#Climate policy

#Climate policy

Affordability is the buzzword in American politics - and when it comes totransit affordability, the policies that would provide the most immediate relief would also do the most to address the climate crisis.

Hanson’s One Nation party this month won its first federal lower house seat, crushing the main conservative parties in a regional farming district they had held for more than 75 years. The opposition leader, Angus Taylor, described it as an existential moment for the Liberal-National Coalition, whose collapse over the past 12 months has coincided with One Nation's rise.

Many books describe how the first atomic bomb was built. But this history by Emily Seyl stands apart. It tells the story of the bomb's Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945 through restored photographs from the Los Alamos National Laboratory's National Security Research Center, where Seyl works. These include images of once-clandestine documents and experiments, as well as unfamiliar restored photographs of 'trinitite' - green glass found at the test crater - which fell from the bomb's fireball in molten drops.

Absolutely, I have experienced investing in a way that green growth has led to both equitable growth and decarbonization, but also have lived experience of what degrowth can do to a country, and how, in my view, [degrowth] is not really a solution.

Reaching net zero would cost about 4bn a year, the CCC found, or close to 100bn by 2050, which was roughly equivalent to the energy-related costs of the fossil fuel shocks that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The findings contradict widespread claims made by rightwing thinktanks and populist politicians including the Reform party that net zero would represent a crippling cost of 9tn to the UK's economy.

Many planned projects have been delayed or scrapped. Adrian Odenweller and Falko Ueckerdt at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany tracked 190 projects globally that were due to begin operating in 2023. The researchers found that only 7% of these had begun operations as scheduled.

But that memorandum, inconspicuous though it may appear on its face, demands careful consideration. It reflects not just another step in the Trump administration's "Great Undoing" of the postwar international order, but also risks serious and material injury to America's economic and national security interests. While the memorandum claims its actions will help to "restore American sovereignty," it will do just the opposite.

Campaigners from the Climate Action Network, a pan-European group of NGOs, said European industry was under real pressure from high energy prices, ageing assets, global overcapacity and delayed investments, but these issues could not be solved by watering down climate and environmental policies. Deregulation is not an industrial strategy, the group wrote in an open letter, which argued that the problems facing energy-intensive industries, including steel, cement and chemicals, were driven by prices of fossil fuel-derived energy and global market dynamics, rather than environmental regulation.

New York is an incongruous state. We're home to fabulous wealth - if the state were a country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world - but also the highest rate of wealth inequality. We're among the most diverse - but also the most segregated. We passed the nation's most ambitious climate law - but haven't been meeting its deadlines and continue to subsidize industries hastening the climate crisis.

But to environmental advocates, the announcement sounded less like relief and more like a bill for working people, one that would result in higher fuel costs, increased pollution, and a slower path to clean energy. Critics warn that the decision represents a blow to the energy transition and a significant setback in the fight against climate change overall.

A few months ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a Georgia representative, held a hearing on her bill to ban research on geoengineering, which refers to technological climate interventions, such as using reflective particles to reflect away sunlight. The hearing represented something of a first a Republican raising alarm bells about human activity altering the health of the planet. Of course, for centuries, people have burned fossil fuels to power and feed society, emitting greenhouse gases that now overheat the planet.