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U.S. Will Allow California to Ban New Gas-Powered Cars, Officials Say

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 13, 2024 - 22:03
California and 11 other states want to halt the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to try to stop them.
Categories: Climate

Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to California Tailpipe Emissions Limits

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 13, 2024 - 21:22
The justices agreed to decide whether industry groups have suffered the sort of injury that gave them standing to sue over an unusual waiver.
Categories: Climate

Canada’s Gas Brings Indigenous People New Money, and Old Worries

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 13, 2024 - 15:15
New export terminals have reignited a generations-old debate over identity and environmental stewardship.
Categories: Climate

Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 13, 2024 - 13:22
Every farm, even the scenic ones with red barns and rolling hills, is a kind of environmental crime scene, an echo of whatever wilderness it once replaced.
Categories: Climate

‘The water war’: how drought threatens survival of Sicily’s towns

The Guardian Climate Change - December 13, 2024 - 05:00

Amid Italian island’s worst drought, towns such as Troina are fighting for survival as supplies run dry and tensions rise

An ancient Sicilian proverb goes like this: “When water to two fountains flows, one will stay dry – that’s how it goes.” The residents of the small town of Troina in the heart of Sicily, struck by a long and unprecedented drought, perhaps understand its meaning better than anyone else. When authorities decreed that the little water left in their dam should be shared with the villages of another province, they took action, and, on 30 November, occupied the distribution centre of the reservoir, blocking access.

“It’s a war between the poor; we are aware of it,” says Salvatore Giamblanco, 66, owner of a bed and breakfast in Troina. “But we had no other choice. The dam is drying up. We have difficulty finding water for ourselves. I had to cancel numerous reservations due to the lack of water. If we also have to share what little we have with other towns, we will all be left dry.”

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Categories: Climate

Three Questions From Cutting-Edge Climate Science

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 12, 2024 - 14:55
An annual gathering of scientists this week offered a glimpse into the latest efforts to answer some of the most intriguing questions about our warming planet.
Categories: Climate

Ocean Heat Killed Half the Common Murres Around Alaska

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 12, 2024 - 14:20
About four million common murres were killed by a domino effect of ecosystem changes, and the population is showing no signs of recovery, according to new research.
Categories: Climate

Trump’s Energy Pick, Chris Wright, Argues Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 12, 2024 - 12:53
Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, says oil, gas and coal are key to solving global poverty. Some call that misleading.
Categories: Climate

Australia news live: Senate committee recommends national hate crimes database and tougher laws

The Guardian Climate Change - December 12, 2024 - 01:25

Follow today’s news headlines live

News bargaining code announcement expected today

The youth minister, Anne Aly, spoke with ABC News Breakfast just earlier ahead of the news bargaining code announcement, expected today.

What I can say is that the government believes that journalists should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, that there is a current regime in place but that’s not working. And so that’s why the government has turned its attention to updating this code and ensuring that social media companies pay for the news that they use as content on their platforms.

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Categories: Climate

From the DealBook Summit: Influential People Share Their Insights

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 14:40
Industry leaders attending the conference were asked about artificial intelligence, the economy, international relations and more.
Categories: Climate

Supreme Court Allows Biden Plan to Address Toxic Coal Ash

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 14:34
The court’s order was provisional, rejecting a request from a Kentucky electric utility to block the plan while an appeals court considers its challenge.
Categories: Climate

Key Questions for HUD Nominee Ahead of Confirmation Hearing

Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming - December 11, 2024 - 13:38

Editor’s note: Updates status of investigation into RealPage

Scott Turner’s nomination by President Trump to lead the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has garnered less attention than some of his other cabinet picks. This is surprising given the power he wields over millions of people’s most immediate everyday need—having a place to live.   

As the housing and climate crises continue to collide—destroying homes, displacing communities, and causing instability in the insurance industry—it’s important to understand the background of the person selected to lead the agency responsible for policy and programs to address America’s urgent housing needs.

Turner’s track record of advancing ultra-conservative agendas raises valid concern that he would prioritize developer interests while shifting climate risk onto local governments and individuals.   

What does the HUD Secretary do?

As the head of HUD, Scott Turner would oversee a broad, important portfolio of programs that literally helps keep the roof over many people’s heads.

HUD serves a crucial role in providing access to affordable housing for millions of people, including through rental assistance programs, public housing, and pathways to homeownership. These programs are especially important for low-income households, people who live with disabilities, the elderly and families with young children.  

HUD also provides financial support for community and economic development through its Community Development Block Grant Program. The Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) component of this program is increasingly important in an era of worsening climate-fueled disasters.  

The question is: if Turner is confirmed as HUD secretary, will he keep the people’s interests as his top priority—or will he be more beholden to deep-pocketed real estate and developer interests?  

