Public Policy

Slowed Growth Of Fossil Fuel

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For those who might say too little too late we say this still counts as good news worth reading, so thanks to Yale Climate Connections:

‘Turning point in energy history’ as solar, wind start pushing fossil fuels off the grid

Fossil fuel growth has stalled while wind and solar are growing.

Solar and wind energy grew quickly enough in 2023 to push renewables up to 30% of global electricity supply and begin pushing fossil fuels off the power grid, the Ember climate consultancy concludes in a report released May 8. 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 →

Andrea Vidaurre, Making Good Trouble in California

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Take five minutes to celebrate Andrea’s activism and its accomplishments:

2024 GOLDMAN PRIZE WINNER

Andrea Vidaurre

Andrea Vidaurre’s grassroots leadership persuaded the California Air Resources Board to adopt, in the spring of 2023, two historic transportation regulations that significantly limit trucking and rail emissions. The new regulations—the In-Use Locomotive Rule and the California Advanced Clean Fleets Rule—include the nation’s first emission rule for trains and a path to 100% zero emissions for freight truck sales by 2036. The groundbreaking regulations—a product of Andrea’s policy work and community organizing—will substantially improve air quality for millions of Californians while accelerating the country’s transition to zero-emission vehicles.

10,000 New Electric Buses In India

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People wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP)

Seven years and many bus stories among us recall the old buses. Noisy, smoke-belching, hot and crowded. Time to retire the old ones and at least lessen the noise and belching. Thanks to Sarah Spengeman and Yale Climate Connections:

India makes a big bet on electric buses

Fast-growing cities need electric buses if the country is to meet its climate goals.

Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that arrives earlier to wait for a smoother, cooler ride in a new model. This has fed a new problem: overcrowding. Fortunately, more new buses are on the way. Continue reading →

South American Fishing Methods, And Choices

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An open-net salmon farm on the Chilean side of the Beagle Channel. Photograph: Dani Casado

As we increase our awareness of the many choices we have when consuming fish (among other things), here is more food for thought:

Crabs, kelp and mussels: Argentina’s waters teem with life – could a fish farm ban do the same for Chile?

Puerto Almanza, on the Beagle Channel in Argentinian Tierra del Fuego, is one of the world’s most southerly settlements and best known for the local seafood, especially Patagonian king crabs.
Photograph: Visit Argentina

While the ecosystem is thriving off the coast of Argentina, the proliferation of salmon farms in Chile’s waters is threatening marine life, say critics

A rocky path, strewn with thick tree roots, leads from a dirt road down to a small green hut overlooking the choppy waters of the Beagle Channel, a strait between Chile and Argentina. The shack is home to Diane Mendez and her family but doubles as Alama Yagan, one of nine restaurants in the fishing village of Puerto Almanza. Continue reading →

Illegal Miners Face The Fire

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The G.E.F. burns mining camps as part of a long-running counteroffensive against environmental depredation. “Wherever they go, the miners destroy everything,” Felipe Finger, the unit’s leader, says. Photographs by Tommaso Protti for The New Yorker

Thanks to Jon Lee Anderson, as always, for his reporting from the danger zone that Brazil’s Amazon forest too often is:

The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon

As miners ravage Yanomami lands, combat-trained environmentalists work to root them out.

Roberto Cabral, a founder of the G.E.F., attends to a puppy discovered in a camp after miners fled.

In a clearing in the Brazilian Amazon, I stood with a group of armed men, discussing a viral TikTok video. The video, shot from a helicopter full of illegal miners, showed a vast stretch of rain forest, with dense foliage extending in all directions. The only sign of human habitation was below: a dirt circle surrounded by fanlike lean-tos made of wooden poles and palm fronds. It was a maloca, a traditional compound of the Yanomami, an Indigenous group that inhabits a remote territory in the rain forest of northern Brazil. Continue reading →

Responding To A Red Alert

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Another reason to subscribe to Bill McKibben’s newsletter:

How Not to Act in an Emergency

Forget AI–we need some human intelligence

We’re getting right to the nub now.

Yesterday the World Meteorological Organization officially certified 2023 as the hottest year in human history. Just to put on the record here what should have been the lead story in every journal and website on our home planet:

Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organisation was now “sounding the red alert to the world”.

The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45C higher last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil and gas.

Last year’s spike was so scary that NASA’s Gavin Schmidt—Jim Hansen’s heir as keeper of NASA’s climate record—wrote in Nature this week that it raised the most profound possible implications. Please read his words slowly and carefully: Continue reading →

McKibben On Responsibility & Accountability

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Vermont’s capitol city, underwater in epic July flooding that wrecked most of Montpelier’s retail district

Holding the responsible accountable is part of Bill McKibben’s objective; he also provides sunshine. Subscribe to this newsletter if you can:

You flood it, you pay for it.

States are considering ‘climate superfund’ laws to hold Big Oil accountable

One prong of the climate fight involves installing so much renewable energy that fossil fuel use actually declines dramatically—a few places are finally showing that’s possible, like sunny Germany which last week said emissions in 2023 dropped more than ten percent. Continue reading →

Solar’s Impressive Portion Of USA Energy Supply Increase

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Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

Thanks to Tik Root, Senior Staff Writer at Grist:

Solar hits a renewable energy milestone not seen since WWII

With supply chains finally open, solar provided most of the nation’s new electricity capacity last year.

