Carbon

International Seabed Authority

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A long thin atoll around a lagoon

The Millennium Atoll in Kiribati, the Pacific state that is sponsoring Michael Lodge for re-election as ISA leader. Photograph: Mauricio Handler/Getty

Before we leave the subject of oceans, back to the question of how their protection is managed, and by whom.

We are learning today that some of the planet’s smaller nation states have a potentially significant, and clearly long overdue influence on how the oceans surrounding them will be protected:

The rare dumbo octopus (Cirrothauma murrayi)

The rare dumbo octopus (Cirrothauma murrayi) is one of many creatures potentially at risk from deep-sea mining. Photograph: NOAA

Inside the battle for top job that will decide the future of deep-sea mining

Marking a pivotal moment for the fate of the barely known ecosystems on the ocean floor, 168 nations will decide this week who will head the International Seabed Authority

Deep-sea mining exploration machinery in the Pacific Ocean

Deep-sea mining exploration trials under way in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. Photograph: Richard Baron/The Metals Company

Leticia Carvalho is clear what the problem is with the body she hopes to be elected to run: “Trust is broken and leadership is missing.” Later this week, at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, nations negotiating rules governing deep-sea mining face a critical vote that could impact the nascent industry for years: who should be the next leader of the regulatory body? Continue reading →

The Ocean’s Depths & You

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An illustration of sea creatures floating in outer space. The planet Earth is in the center.

Isabel Seliger

While Brisa surfs in Tahiti, the fate of our oceans will be on our minds. While not self-evidently important to most of us, most of the time, their scale on our planet gets us to pay attention when someone makes the case. Porter Fox, who reports on climate change, has come to the following conclusions with regard to those waters:

There’s a New Reason to Save Life in the Deep Ocean

Honey Long and Prue Stent

To most of us, the ocean is a no man’s land — a vast, bottomless and uncharted void. Three-quarters of the ocean has never been seen by humans, and only a quarter of its floor has been mapped in detail, which means we have a better understanding of the surface of Mars than we do of the seas on our own planet. It is this lack of exploration and appreciation — particularly of the layer of cold, dark water that begins where light fades, known as the ocean’s twilight zone — that has led us to a very precarious place. Continue reading →

Petrostate Is A Choice

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A middle-aged man in a blue button-up shirt sits in front of a laptop.

John Allaire, a former oil industry worker, has turned his efforts to blocking LNG plants from being built directly next to his camper home in Cameron parish.

Some states are moving forward with new technologies leading to a cleaner energy future. We respect John Allaire’s work to protect his state from leaning in to dirty energy, reminding us of the choice we all have to just watch others make decisions affecting where you live, or to do something:

‘This used to be a beautiful place’: how the US became the world’s biggest fossil fuel state

Guardian graphic. Sources: Oil & Gas Watch. Note: Map includes oil, gas and liquified natural gas projects. Those classified as ‘Announced / underway’ also include projects with statuses of ‘Under construction’, ‘Pre-construction’, ‘Commissioning’ and ‘On hold’.

No country has ever in history produced as much oil and gas as the US does now and Louisiana is ground zero

To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana.

Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas (or LNG) plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo overseas. Continue reading →

Appalachian Solar & Remediation

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A photo of solar panels under a blue skyThanks to Bridgett Ennis at Yale Climate Connections for expanding our coverage of brownfield remediation, which surprisingly has only featured in one previous post in our 13 years linking to environmental news stories. Now two:

Massive solar farm planned for coal mine site in eastern Kentucky

Solar developer BrightNight is set to transform the Starfire coal mine into an 800-megawatt solar farm, bringing renewable energy and jobs to southern Appalachia.

A massive solar farm is in the works at the site of one of the largest coal mines in southern Appalachia. Continue reading →

Dry, Hot Places Greening?

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The Guera Mountains in southern Chad, a region that has grown greener in recent decades.

The Guera Mountains in southern Chad, a region that has grown greener in recent decades. NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Fred Pearce, writing in Yale e360, offers this surprising news from some of the driest, hottest places:

With CO2 Levels Rising, World’s Drylands Are Turning Green

Despite warnings that climate change would create widespread desertification, many drylands are getting greener because of increased CO2 in the air — a trend that recent studies indicate will continue. But scientists warn this added vegetation may soak up scarce water supplies.

Southeast Australia has been getting hotter and drier. Droughts have lengthened, and temperatures regularly soar above 95 degrees F (35 degrees C). Continue reading →

USA Environmental Policy Opinion Landscape

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An illustration showing a corn field, a wind turbine and an electric car on top of a solar farmIt is political season, which can be overwhelming. But it has moments of inspiration. Karin Kirk at Yale Climate Connections summarizes the landscape of opinion on key environmental issues:

Six incredibly popular climate policies

The majority of registered U.S. voters support electrification and renewable energy.

An infographic showing strong support for climate-pollution reducing policies

A strong majority of registered voters support certain policies aimed at tackling climate change, according to recent research by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (the publisher of this site) and the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

Here’s a summary of these results. Continue reading →

Fungi & Brownfield Remediation

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Researcher Danielle Stevenson digs up California buckwheat grown at a brownfield site in Los Angeles.