Potential conflicts of interest 

To get an idea of how he would lead HUD, it’s important to look at who Scott Turner is. He has had a varied career, including stints in the Texas legislature, the first Trump Administration, and the NFL. During his time in the Texas legislature, Turner stuck mostly to the fiscally and socially conservative Tea Party agenda and didn’t file any housing bills.  

Most recently, Turner has served as a Chief Inspiration Officer for JPI—a development firm that specializes in building multi-family homes across the income spectrum. While it’s essential for the nation’s housing secretary to understand the development landscape, their actions must be rooted in the public interest, not real estate industry interests. The Project 2025 chapter on HUD, authored by former HUD Secretary Ben Carson who Turner considers a mentor, encourages the sale of existing public housing to private, profit-motivated developers.

Additionally, Turner’s former employer has a longstanding and well-publicized relationship with RealPage, a private equity-backed software firm that the US Justice Department claimed enables price-fixing, artificially increasing the rents of hundreds of thousands of renters nationwide. While a criminal investigation into RealPage was recently dropped, a civil lawsuit by the DOJ and eight states remains active. As the average American pays more money than ever before to keep a roof over their head, this confluence of interests and influence should raise concerns during confirmation hearings.   

Opportunity Zones  

In his previous role as a senior official at HUD, Turner was celebrated by President Trump and others for his role in promoting Opportunity Zones. Opportunity Zones were a signature economic development effort of the first Trump administration codified in the 2017 tax bill that allowed investors to defer taxes on capital gains by siphoning those gains into a fund that invested in economically distressed areas. 

The architects of Opportunity Zones claimed the program would spur desirable investment in communities and jumpstart economic revitalization, however, the program didn’t lay out tight regulatory guidelines, and the full impact of the policy isn’t yet obvious as investments can be made through 2026 and some forms of investment (like developing or rehabbing housing) can take years to realize.   

What we do know is that real estate is the largest investment category among Opportunity Zone investors. It’s reported that thousands of affordable homes have been financed in hot housing markets like Charlotte and Austin, but how many of those homes are meaningfully affordable or only nominally affordable, stretching buyers and renters thin, is unclear. 

The return of Opportunity Zones was a key component of the president-elect’s campaign platform, and they are poised for extension in the new administration and Republican-controlled Congress.  If Turner’s job is to champion safe, healthy affordable housing, members of Congress should ask how he intends to strongly condition Opportunity Zones to help address the nation’s housing shortage and whether those benefits will flow to those with lower incomes.  

Reversing climate progress at HUD 

In addition to investing in public housing, rental support and providing pathways to homeownership for low-income families, HUD is also tasked with distributing funds for long-term recovery to cities and states after increasingly frequent and costly disasters.  Cuts to disaster response programs in other federal agencies like FEMA proposed in Project 2025 will almost certainly reduce community resilience and may drive up the price tag of long-term recovery that Turner is tasked with administering. 

In the last few years, HUD has adopted climate initiatives to make affiliated properties more energy efficient, weatherize buildings against extreme heat and reduce flood risk. Project 2025 recommends eliminating the agency’s climate programs. The climate denialism of these proposed repeals aside, the conservative playbook’s obsession with reducing government spending simply transfers risk to levels of government and communities less equipped than the federal government to pursue resilience.  

HUD’s climate initiatives are intended to keep communities safer and tackle climate challenges that, if left unchecked, will have increasingly expensive impacts on its assets and risk the lives of people the agency has a responsibility to protect.

Members of Congress should probe Turner on the true, long-term cost of walking away from common sense climate efforts like weatherization and floodplain standards.   

Project 2025 regurgitates rejected policies

It’s too soon to tell just how much of President Trump’s dangerous agenda Scott might be able to realize as HUD Secretary.  Much of the Project 2025 plan for the agency are policies that were rejected or unfinished during the first Trump presidency, which like the coming administration also began with a Republican-controlled congress.

Other parts of President Trump’s agenda like his inhumane threats of mass deportation could make it harder to build affordable homes. With an electorate deeply concerned about making ends meet, it’s important that confirmation hearings reveal who Turner will center in his leadership—a nation struggling with housing costs and growing climate risk or his real estate industry colleagues.    

Categories: Climate

‘A human face on an abstract problem’: ICJ forced to listen to climate victims

The Guardian Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 11:00

Marginalised communities have been elevated during hearings in The Hague on impact of climate crisis

The village of Veraibari in Papua New Guinea sits at the mouth of the Kikori River, just before it opens into the Pacific. “Veraibari was so beautiful when I was a child,” remembers Ara Kouwo, 52. “I used to walk down to the beach passing under mango trees.”

Kouwo’s testimony was one of many included in written submissions to the international court of justice (ICJ) before hearings that began last week and continue until Friday in a landmark case in which the court has been asked to give an advisory opinion on “the obligations of states in respect of climate change”.

