This week’s email from the Yale Climate Connections discusses:
carbon offsets; communicating about climate change; Canada’s climate change position; flooding and droughts in communities; impact on flowering plants in New England from an earlier Spring; self driving cars and their potential air pollution impact; UN negotiators try role playing; and impact of energy efficiency in Wisconsin.
This NY Times article discusses the Trump Administration’s Attack on Climate Science.
This article discusses how Scientists Have More Bad News About the Oceans. They Found It by Looking in the Past. Plankton tells us a lot about what went wrong.
This article discusses why, as Coal Retires in PJM, renewables aren’t filling the vacuum. Solar and wind have struggled to compete against a flood of cheap natural gas in the largest U.S. wholesale power market, operated by PJM.
This article discusses a recent court decision to pull the permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
A federal appeals court has thrown out a power company’s permit to build a natural gas pipeline across two national forests and the Appalachian Trail – and slammed the U.S. Forest Service for granting the approvals in the first place.
In a decision filed Thursday by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., a three-judge panel declared the U.S. Forest Service “abdicated its responsibility to preserve national forest resources” when it issued permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to build through parts of the George Washington and Monongahela National Forests and a right of way across the Appalachian Trail.
This Vox article discusses how fossil fuels are underpriced by a whopping $5.2 trillion. We can’t take on climate change without properly pricing coal, oil, and natural gas. But it’s a huge political challenge.
The world’s top climate scientists calculated in a startling report last year that if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century to avoid devastating social and economic consequences, we need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
One big reason that goal is tough to hit is that we’re still heavily dependent on coal, oil, and natural gas — and governments support these forms of energy far more than clean energy.
The International Monetary Fund periodically assesses global subsidies for fossil fuels as part of its work on climate, and it found in a recent working paper that the fossil fuel industry got a whopping $5.2 trillion in subsidies in 2017. This amounts to 6.4 percent of the global gross domestic product.
This article discusses how to talk to kids about climate change without scaring them.
This Inside Climate News article discusses Louisiana’s New Climate Plan – resilience and retreat as Sea Level Rises. People are already migrating inland as the ocean rises with global warming and the delta sinks. The state’s new plan looks at ways to ease the transition.
The plan, Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE), looks at future flood risks in six coastal parishes and recommends a series of policy changes that could help mitigate those risks—from enhanced transportation routes to elevated houses and new urban centers.
This Yale Environment 360 article discusses how a 4th of West Antarctica’s Ice Now Considered Unstable, Scientists Find.
Rising temperatures have sped up the melting of West Antarctica’s ice fivefold in the past 25 years, resulting in a quarter of the region’s glaciers being classified as unstable, according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet have thinned by as much as 400 feet since 1992, with some of the most dramatic changes happening to the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. According to Earther, West Antarctica has shed enough ice over the past quarter-century to fill Lake Erie 12 times over.
This BBC article discusses new scientific evidence that global sea level rise could be bigger than expected.
Scientists believe that global sea levels could rise far more than predicted, due to accelerating melting in Greenland and Antarctica.
The long-held view has been that the world’s seas would rise by a maximum of just under a metre by 2100.
This new study, based on expert opinions, projects that the real level may be around double that figure.