Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The severe heat is driving almost all social gatherings and group activities into enclosed, air-conditioned spaces. Getting together these days in the cool indoor world can dramatically raise the risk of coronavirus infection.
There’s a lot of delusional talk about how much “carbon budget” (or new emissions) are allowable that would still keep global heating to the Paris target of 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C).
The decisions made during the remainder of this year – a mere 6 months – to recover economically from the COVID-19 crisis, are likely to determine the practical actions set in motion for the next 3 years, in terms of controlling carbon emissions, and thence the course of the climate crisis up to 2050… and beyond.
A coalition of 23 states plus the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, challenging the Trump Administration’s rollback of the Obama-era clean car standards.
Estimations for the percentage of greenhouse gases emitted by the buildings sector vary wildly. But any assessment should include both the embodied energy involved in constructing new buildings and the energy costs of heating, cooling and lighting buildings.
The date was Thursday, July 25th – the hottest day ever in Europe, part of a record-setting heat wave. Climate change, in other words. By the time we reached the airport the next morning for the long journey home, all the stories had melted in the heat and merged into just one story, one anguished question:
Where indeed, Mr. Gauguin, are we going exactly?
Unless you live under a rock, you know that most reputable geophysical scientists around the world, especially climatologists and those who study the near-Earth atmosphere, will tell you they are very worried about carbon.
Around the world, 12.7 gigawatts (GW) of new coal capacity has been proposed so far in 2019 – less than 3GW above the amount that has retired (10GW). These trends mean the global coal fleet will soon decline, because only a third of proposed capacity has actually been developed since 2010.
While both the acolytes of Adam Smith and Karl Marx worshipped the fossil-fueled industrial revolution as the driver toward the paradise that the invisible hand of the market or the golden age of communism would create, Eunice Foote’s experiments reveal the fatal flaw on which these dreams were made and that would one day turn into the nightmare we are just beginning to wake.
Major automakers and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) have reached an agreement to increase fleet fuel efficiencies to nearly 50 miles per gallon on average by 2026. The companies–Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW of North America—along with California regulators took matters into their own hands, after the Trump administration planned to freeze the standard at the 2020 level.
The UK is to raise its ambition on climate change by setting a legally binding target to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to “net-zero” by 2050, prime minister Theresa May has announced today.
Natural gas, marketed for years as a “bridge fuel” to cleaner energy sources, cannot be part of any climate solution, according to a new report from Oil Change International.