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Categories: Climate

‘I have to live in a cocoon’: locals in Pennsylvania feel ‘sacrificed’ for Shell plastics plant

The Guardian Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 07:00

Residents accuse the oil firm of overstating the benefits of its ethane cracker plant – and playing down the harms

Nadine Luci lives on a breezy hill south-western Pennsylvania, but hardly ever opens her windows for fear the air outside is harming her.

“I have to live in a cocoon year-round,” she said.

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Categories: Climate

Arctic Report Card 2024: How Did the Region Fare? Ask the Caribou

Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming - December 11, 2024 - 07:00

For the first time, the Arctic Report Card assessed that the Arctic is faltering as a reliable area for storing carbon away from the atmosphere (Natalie et al., in Arc2024). It was its first failing grade after thousands of years holding onto more carbon than released to the atmosphere. As a scientist who has conducted research in the Arctic, this is truly alarming for me. 

This report, issued by NOAA annually since 2006, was a much-anticipated event at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting because the implications matter far beyond the Arctic. 

Grade F: First major “vital sign” shift in its report card

Different factors are at play in terms of whether the Arctic is a net sink or source of carbon. On one hand, warming temperatures increased vegetation in the region with increased uptake of carbon dioxide. However, unprecedented Arctic wildfires combined with soils thawing released even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Methane releases were sustained as well.  

The carbon cycle trend in the Arctic will be a closely watched “vital sign” for Earth’s climate going forward. 

Is this report card for the Arctic, which includes boreal and tundra of northern permafrost regions, a temporary carbon cycle hiccup, or will this be a growing trend as a net carbon source region? 

If the latter, the implications are profound because the Arctic holds an immense store of carbon that, if released, would set off a chain of cascading consequences, including significant global warming.

The implications of these changes are enormous for the Arctic ecosystem, the ways of life of communities living in the region, and for the many unique species that exist there. Moreover, changes in the Arctic have a huge impact on weather patterns north of the equator, including polar vortex disturbances, changes to ocean currents, and extreme heat domes. Shrinking Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers also contribute to accelerating sea level rise. 

Meanwhile, the warming climate is leaving Arctic species with little choice but to adapt, but some are finding it harder than others. 

Grade C: Coping or struggling to cope with Arctic change 

A vivid scene reappeared from memory when I learned the findings of the annual Arctic Report Card. It’s from my time in the Arctic aboard the Oden. The Icebreaker suddenly blasted the horn on an unplanned  stop that shuddered the entire ship as the sounds of water pumps that help roll the ship and engines shifting speed reverberated in the ears.   

Biologists had spotted a tiny Arctic cod on top of the ice! We watched as the fish was retrieved for analysis amid plenty of evidence that a seal and a polar bear had been on that spot of sea ice not too long before we had arrived. Given the primary source of polar bear food— ice dependent seals —it likely was their favorite, ringed seal. Now we knew why the fish was on top of the ice and not in the frigid seawater below. These three are species in an Arctic ecosystem that used to be more tightly linked together.  

But the Arctic report card assessed that ringed seals in the Pacific sector of the Arctic have adapted away from their former major food source—Arctic cod — to a new major food source—saffron cod (Quakenbush et al., in Arc2024). This is a cod species shift to warmer seawater from that particular cold seawater with floating sea-ice.  

The surprise is that, despite plummeting sea ice, the ringed seal is currently coping with these changes. It’s a bright sign brought by collaborations among indigenous researchers and other scientists.   

Yet there are more stark signs in the report card overall logging different marine and land species coping with regional changes that differ from the Arctic averages. 

Arctic cod and seawater in glass jar collected from the surface of Arctic sea-ice.  Brenda Ekwurzel 

Case in point is the difference between coastal caribou herds that are coping with the wetter and warmer conditions and the inland migratory tundra caribou herds that are struggling to adapt (decreasing 65% over past two to three decades) (Gunn et al., in Arc2024).  Rain on snow that often freezes can shield vital forage away from inland caribou herds.  Roads associated with mines and railroads are also factors.

If these inland herds fail to adapt to these changes, the caribou’s future in these locations is uncertain. And so too are the ways of life of indigenous communities that are adapting given local traditional levels of reliance on the caribou for food and other essentials. 

NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024 Grade A: Amplified warming in the Arctic, a dubious distinction

This year logged the eleventh year in a row when the Arctic warmed faster than the global average (Ballinger et al., in Arc2024)—quite a feat given the Earth’s global average temperature is on track to being the hottest on record.  

This greater pace of warming has implications for the character and timing of snow cover. The 2023-2024 Arctic winter snow accumulation was above average over Eurasian and North American sectors with the Central and Eastern Canada region logging the shortest snow season in 26 years (Mudryk et al., in Arc2024).   

