Environment featured

Undiscovered Peatlands Might be the Most Important Thing you Learn about Today. Here’s Why.

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Peatlands are the superheroes of ecosystems: purifying water, sometimes mitigating flooding and providing a home for rare species. And they beat nearly every system when it comes to carbon storage. Known peatlands only cover about 3 percent of the world’s land surface, but store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. And at least one-third of the world’s organic soil carbon, which plays a vital role in mitigating climate change and stabilizing the carbon cycle, is in peatlands.

Record Heat in 2016 Broke Lake Temperature Records Too

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An annual analysis of the planet’s climate reaffirms what researchers knew was the case: that 2016 was the hottest year since at least 1880, when reliable global measurements were first kept. Record concentrations of heat-trapping gases and a strong El Nino raised the global average temperature to a new high, breaking a mark set just a year earlier.

More Than a Landscape

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The 54 kilometres of the eastern mountains surrounding Bogotá represent practically the last drop of water that many people are struggling to preserve in the middle of a desert. Organisations and public and private foundations alike have come up with projects that are not only designed to reforest the mountains with native plants, but also to encourage citizens to get to know these lands and take responsible possession of them.

This is What America will Look Like if We Follow Trump’s Climate Policies

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The United States faces a choice between manageable warming and unmanageable catastrophe, according to a leaked draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies. The report’s “higher emissions” scenario projects a devastating 8°F to 10°F warming over the interior of this country–and, unimaginably, upwards of 18°F over in the Arctic!–by 2071 to 2100. In that case, global sea levels could rise as much as 8 feet, inundating every major coastal city in this country and around the world.

Environmental Regulation In Republican Administrations: The Trickster, The Gipper and The Trumpster (Part 2)

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The Trumpster’s place at the bottom of the list of Green Presidents is pretty much assured should he do nothing more than he already has. It is hard to imagine he will see a light anything like Saul saw on his fateful way to Damascus. Although, the world will undoubtedly continue to hope.

Environmental Regulation In Republican Administrations: The Trickster, The Gipper and The Trumpster (Part 1)

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Trump’s environmental assault raises questions—as well as eyebrows—about the legacy of Republican presidents in the modern era. For example, is The Donald’s denial of climate change theory an historically Republican phenomenon or is it more personal to whoever is sitting in the presidential chair?

Standing Rock Lawsuit Started a Year Ago. Here’s Where We Are Now

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On July 27, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux filed a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers for authorizing the construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline. Just over a year later, the project has been completed and carries crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields to an export terminal in Illinois. The case is still pending, and continues to be the tribe’s last hope to protect its water and land.

Biological Annihilation and the Sixth Mass Extinction

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We might be annihilating life on earth but this is not something about which we have no choice. In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one

The Global Climate Justice Movement Must Gear Up for Taking Political Power

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I will present what may be the movement’s biggest task: crafting ways and means for it to actually take power across the world so that the desires of the vast majority of the world’s residents (including the non-human creatures among us) can be the benchmark against which we measure our chances for arriving in mid-century in a world characterized not by multiple crises…

How BC’s LNG Fiasco Went So Wrong

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If you want to understand how global economics killed British Columbia’s risky liquefied natural gas gamble and the government’s promised riches and jobs, then you might want to hear out Eoin Finn. The failure of B.C.’s LNG strategy, symbolized by last week’s death of the $11-billion Pacific NorthWest LNG terminal, is really a story about government deceit or ignorance.

Help Us, Strategic Climate Communicators, You’re Our Only Hope

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Strategic climate communicators still don’t know what will be successful. The extent of our failure is of Biblical proportions and continuing. In the meantime, everyone should do everything, all the time, even if it means finding motivation by thinking about an uninhabitable world.