Solar accounted for most of the capacity the nation added to its electric grids last year. That feat marks the first time since World War II, when hydropower was booming, that a renewable power source has comprised more than half of the nation’s energy additions.  Continue reading →

McKibben Discusses The Future With John Kerry As He Moves On

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“There’s a lack of knowledge, a lack of due diligence, a lack of basic education on the issue of climate,” John Kerry says.Photograph by Alain Jocard / AFP / Getty

With a transition this important, and especially when McKibben has a conversation like this one it is worth two posts in a row:

John Kerry Thinks We’re at a Critical Moment on Climate Change

As he steps down from office, the first Presidential envoy on the climate says that we have made progress, but we’re not moving fast enough.

He’s been perhaps most closely involved in negotiations with the Chinese government, in particular with his longtime interlocutor Xie Zhenhua, who retired in December at the age of seventy-four. One of Xie’s last encounters with Kerry came last December at the cop28 climate talks in Dubai, where Xie’s eight-year-old grandson presented Kerry with a card for his eightieth birthday. Continue reading →

When Embarrassment Really Means Shame

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Alex Wong / Getty

The sentiment is appreciated, but we should use the stronger word, shame, in describing the feeling many of us share:

Goodbye to America’s First Climate Envoy

John Kerry believes the world can still limit global warming, even if U.S. climate politics are “embarrassing.”

The smallest hint of frustration had crept into John Kerry’s voice. We were talking about international climate diplomacy, which for the past two years has been Kerry’s job as the U.S. special presidential envoy on climate, a role President Joe Biden created to signal his commitment to the issue. Continue reading →

AI’s Energy Appetite

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Inside the Guian Data Center of China Unicom, which uses artificial intelligence in its operations. TAO LIANG / XINHUA VIA GETTY IMAGES

For all of technology’s contributions to conservation, energy consumption is one of the downsides. Thanks to David Berreby and Yale e360 for this:

As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires

Generative artificial intelligence uses massive amounts of energy for computation and data storage and billions of gallons of water to cool the equipment at data centers. Now, legislators and regulators — in the U.S. and the EU — are starting to demand accountability.

Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more “generative A.I.” Pundits compared the new technology’s impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution — or the discovery of fire.

Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology’s environmental footprint is large and growing. Continue reading →

Capturing Carbon In Trillions Of Tons Of Soil

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Thanks to Yale Climate Connections for sharing Max Graham’s article at Grist:

How much carbon can farmers store in their soil? Nobody’s sure.

Advocates say the long-awaited farm bill could help fix that.

Dirt, it turns out, isn’t just worm poop. It’s also a humongous receptacle of carbon, some 2.5 trillion tons of it — three times more than all the carbon in the atmosphere. Continue reading →

Is That Safari In Tanzania A Good Use Of Your Money?

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Brian Otieno

This guest opinion, written by Professor Robert Williams of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona, and published in the New York Times, should make you think twice about the safari that might be on your bucket list:

Over 600,000 tourists travel to Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area each year, and many will catch a glimpse of the Great Migration: the famed trek of more than one million wildebeests and thousands of zebras, gazelles and other animals crossing over the Mara River into Kenya and back again. Continue reading →

Pause On Terminals for LNG Export

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Activists protest against fossil fuels and in particular fracking and liquefied natural gas, or LNG, on day eight of the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference at Expo City Dubai on December 8, 2023, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The news was hailed weeks ago as a big deal. Yale Climate Connections takes the proclomation a step further:

Why Biden’s pause on new LNG export terminals is a BFD

The administration’s move puts a spotlight on a potent climate-warming gas: methane, the main ingredient in natural gas.

Natural gas has long been touted as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future that gets all its power from renewable sources like wind, solar, and geothermal power. Continue reading →

Investing Patagonia’s Proceeds In Conservation

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Greg Curtis, the former deputy general counsel of Patagonia, is responsible for giving away huge sums of money to causes that are aligned with Patagonia’s history of environmental activism. Adam Amengual for The New York Times

When news broke about the company’s future, we were in awe; since then we heard little so this is a welcome update:

Patagonia’s Profits Are Funding Conservation — and Politics

$71 million of the clothing company’s earnings have been used since September 2022 to fund wildlife restoration, dam removal and Democratic groups.

A little more than $3 million to block a proposed mine in Alaska. Another $3 million to conserve land in Chile and Argentina. And $1 million to help elect Democrats around the country, including $200,000 to a super PAC this month.

The site of the Kalivac Dam on the Vjosa River in Albania, where Holdfast has funded a major conservation project. Andrew Burr/Patagonia

Patagonia, the outdoor apparel brand, is funneling its profits to an array of groups working on everything from dam removal to voter registration.

In total, a network of nonprofit organizations linked to the company has distributed more than $71 million since September 2022, according to publicly available tax filings and internal documents reviewed by The Times. Continue reading →

A 20-Minute Read On Problematic Forest Management Policies

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Elizabeth Kolbert always carries out her duty, which often makes it difficult to savor life’s small pleasures or even big victories without considering the law of unintended consequences. Give 20 minutes of your time to this one:

The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires

Strategies intended to safeguard forests and homes have instead increased the likelihood that they’ll burn.

The provincial government of Alberta defines a “wildfire of note” as a blaze that could “pose a threat to public safety, communities or critical infrastructure.” Continue reading →