After industry lobbyists halted the oil and gas well safe-distance law, their well-funded referendum could sway voters with misinformation. Over the last few years, as California has introduced stronger regulations on oil and gas drilling aimed at protecting public health, a pattern of events has started to emerge. Here’s how it typically goes:
Michael Jacobs, University of Sheffield Climate change policy has entered a new era. The growing row between the United States and the European Union over the impacts of the new American green subsidy regime makes that all too clear. Yet in many ways, this story is ultimately about China. For the last 20
A new report chalks out pathways for the United States to heavily reduce the amount of mined lithium it needs to decarbonize transportation and sidestep “irreversible harms” to water, air, and animal habitats—especially near Indigenous lands. “The question is not whether we decarbonize the transportation sector, but how we decarbonize it,” the report’s
It is called “Model Explorer” and its scheduled release in mid-2023 is being keenly anticipated. A new video game for screen-addicted teenagers worldwide? Not quite. Behind the scenes “Model Explorer” will mark the next advance in computer modelling for Europe’s clean-energy ambitions, promising key insights into the impact on societies of the planned
A clever series of presentation slides at a conference in Ottawa last week placed small communities at the centre of the energy transition and spotlighted Prince Edward Island as Canada’s next source of breakaway climate leadership. With a population of 161,455 and just 1.6 million tonnes of emissions in 2020—less than a quarter
A non-profit coalition of about 30 organisations has called on South African authorities to refuse re-entry to the Kremlin’s Antarctic mineral ‘explorer’ — a regular visitor in Table Bay. Meanwhile, Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who was in Antarctica on Monday, has told Our Burning Planet that Russian state vessels should not berth
Why the threat to food supplies — and industrial agriculture’s role in global warming — is central to the discourse on climate change. The writer Upton Sinclair once famously said, upon the reaction to his classic exposé of the slaughterhouse industry, The Jungle, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I
Samantha Maldonado, The City In December, Mayor Eric Adams announced to great fanfare MSC Cruise’s forthcoming year-round operations from the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (BCT). The ships, the mayor said, would bring thousands of tourist dollars to New York City. But the vessels will also bring toxic diesel exhaust to the local community. Over
New research tests the promise of insurance to harden the U.S. economy to tropical storms. Tropical storms and hurricanes bring immediate and direct economic damage to communities and may also reduce a country’s economic growth for more than a decade. Models that determine climate policy in the United States have been criticized for
In 1952, a landslide caused a tsunami that killed a Greenlandic man. Some researchers think he might have been an early victim of anthropogenic warming. On a vast shoreline of crumbled, sloping rock in central West Greenland, four fishermen are hard at work tending their nets. Barely an instant after they realize a