Researcher Danielle Stevenson digs up California buckwheat grown at a brownfield site in Los Angeles. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Corporate irresponsibility abounds, so brownfield sites are abundant. And fungi sometimes offer relevant remediation options. Thanks to Richard Schiffman and Yale e360 for this interview on a topic we have cared about since launching this platform, and which we believe will be of increasing importance in our future:

Turning Brownfields to Blooming Meadows, With the Help of Fungi

California buckwheat that has absorbed lead at a contaminated site in Los Angeles.

California buckwheat that has absorbed lead at a contaminated site in Los Angeles. PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Toxicologist Danielle Stevenson cleans up carbon-based pollutants and heavy metals from contaminated sites using fungi and plants. She’s also training environmental justice and tribal communities in using these methods so they can remediate toxic sites on their own.

The United States is dotted with up to a million brownfields — industrial and commercial properties polluted with hazardous substances. Continue reading →

California, Solar Showcase

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Workers install solar panels at a home in San Francisco, California.Photograph by Michaela Vatcheva / Bloomberg / Getty

McKibben’s essay in the New Yorker, showcasing the showcase for renewable energy, will brighten your day:

California Is Showing How a Big State Can Power Itself Without Fossil Fuels

For part of almost every day this spring, the state produced more electricity than it needed from renewable sources.

Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Continue reading →

Just Stop Oil & Alternative Approaches

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A photo of two protesters sitting in front of Stonehenge, which has orange spray paint on it

Just Stop Oil via AP

On this platform dedicated to environmental and conservation topics, purposeful stone alteration has appeared in our pages exactly once before. Environmental vandalism, likewise. I appreciate this essay by Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, about a recent act of environmental vandalism:

Maybe Don’t Spray-Paint Stonehenge

Climate protests should be pro-humanity.

They run toward Stonehenge in white shirts. just stop oil is emblazoned on the front, marking them as emissaries of a British climate-activism group. The pair—one of them young, the other older—carry twin orange canisters that emit a cloud of what looks like colored smoke (we later learn it’s dyed corn flour). Continue reading →

Bullish On Solar

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image: la boca

The Economist makes a compelling case for us all to be more bullish on solar–not that we needed much convincing:

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world

An energy-rich future is within reach

It is 70 years since at&t’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round. Continue reading →

Greenhouse Reflective Effects

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Greenhouse roofs reflect sunlight in Kunming, China. FABIO NODARI / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Fred Pearce, in Yale e360, offers reason to further consider the greenhouse:

Could the Global Boom in Greenhouses Help Cool the Planet?

As agricultural greenhouses proliferate, researchers are finding that their reflective roofs are having a cooling effect. Some experts see this as an unintended experiment with lessons for cooling cities, but others point to the environmental damage that greenhouses can cause.

The world is awash with greenhouses growing fresh vegetables year-round for health-conscious urbanites. There are so many of them that in places their plastic and glass roofs are reflecting sufficient solar radiation to cool local temperatures — even as surrounding areas warm due to climate change. Continue reading →

Old Growth, Reviewed

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A color photograph of a dense stand of aspen trees with blue sky showing beyond the canopy

Aspen (Pando), Utah III 2023 (Courtesy of Steidl Publishers / Yancey Richardson Gallery)

Writing for The Atlantic, Clint Smith introduces us to this amazing book:

THE MAGIC OF OLD-GROWTH FORESTS

Photographing some of the oldest—and largest—living organisms on the planet

When i was a boy, I loved climbing the old oak trees in New Orleans City Park. I would hang from their branches and fling my legs into the air with unfettered delight. I would scoot my way up the trees’ twisting limbs until I was a dozen feet off the ground and could see the park with new eyes. These were the same trees my mother climbed as a young girl, and the same ones my own children climb when we travel back to my hometown to visit. Live oaks can live for centuries, and the memories made among them can span generations. Continue reading →

Greenland’s Ice Sheet & Our Future

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photo of curving white edge of glacier with several calved icebergs and dark blue sea

The edge of the Thwaites Glacier, 2023 (Nicolas Bayou)

Ross Andersen, writing for this focused issue of Atlantic, is worth reading for more than just the adventure he encountered reporting it:

A WILD PLAN TO AVERT CATASTROPHIC SEA-LEVEL RISE

The collapse of Antarctica’s ice sheets would be disastrous. A group of scientists has an idea to save them.

The edge of Greenland’s ice sheet looked like a big lick of sludgy white frosting spilling over a rise of billion-year-old brown rock. Inside the Twin Otter’s cabin, there were five of us: two pilots, a scientist, an engineer, and me. Farther north, we would have needed another seat for a rifle-armed guard. Here, we were told to just look around for polar-bear tracks on our descent. Continue reading →

The Atlantic Editor’s Note, July/August 2024

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Henry David Thoreau’s grave, Concord, Massachusetts (Jeffrey Goldberg)

Jeffrey Goldberg has not appeared in our pages directly before, but his work has had a profound impact on how we see the world. His editorship of The Atlantic, starting in 2016, overlaps with an increase in that magazine’s coverage of climate change in ways that we have found useful. His introduction to the summer issue of the magazine is a fitting example of his commitment to the topic:

In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World

Returning the planet to some sort of climate equilibrium is a universal interest.

