Articles include: lumber shortage; disabilities and natural disasters; California wildfire season; Study: cut methane emissions quickly; flooding in Michigan; climate vote in Senate; Study: poor communities affected by climate change; low carbon fuel standard; money to modernize grid; Fukushima; Ford making electric vehicles; Study: sea level rise and budgets.
Tag: Japan
Above the Fold – Week’s Best & Covid
Environmental Health News puts out weekend ‘summary’ emails, in addition to their daily emails.
EHN Week’s Best: April 16, 2021: forever chemicals on paper straws; Piney Point pollution; jails and environmental justice; DDT; PFAS; drought’s impact on farming water; rechargeable batteries – real cost; Mexico and coal; heavy metals in children’s food; Japan dumping Fukushima’s radioactive water into the ocean.
EHN Covid: April 16, 2021: facemask garbage; underserved communities & J&J vaccine halt; green spaces & housing justice; loosing women scientists; how to stop a pandemic.
The Daily Climate, April 16, 2021
Articles include: Canadian methane emissions; Hawaiian coral reefs; phase-out of non-EVs; better highways; funding focus changes on infrastructure; Japan & hydrogen; South Korea funding coal plants; wildfires and Alaska; Utilities and clean energy standards; clean hydrogen energy; US and China – foes; 3% of ecosystems remain intact – study.
The Daily Climate, March 30,2021
Articles include: Eastern Kentucky and flooding; Biden offshore wind farms; Massachusetts law and gas ban; Japan’s cherry blossoms peak; Electric vehicles; investigating trump attacks on science; Russian oil leaks; DOE & carbon capture; Study: China and coal-based electricity (published by Ember, the London-based energy and climate research group – no link provided); Biden reducing methane emissions.
Japan adopts green growth plan to go carbon free by 2050
Politico discusses Japan adopts green growth plan to go carbon free by 2050.
Japan aims to eliminate gasoline-powered vehicles in about 15 years, the government said Friday in a plan to achieve Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s ambitious pledge to go carbon free by 2050 and generate nearly $2 trillion growth in green business and investment.
The “green growth strategy” urges utilities to bolster renewables and hydrogen while calling for auto industries to go carbon free by the mid-2030s.
Suga, in a policy speech in October, pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions in 30 years. As the world faces an environmental challenge, green investment is an opportunity for growth not a burden, he said.
Japan faces another Fukushima disaster crisis
Climate News Network discusses why Japan faces another Fukushima disaster crisis. A plan to dump a million tonnes of radioactive water from the Fukushima disaster off Japan is alarming local people.
The Japanese government has an unsolvable problem: what to do with more than a million tonnes of water contaminated with radioactive tritium, in store since the Fukushima disaster and growing at more than 150 tonnes a day.
The water, contained in a thousand giant tanks, has been steadily accumulating since the nuclear accident in 2011. It has been used to cool the three reactors that suffered a meltdown as a result of the tsunami that hit the coast.
Tritium is a radioactive element produced as a by-product by nuclear reactors under normal operation, and is present everywhere in the fabric of the reactor buildings, so water used for cooling them is bound to be contaminated by it.
To avoid another potentially catastrophic meltdown in the remaining fuel the cooling has to continue indefinitely, so the problem continues to worsen. The government has been told that Japan will run out of storage tanks by 2022.
Japan net zero emissions pledge puts coal in the spotlight
Climate Change News discusses Japan net zero emissions pledge puts coal in the spotlight. Prime minister Yoshihide Suga has promised to “fundamentally shift” Japan’s coal policy to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Japan will slash its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, the prime minster announced on Monday – a major shift in climate ambition for the world’s third largest economy.
Yoshihide Suga indicated his government would rethink its reliance on coal, instead backing solar power and “carbon recycling” – capturing carbon dioxide emissions for various industrial applications.
“I declare we will aim to realise a decarbonised society,” Suga said in his first policy address to parliament since taking office.
“Responding to climate change is no longer a constraint on economic growth. We need to change our thinking to the view that taking assertive measures against climate change will lead to changes in industrial structure and the economy that will bring about great growth.”
NYT Climate Fwd: October 28, 2020
The New York Times discusses: voting to influence US policies towards climate change; calls this election a referendum on climate; points out trump’s attacks on climate science; alternatives to reduce atmospheric warming; how states make electricity; Japan and carbon neutrality; seismic testing in the Arctic; lightening and wildfires.
Earth is setting heat records. It will be much hotter one day.
National Geographic discusses why the Earth is setting heat records. It will be much hotter one day. As temperatures spike ever higher, the world is predicted to just get hotter. But how hot could it get?
As a heat wave roasted the western United States this week, temperatures in California’s Death Valley soared to a blistering 130 degrees Fahrenheit, marking the hottest temperature measured anywhere on Earth since 1931 and the third hottest day ever recorded on our planet, period.
But Earth has seen warmer days in its past and it will experience them again in the future. During so-called hothouse periods, when the atmosphere was supercharged with greenhouse gases, the planet was much warmer than it is today and the worst heat waves were correspondingly nightmarish. And while human carbon emissions haven’t pushed Earth into a new hothouse state yet, climate change is making heat waves more frequent and severe, meaning Death Valley’s extreme temperatures are unlikely to stand for long. Earth won’t be as scorching and uninhabitable as Venus anytime soon—temperatures there are hot enough to melt lead—but heat that challenges the limits of human tolerance will occur more often as the century wears on, scientists say.
And in the very, very distant future, Earth might actually become like Venus.
Study: Japan’s climate change efforts hindered by biased business lobby
Reuters discusses a study showing how Japan’s climate change efforts are hindered by biased business lobby. Japan’s powerful business lobby Keidanren is dominated by energy-intensive sectors that represent less than 10% of the economy, resulting in national policies that favour coal and hindering attempts to combat climate change, a new study said.
To view the InfluenceMap study, please click on: here