Annual global greenhouse-gas emissions have been rising steadily for decades and show no sign of peaking. That is, humankind is not making enough progress to exclude a possibly catastrophic climate scenario. Protecting the climate is difficult because of free-riding: emissions abatement costs are largely national but the benefits from climate stability are global. Dealing with this problem needs to be at the core of a new climate strategy.

Climate-conscious individual choices are good–but not nearly enough to save the planet. Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception. People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around.

What if the most American symbol of unsustainable consumption isn’t the automobile, but the air conditioner? In cool indoor spaces, it’s easy to forget that billions of people around the world don’t have cooling — and that air conditioning is worsening the warming that it’s supposed to protect us from.

What will the Earth be like in 500 years? — Lotte, Brookline, Massachusetts. Scientists can make some pretty accurate forecasts about the future. But predicting what the Earth will be like 500 years from now is a difficult task because there are many factors at play. Imagine Christopher Columbus in 1492 trying to predict the Americas of today!

We do not know how much climate change will cost us. Yet that cost is the ‘externality’ missing from fossil fuel prices (Gollier 2021), which needs to be incorporated by either taxing or capping carbon emissions (as in the EU Emission Trading System). Plausible assumptions about that cost could justify carbon prices anywhere from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars per tonne.

Environmentalists in recent days have expressed outrage over the eight-year prison sentence handed to Jessica Reznicek — a nonviolent "water protector" who pleaded guilty to damaging equipment at the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa — while calling the fossil fuel companies who knowingly caused the climate emergency the real criminals who should be held to account.

City Hall requested residents turn off air conditioners to conserve energy in high heat

The atmospheric scientist that led a major year-long Arctic research expedition said Tuesday that the world may have already hit one of the so-called climate "tipping points." "The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far," said Markus Rex of the Alfred Wegener Institute, reports Agence France-Presse.

National data released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration supports what scientists have been shouting for years: The ongoing climate crisis has created a wet, hot, American climate.

The Earth’s climate has always been a work in progress. In the 4.5 billion years the planet has been spinning around the sun, ice ages have come and gone, interrupted by epochs of intense heat. The highest mountain range in Texas was once an underwater reef. Camels wandered in evergreen forests in the Arctic.

The company’s stock market arrival establishes Bitcoin and other digital currencies in the traditional financial landscape. It also elevates a technology with astonishing environmental costs.

We write about gun violence in America as our full-time jobs. Between the two of us, we’ve been doing that for over a decade. We see that America’s endless gun debate does not treat shooting victims and their families equitably. It is not driven by a focus on what actually works to save lives. It rarely includes the voices of the majority of the victims or any of the people who have a track record of successfully preventing shootings. It is not just biased; it is actively harmful and racist. And it will never make us safer.

The Amazon rainforest is most likely now a net contributor to warming of the planet, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis from more than 30 scientists. For years, researchers have expressed concern that rising temperatures, drought, and deforestation are reducing the capacity of the world’s largest rainforest to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and help offset emissions from fossil-fuel burning. Recent studies have even suggested that some portions of the tropical landscape already may release more carbon than they store.

For the past two decades, a giant digital display in Manhattan’s Union Square has clocked up the accumulation of days, hours, minutes and seconds for the thousands of New Yorkers who hurry past it each day. Now, for the first time, it’s counting down: Revealing just how little time we have left to tackle the climate crisis before the planet is past a tipping point of irreversible change.

Produced by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and partner organization WRAP, the Food Waste Index Report 2021 reveals that between food wasted in homes, restaurants and shops, 17 per cent of all food is just dumped. Some food is also lost on farms and in supply chains, indicating that overall a third of food is never eaten.

Food waste creates more greenhouse gases than the airline industry. But there are several ways to fix that, starting with your shopping habits.

Natural gas utilities face a bleak future in a world increasingly concerned about climate change. An NPR investigation shows how they work to block local climate action and protect their business.

The promise of negative emissions is baked into most “net zero” pledges. But putting that into practice is easier said than done.

The month of December opened with good news and bad news for people concerned about the climate crisis. A climate analysis released by the independent watchdog group Climate Action Tracker said that based on promises made by Paris Climate Agreement participants, the world could limit warming to 2.1 degrees C (3.8 degrees F) by the year 2100.

With the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the U. S. Supreme Court, it doesn’t seem hyperbolic to predict that the Supreme Court will be the most anti-environmental court in the modern era.