Tag: Climate change
The EU’s Secret to Slashing Emissions
Environment
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April 10, 2024
Europe proves that putting a price on carbon can dramatically transform fossil fuel–based economies.
A man demonstrates in front of the school where a dialogue event with citizens is taking place about the future of lignite mining in Erkelenz, a midsize town in the state of North Rhine–Westphalia in Germany on March 11, 2023. He holds the number 1.5, signifying a global goal to limit Earth’s warming.
(Marius Becker / Picture Alliance via
America’s Climate Boomtowns Are Waiting
As my airplane flew low over the flatlands of western Michigan on a dreary December afternoon, sunbursts splintered the soot-toned clouds and made mirrors out of the flooded fields below. There was plenty of rain in this part of the Rust Belt—sometimes too much. Past the endless acres, I could make out the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, then soon, in the other direction, the Detroit River, Lakes Huron and Erie, and southern Canada. In a world running short on
How Long Should a Species Stay on Life Support?
At about 3:30 a.m., four hours into our drive, Travis Livieri’s phone began to thrum. “I’ve got a ferret for you,” a voice crackled through the static. The animal in question was one of North America’s most endangered mammals, for which the next hour might be the strangest of her life; for Livieri, the wildlife biologist tasked with saving her, it would be one of thousands of interventions he’s made to prevent her kind from permanently vanishing. Over the
How to Tackle Truth Decay
When then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the California wildfires in 2020, the scientific opinion he heard was that climate change was real and had contributed to the conflagrations that ended up consuming more than 4 million acres and killing 31 people. His response? “Science doesn’t know.”
Millions of Americans trusted Trump, a fact he leveraged to attack the trustworthiness of science itself. Trump’s actions are part of a larger pattern of assault on expertise. People need to trust that
AI Is Taking Water From the Desert
One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above my head,
Why shiny, high-tech solutions won’t solve one of Africa’s worst crises
Hainikoye hits Accept and a young woman greets him in Hausa, a gravelly language spoken across West Africa’s Sahel region. She has three new cows, and wants to know: Does he have advice on getting them through the lean season?
Hainikoye—a twentysomething agronomist who has “followed animals,” as Sahelians refer to herding, since he first learned to walk—opens an interface on his laptop and clicks on her village in southern Niger, where humped zebu roam the dipping hills and dried-up … Read more
Vaclav Smil and the Value of Doubt
Not long ago, I randomly opened Vaclav Smil’s recent book “Size: How It Explains the World.” The first paragraph I read, in a chapter about good and bad design, concerned rubber flip-flops, which Smil described as among the world’s most widely owned individual possessions even though “they provide neither good lateral support nor basic vertical stability.” The following paragraph, about furniture, mentioned “the steadily diminishing share of the rich world’s population that grows food, catches fish, cuts wood, mines minerals
I Saw the Future of Climate Technology—and Its Big-Oil Investors
“The world does not end at 2 degrees C,” Bill Gates told the British podcast The Rest Is Politics in an episode that aired in January. Gates, one of the strongest and earliest supporters of tech as a tool to address the climate crisis, has spoken before about his belief that we’ll blow past 1.5 degrees—but his more recent assertions that 2 degrees C is unavoidable took many by surprise.
“There’s no stopping us passing 2C,” he said. “In temperate … Read more
The ‘dirty dozen’ of Davos – POLITICO
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It’s that time of year again: Leaders, business titans, philanthropists and celebs descend on the Swiss ski town of Davos to discuss the fate of the world and do deals/shots with the global elite at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
This year’s theme: “Rebuilding trust.” Prescient, given the dumpster fire the world seems to be turning into lately, both literally (climate change) and figuratively (where to
How the Media Greenwashes the Fossil Fuel Industry
The CEO of Exxon, Darren Woods, celebrates the potential of carbon capture to dramatically reduce global emissions. Saudi Aramco says in its podcast that the fossil fuel industry is innovating new climate solutions. BP’s podcast proclaims more of the same. These sound like examples pulled from the public-relations departments of the fossil fuel industry, but they were respectively produced and promoted by Bloomberg, Reuters, and The New York Times. Over decades, these media companies built trust with readers; … Read more