reflecting the position of the “high ambition coalition” (France, Kenya, Colombia and others).

The second is wordier. It has qualifiers that give cover to coal, oil and gas: countries should be “accelerating efforts” towards a phase out of “unabated” fossil fuels and “rapidly reducing their use” – but crucially not their production. It’s also more specific about the goal: “net-zero CO2 in energy systems by or around ...

Copernicus head Carlo Buontempo said that "as long as greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising we can't expect different outcomes". "The temperature will keep rising and so will the impacts of heat waves and droughts." © 2023 AFP

New regulations, investor demands and environmental realities are forcing finance teams to brush up on best practices for sustainable finance and ESG reporting.

New regulations, investor demands and environmental realities are forcing finance teams to adopt new processes related to sustainable finance and ESG reporting - topics most of them haven’t previously prioritized.

There’s often a steep learning curve associated with that transition. A shortage of ESG-savvy finance professionals will prevent most companies from hiring their way out of this challenge. That’s why more should invest in upskilling existing finance and accounting teams about the subject matter expertise needed to finance the path to a net-zero economy.

One area that deserves particular attention in the near term: Mandatory ESG disclosure regulations and reporting standards, which have created new data streams that are material to companies and their investors. That information must be ...

Move could also undermine nine funding programmes, covering schemes from energy efficient homes to cargo bikes provision

Germany has put an indefinite stop to a series of subsidies viewed as key to meeting climate goals, a move that could undermine the rollout of heat pumps as the country attempts to plug a multi-billion-euro hole in its budget.

Nine funding programmes, covering everything from energy efficient homes to cargo bikes for commercial use, are now on hold as Olaf Scholz’s coalition government seeks to make savings of about €17bn (£15bn).

The government was thrown into a quandary last month over how to finance its ambitious environmental and industrial transformation programme (KTF) when the country’s highest court blocked its attempts to switch €60bn of pandemic-era borrowing to pay for it.

The three-party government, which sees Scholz’s Social Democrats sitting alongside the Greens and the liberal FDP, has been scrambling for ideas to ...

Andrée Nieuwjaer, a 67-year-old resident of Roubaix, France, is what one might call a frugal shopper. In fact, her fridge is full of produce that she got for free. Over the summer, she ate peaches, plums, carrots, zucchinis, turnips, endives - all manner of fruits and vegetables that local grocers didn’t want to sell, whether because of some aesthetic imperfection or because they were slightly overripe.

What Nieuwjaer couldn’t eat right away, she preserved - as fig marmalade, apricot jam, pickles. Reaching into the depths of her refrigerator in September, past a jar of diced beets that she’d preserved in vinegar, she tapped a container of chopped pineapple whose shelf life she’d extended with lemon juice: “It’ll last all month!” she exclaimed. Just a few inches away, two loaves of bread that a nearby school was going to get rid of lay in a glass baking dish, reconstituted as bread pudding. A third loaf was in a jar in the cupboard, transformed into bread crumbs that ...

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

During a heated public meeting last Friday, Michigan’s top energy regulator granted the Canadian company Enbridge Energy a permit to build a new pipeline and tunnel under the environmentally sensitive Straits of Mackinac, in an important - but not final - step in the controversial project’s approval process.

Construction can’t begin unless the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers grants it a federal permit. Before that happens, the Army Corps has to release its assessment of the project’s environmental impacts.

The Michigan Public Service Commission’s decision sparked strong reactions from opponents and supporters of the tunnel.

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Line 5 carries oil and natural gas liquids ...

Most Americans would prefer to live in a home where almost all major appliances run on electricity - but only if they can keep their gas stoves. Just 31 percent want to go fully electric.

“We realized we didn’t really have a baseline for what people actually want,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication who helped design the question and push for its inclusion. Combine those who said they would go fully electric with the 29 percent who would do so except for their gas stove and six in 10 Americans are ready to decarbonize. ”As a starting point, this is quite encouraging.”

Addressing residential energy use is critical to combating climate change, as the sector accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Meeting the 2050 goals of the Paris Agreement will require an aggressive move to decarbonize the grid and move homes off of oil and natural gas onto efficient electric options ...

