Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.
Maher had a lot to say about the current president's recent attacks on climate change. "He thinks it's just some bullshit that people made up out of nothing to get rich. You know, like crypto," Maher said. He went on to say that the EPA's recent decision to stop regulating climate change was arguably "the biggest dick move in American history."
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government's legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet." - The New York Times A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don't know where it goes. All remaining top scientists have been taken from their positions and tasked with getting to the bottom of this.
The Trump administration has dismantled the basis for all US climate regulations, in its most confrontational anti-environment move yet. The 2009 endangerment finding determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare and should therefore be controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By revoking it on Thursday, officials eliminated the legal foundation enabling the government to control planet-heating pollution.
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.
Jewish community sees eye-to-eye on, especially these days. So when over a thousand members of the community from all denominations and across the state get behind a single issue, it's no small deal. The issue at hand? Governor Hochul's abdication of leadership when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. It's pretty simple. The Governor, previously a keen champion for climate action, is quietly (and sometimes, not so quietly) walking back previous commitments and refusing to take on new ones.
"Let's be realistic." That's the advice coming from a growing number of voices in climate circles in the United States. In October, billionaire Bill Gates argued that a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius is unavoidable and not a " super bad outcome"-a view unlikely to be shared by the millions of people whose homes would be destroyed by the resulting killer storms and rising seas.
Most Americans now accept the basic physics of climate change-that manmade greenhouse-gas emissions are raising global temperatures. Yet the public discussion of climate change is still remarkably broken in the United States. Leaders of one political party frame climate change as an existential emergency that threatens human life and prosperity. Leaders of the other dismiss it as a distraction from economic growth and energy security. Economists like me, trained to think about trade-offs,
"Without a large global carbon tax (which is, unfortunately, politically unachievable), market forces do not properly incentivize the creation of technologies to reduce climate-related emissions," Gates writes. To stop global temperatures from increasing, we need to replace all emissions-emitting activities with affordable alternatives, Gates says. He particularly calls out industrial emissions and aviation as areas that need innovation. And governmental policies-"in rich countries," he notes-are crucial to bringing about that innovation, "because unless innovations reach scale, the costs won't come down and we won't achieve the impact we need."
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.
It seems possible that what will ultimately emerge is a clarified sense of principles and a deeper commitment to them (which is why part of the conflict is over American history itself). On one hand, there are the heads of the federal government and their spokespeople, whose lies are part of their disdain for the electorate and the rule of law.
A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy. Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we'd built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings.
Hundreds of Arctic rivers and streams are turning bright red-orange, not from chemical pollution, but from naturally occurring iron spilling from long-frozen ground as temperatures warm. The "rusting rivers" phenomenon, which has been documented across the Brooks Range in northern Alaska, offers a vivid example of the effects of climate change in a region that is warming faster than the global average. The finding was reported in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual Arctic Report Card, released Tuesday. NOAA has released the report for 20 years as a way to track rapid changes in the northernmost part of the planet.
The once-rigid link between economic growth and carbon emissions is breaking across the vast majority of the world, according to a study released ahead of Friday's 10th anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. The analysis, which underscores the effectiveness of strong government climate policies, shows this decoupling trend has accelerated since 2015 and is becoming particularly pronounced among major emitters in the global south. Countries representing 92% of the global economy have now decoupled consumption-based carbon emissions and GDP expansion, according to the report by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
It also has a "Belém Mission to 1.5" aimed at "enabling ambition and implementation" of nations' emissions-cutting pledges. Elsewhere, the agreement calls for efforts to at least triple finance for climate adaptation by 2035. Between the lines: The carefully word-smithed document indirectly endorses movement away from fossil fuels. The section on the "Global Implementation Accelerator" shouts out the "United Arab Emirates Consensus." That's the outcome of the 2023 UN talks in Dubai that called for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems."
Can you imagine someone giving you $170,000 (129,000)? What would you buy? Can you imagine getting another $170,000 one minute later? And the handouts then continuing every minute for years? If so, you have a feel for the colossal cash machine that is Saudi Arabia's state oil company Aramco, the world's biggest producer of oil and gas last year. That tidal wave of cash keeps the authoritarian kingdom afloat,
The world is still on track for a catastrophic 2.6C increase in temperature as countries have not made sufficiently strong climate pledges, while emissions from fossil fuels have hit a record high, two major reports have found. Despite their promises, governments' new emission-cutting plans submitted for the Cop30 climate talks taking place in Brazil have done little to avert dangerous global heating for the fourth consecutive year, according to the Climate Action Tracker update.
Maybe the biggest harm he's doing is to the United States itself, and one figure now illustrates it. China is now exporting green technology to the rest of the world that has a cumulative export value that is significantly higher than all of the fossil fuel exports from the United States to the rest of the world. And that trend is obviously accelerating quite dramatically.
When Bill Gates published his latest essay on climate change, the response was immediate. Many critics accused him of defeatism or saw the memo as another example of billionaires bending a knee to the climate denialism of President Donald Trump. (Trump himself was a fan.) Others told him to stop opining about climate change. "Respectfully, Bill Gates Should Shut Up," read a headline by the online magazine Slate.
The International Energy Agency predicts global demand for oil and gas will rise well beyond 2030, marking a sharp departure from the agency's previous forecasts that demand for oil would peak by 2030. In a new report, the IEA says low gas prices, growing concerns over energy security and a global lack of ambitious climate policies will delay the peak of the fossil fuel era until at least 2050.