Amplified warming in a region that has water locked in the form of ice on land for millennia has global significance for coastal communities worldwide.  Mountain glacier and ice sheet contributions to global sea level rise has been a growing proportion with each passing decade.   

Another bright spot this year amid the bad news was that the massive Greenland Ice Sheet had the lowest annual ice mass loss since 2013 (Poynar et al., in Arc2024).   

No doubt about it. That F grade for failing to remain a region that stored more carbon than it released has got to grab the attention of anyone involved with international negotiations in line with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  The urgency for reducing emissions is a serious Arctic warning. 

Icebergs from a Greenland Ice Sheet glacier that has released large volumes of ice to the ocean over recent years. Brenda Ekwurzel
Categories: Climate

‘Making Argentina great again’? What a year under a climate-change denying president has done for the country

The Guardian Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 06:30

Javier Milei’s push for extraction and cuts to land protections have left people fearing for their way of life – and environmentalists concerned about the future

Like many who follow Mapuche traditions in the Mendoza region of Argentina, Gabriel Jofré, 50, raises goats, moving between the plains in winter and the peaks of the Andes in summer, amid the region’s 4,000 glaciers. But the future of his people’s ancestral way of life is threatened, he says, by the climate crisis and plans for mining projects in the area.

In October, the local governor, Alfredo Cornejo, led the National Institute of Indigenous Affairs to reconsider the recognition of ancestral lands belonging to three Mapuche communities, potentially paving the way for the auction of public lands, 34 new copper exploration projects and the creation of the Malargüe western mining district.

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Categories: Climate

‘We’re an evolving laboratory’: the island on a quest to be self-sufficient in energy

The Guardian Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 04:00

Harnessing wind, hydro and maybe geothermal power, the tiny Canary Island of El Hierro is blazing a trail for sustainable energy – and the secret is all in the mix

  • Words and photographs by Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita

A vertiginous outcrop with more than 500 volcanoes, El Hierro, the most westerly of the Canary Islands, is less than 12 miles (20km) wide but features elevation differences of more than 1,500 metres. Swept by strong Atlantic winds and pockmarked with volcanic craters, it has spent the past decade harnessing its natural features to create clean electricity – with the goal of being the first island to reach self-sufficiency in energy.

Now, the island is reaching new milestones. Energy generated by wind and water has enabled its 11,000 inhabitants to be completely self-sufficient in electricity for 10,000 hours since its renewables project was established.

Wind turbines not only produce most of the energy needed for islanders’ daily use, but also El Hierro’s three desalination plants, which supply water to the island

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Categories: Climate

Queensland environment minister stands by ‘scepticism’ about human-induced climate change

The Guardian Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 03:31

Andrew Powell first said he was not ‘100% convinced’ 12 years ago while holding the portfolio during the Campbell Newman era

Queensland’s environment minister has told parliament he stands by his comments more than a decade ago that he was “a bit sceptical” about human involvement in climate change.

Andrew Powell returned to the environment, tourism, science and innovation portfolio last month, having held it under the former premier Campbell Newman in 2012.

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Categories: Climate

Malaria cases rise for fifth year as disasters and resistance hamper control efforts

The Guardian Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 03:00

The disease killed 600,000 people amid 263m cases globally in 2023, says WHO, calling for nations to address funding shortfall

Malaria killed almost 600,000 people in 2023, as cases rose for the fifth consecutive year, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Biological threats such as rising resistance to drugs and insecticides, and climate and humanitarian disasters continue to hamper control efforts, world health leaders warned.

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Categories: Climate

I regret none of the climate policies we pushed in Ireland. But we underestimated the backlash | Eamon Ryan

The Guardian Climate Change - December 11, 2024 - 02:00

From rural buses to solar panels, our Green agenda has been transformative. Yet, vested interests and big polluters helped to poison the well of public thinking

  • Eamon Ryan was Irish Green party leader from 2011 to 2024

Ireland’s Green party went into government in 2020 determined to bring Ireland from laggard to leader on the climate crisis. Public opinion was with us, and we won more than 7% of the national vote. This mandate allowed us to negotiate a coalition agreement with Ireland’s two large centrist parties that was recognised by European Green colleagues as one of the greenest deals they had seen.

Over the past four and a half years we worked flat out to implement that programme. I think most independent experts would say the impact has been transformational. Last year Ireland’s emissions fell 6.8%, despite having one of Europe’s fastest growing economies and record population growth. The Greens switched spending in favour of public transport, cycling and walking. We rolled out a new rural bus service every week, while cutting young people’s fares by 60%. Passenger numbers took off immediately and we are only at the start of the transformation. A pipeline of big new projects is coming through our planning system, ready to go.

Eamon Ryan served as the minister for the environment and transport in Ireland’s outgoing coalition government and was Green party leader from 2011 to 2024

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Categories: Climate