The 2015 Paris climate agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times over the long term and failing that at least 2 degrees (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Diplomats, scientists, activists and others meeting at the United Nations climate conference in Dubai for nearly two weeks are trying to find ways to limit warming to those levels, but the planet isn't cooperating. Scientists calculate with the promises countries around the world have made and the actions they have taken, Earth is on track to warm 2.7 to 2.9 degrees Celsius (4.9 to 5.2 degrees) above pre-industrial times. The northern autumn is also the hottest fall the world has had on record, Copernicus calculated. Copernicus records go back to 1940. United States government calculated records go back to 1850. Scientists using proxies such as ice cores, tree rings and corals have said this is the warmest decade Earth has seen in about 125,000 years, dating ...

AMOC collapsing was like spotting something that could cause that plane to "fall out of the sky", he said. But there's no way to redesign the Earth to make it safer. Co-author Manjana Milkoreit from the University of Oslo said that "our global governance system is inadequate to deal with the coming threats and implement the solutions urgently required." The authors called for tipping points to be included in the global stocktake being debated at the COP28 talks, as well as in national targets to combat climate change. They also urged more effort to push tipping points in the right direction, such as changing policies on energy, transport, food and green ammonia used for fertilizer. Sarah Das, a scientist at the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the report, said the science was now "crystal clear". "The risks for humanity in crossing tipping points into these unexplored states is dire, and the impact to human lives potentially horrific," she said. ...

New terrain development at ski resorts, primarily in Colorado, aims to chase and preserve snow, an invaluable commodity.

Despite the La Niña weather pattern that dumped snowfall by the foot last winter at many mountain resorts in the western United States, global warming fundamentally threatens the survival of the ski business. In response, ski areas are increasingly investing in efficient snow-making and carbon emissions reductions. Some areas, especially in the West, are also pursuing another method: developing terrain higher up mountains where colder climes or steeper, tree-filled terrain are more likely to hold the snow.

This winter, three ski areas in Colorado - Aspen Mountain, Keystone Resort and Steamboat Ski Resort - are unveiling significant high-altitude expansions or terrain additions designed for experts, potentially delighting one of the biggest audiences of skiers and snowboarders in recent years.

Going higher

While opening ...

Former President Donald Trump didn’t shy away from echoing his adamant denial of climate change during a town hall Tuesday in Iowa hosted by Sean Hannity.

During the event in Davenport, Trump slammed John Kerry and the efforts made by the presidential envoy for climate.

“Our country can be rich again. John Kerry has to be stopped. He’s destroying our country,” Trump told Hannity and the crowd at the town hall.

Kerry, a former senator and secretary of state, announced Tuesday that the U.S. would collaborate with other governments to speed up the process of making nuclear fusion a new source of carbon-free energy, which could be used to power cars and heat and cool homes instead of using fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas.

“The only global warming we should be thinking about or worrying about is nuclear global warming, not global warming,” Trump said at the town hall, echoing comments he made earlier this year minimizing the climate ...

Cracks in ponds holding highly radioactive fuel rods lead to safety fears

In the early 1950s, a huge hole was dug into the Cumbrian coast and lined with concrete. Roughly the length of three Olympic swimming pools and known as B30, it was built to hold skip loads of spent nuclear fuel.

Those highly radioactive rods came from the 26 Magnox nuclear reactors that helped keep Britain’s lights on between 1956 and 2015. When B30 was first put to work, it was designed to keep the fuel rods submerged for only three months before reprocessing work was carried out.

But when 1970s miners’ strikes shut down coal power stations and forced greater reliance on nuclear plants, more spent fuel than could be quickly reprocessed was generated. The silos and ponds, built to prevent airborne contamination if the fuel or radioactive sludge dried out, rapidly filled up. Meanwhile, the fuel corroded in the water, breaking down into radioactive sludge.

Debris from elsewhere ...

Provided by Nagoya University

Coalition of climate NGOs highlights that there are more fossil fuel lobbyists than delegates from 10 most climate-vulnerable countries combined