Credit: Thomas Vijayan
We encourage you to go to Nature to see the entire selection, if you think this one is amazing:
Melt warning. This shot of melt water pouring through the Austfonna ice cap on the Arctic island of Nordaustlandet, Norway, won the Nature category in the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. “I have visited this place several times before, but last year it was disheartening to witness the sea ice melting as early as June,” said photographer Thomas Vijayan.
Male and Female
Davis Mountains Preserve, TX
Peter Dejong/Associated Press
David Wallace-Wells keeps our attention focused on the real message out of Dubai:
What No One at COP28 Wanted to Say Out Loud: Prepare for 1.5 Degrees
It only took 28 years. When Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber banged his gavel on the resolution text of COP28 in Dubai on Wednesday, it marked what has been widely called a historic achievement: the first time nearly every country on Earth agreed that oil and gas play a role in driving global warming, and the first time they nodded toward the need for a fossil fuel drawdown. Continue reading
Nairobi National Park, Kenya
This journalist and author of the book to the left, surprisingly, has not appeared in our pages before. Here is what he says about himself:
Hi, I’m Ben, an independent conservation journalist. I’m the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
And about the book he shares what others have said:
An eye-opening and witty account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager.
Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. Continue reading
Namibia
Beavers are not always welcome, but where they belong, they are a wonder to behold. Ian Frazier offers this dispatch from the great North:
Deep in the Wilderness, the World’s Largest Beaver Dam Endures
The largest beaver dam on Earth was discovered via satellite imagery in 2007, and since then only one person has trekked into the Canadian wild to see it. It’s a half-mile long and has created a 17-acre lake in the northern forest — a testament to the beaver’s resilience.
Wood Buffalo National Park, the largest national park in Canada, covers an area the size of Switzerland and stretches from Northern Alberta into the Northwest Territories. Continue reading
Daniel Boone National Historic Site, MO
United States’ Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry(L) and China’s special envoy for climate change Xie Zhenhua (R) attend a press conference during the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on December 13th, 2023. Martin Divisek/ZUMA
It started on a flawed premise, that a petrostate bigwig could honestly lead the forum to a legitimate outcome. We knew it was not going to end dirtier than it should have, but still we must parse what just happened. Thanks to Mother Jones for republishing Damien Carrington’s explanation from the Guardian:
Good Cop, Bad Cop: Breaking Down the UN’s New Climate Resolution
Some call the COP28 agreement “historic,” others call it weak. Here’s why.
Language on coal power was no stronger than that of Cop26 in 2021. Photograph: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA
The decision text from Cop28 has been greeted as “historic,” for being the first ever call by nations for a “transition away” from fossil fuels, and as “weak and ineffectual” and containing a “litany of loopholes” for the fossil fuel industry. An examination of the text helps to explain this contradiction.
Reducing Fossil Fuel Use
The text states the huge challenge with crystal clarity: Continue reading
Legon Botanical Gardens, Accra, Ghana
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker
Cactus is an infrequent topic in these pages, sometimes with attention to their beauty–and that leads to an environmental problem we had not been aware of:
Inside the Illegal Cactus Trade
As the craze for succulents continues, sometimes the smuggler and the conservationist are the same person.
The succulent Dudleya pachyphytum is known as the Cedros Island live-forever. It has also been called the panda bear of plants, on account of being so cute. It has sweet, chubby leaves, is pale, and is powdered as if with confectioner’s sugar, and its shape is most often that of a rose. D. pachyphytum grows slowly, as succulents generally do, and many specimens would fit in your coat pocket. Continue reading
Photo Illustration by The New York Times
We have Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich to thank for the answer to this question:
Can Carbon Capture Live Up to the Hype?
The technology to capture and bury carbon dioxide has struggled to ramp up and has real limits. But experts say it could play a valuable role.
World leaders at the annual United Nations climate talks have battled for years over whether they should “phase out” fossil fuels like coal or just phase them “down.” Continue reading
Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya
Planes account for roughly two per cent of the world’s CO2 emissions—if all the world’s aircraft got together to form a country, they’d emit more than the vast majority of actual nations. Photograph by Kevin Dietsch / Getty
I have had precisely one direct experience with otherwise elusive alternative aviation fuel. It was during my first of multiple work trips to Paraguay. The fuel was made from sugarcane, and while I am still here to write about it, the experience was among the most harrowing of my lifetime. I only have time and space here to mention that I spent an unexpected night in the Chaco. I highly recommend visiting the Chaco, but I do not highly recommend traveling with experimental fuel. That said, read on:
Looking for a Greener Way to Fly
The Treasury Department is about to announce tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel, which raises the question: What fuels are actually “sustainable”?
Sometime in the next few weeks, the Department of the Treasury is expected to decide who—or, really, what—will qualify for a new set of tax credits. Continue reading
Nairobi National Park, Kenya
Greenpeace has not been in our pages for years, but it was in our pages for years, and for good reason. Here is one more.
Guatemala
Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Vibing is a slang word that works well as a stand-in for greenwashing. Alex Simon, a co-founder of Synaps, an economic and environmental research center, shares additional perspective on the corruption built into Cop28:
In Dubai, a ‘Good Vibes Only’ Approach to Climate Change
On a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates, I felt as if I’d entered a fever dream of green exuberance. It was more than two months before COP28, the annual global climate meeting now in progress in Dubai, but the country was already awash in environmental hype. On the highway, banners for an event hosted by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the fossil fuel behemoth known as Adnoc, read: “Decarbonizing. Faster. Together.” A placard in my hotel bathroom asked me to conserve water by using the two-tiered flush, although the flush had only one tier. A friend’s utility bill was labeled “green bill” — although U.A.E. households have some of the biggest carbon footprints in the world. Continue reading
Nairobi National Park, Kenya
Organikos 