Loyal readers of this magazine know that we are preoccupied with matters of climate change, and that we worry about the future of our home planet. I appreciate (I really do) Elon Musk’s notion that humans, as a species, ought to pursue an extraplanetary solution to our environmental crisis, but I believe in exploration for exploration’s sake, not as a pathway to a time share on Mars. Continue reading →

Conversation With An Optimistic Scientist

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the american atmospheric chemist professor susan solomon

Susan Solomon: ‘Frankly, I worry about climate scientists being encouraged to take a particular stance.’ Photograph: Justin Knight

Killian Fox (long time no see!) offers this wonderful conversation with an optimist who knows the science:

Climate scientist Susan Solomon: ‘Let’s not give up now – we’re right on the cusp of success’

The US atmospheric chemist on why she doesn’t share the pessimism of most climate scientists, fixing the ozone layer, and why Jacques Cousteau is her hero

Susan Solomon was born and raised in Chicago and got her PhD in atmospheric chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the 1980s which established how the Earth’s protective ozone layer was being depleted by human-made chemicals. Continue reading →

More Youth Demanding Liveable Futures

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portion of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska in 2023. The project would involve construction of a liquefaction plant to prepare the gas for export to Asia. Photograph: Richard Ellis/Alamy

Our appreciation to Dharna Noor for writing a clear story about this new legal initiative, and to the Guardian for publishing it. What started in Montana, a naturally well-endowed state with a mixed environmental record, now continues in Alaska, the biggest frontier of the American West. Our thanks to the younger generation for taking up the fight creatively:

Young Alaskans sue state over fossil fuel project they claim violates their rights

Plaintiffs claim $38.7bn gas export project, which would triple state’s greenhouse gas emissions, infringes constitutional rights

Eight young people are suing the government of Alaska – the nation’s fastest-warming state – claiming a major new fossil fuel project violates their state constitutional rights. Continue reading →

Implementing The Inflation Reduction Act

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A windmill getting tangled by an electrical cord

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic

We celebrate when a law is passed that moves the USA in the right direction, but the biggest  such law ever still is in the process of implementation. So, creativity and vigilance are still key ingredients to making the best of the law:

The Next Front in the War Against Climate Change

Clean-energy investment in America is off the charts—but it still isn’t translating into enough electricity that people can actually use.

On august 2022, the U.S. passed the most ambitious climate legislation of any country, ever. As the director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council at the time, I helped design the law. Continue reading →

Vermont Vote Victory

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Flooding in downtown Montpelier, Vermont, in July, 2023.Photograph by John Tully / Washington Post / Getty

When you read to the end of this short commentary, you will wonder whether this is a victory at all, but when Elizabeth Kolbert says it is, it probably is. It just requires more pondering to understand how it is:

Vermont Moves to Hold Fossil-Fuel Companies Liable for Climate-Change Damage

A new constituency is willing to stand up to Big Oil (and Gas and Coal): state government.

On July 10, 2023, Vermont’s state capital, Montpelier, was hit with more than five inches of rain. Continue reading →

Romanian Bison & Carbon Sequestration

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Bison (Bos Bonasus), Kennemerduinen National Park, Kraansvlak, The Netherlands. Enclousure in a fenced reserve, 250 hectar, in Kennemerduinen National Park. STAFFAN WIDSTRAND / REWILDING EUROPE

Bison restoration stories we have linked to are mostly in North America. But the Carpathian mountains have demonstrated Romania’s outsized efforts at rewilding. Now the largest such effort in Europe, according to Rewilding Europe, is this:

The goal of the Tarcu Mountains bison initiative is to help build a herd of at least 500 bison living in freedom by 2025 in the Southern Carpathians. This is an area spanning some 1.4 million hectares of wild mountains and valleys in the southern part of the Carpathian mountain chain.

Thanks to Yale e360 for more on this news from Romania.

European bison in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. DANIEL MIRLEA / WWF ROMANIA

How a Small Herd of Romanian Bison Is Locking Away Thousands of Tons of Carbon

Gone from Romania for 200 years, European bison were reintroduced to the Țarcu Mountains, at the southern end of the Carpathian range, in 2014. Now numbering 170, the bison are reshaping the mountain landscape in ways that are helping clean up emissions. Continue reading →

Price Adjustments & Carbon Emmissions

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illustration: javier jaén/getty images

The Economist shares this news:

Carbon emissions are dropping—fast—in Europe

Thanks to a price mechanism that actually works

“Our most pressing challenge is keeping our planet healthy,” declared Ursula von der Leyen on the day she was elected president of the European Commission in July 2019. Continue reading →