By Nityanand Jayaraman 1 July 2019 (BBC News) – As I write this, it has rained in Chennai – the first real welcome shower, but one that lasted only 30 minutes. But, still, that has been enough to flood the streets and stall traffic. The irony is that Chennai’s vulnerability to floods and its water […]
By Damian Carrington 24 June 2019 (The Guardian) – G20 countries have almost tripled the subsidies they give to coal-fired power plants in recent years, despite the urgent need to cut the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis. The bloc of major economies pledged a decade ago to phase out all fossil fuel subsidies. The figures, published […]
By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis 26 June 2019 (The Washington Post) – Bill Wehrum spent only a year and a half as the Environmental Protection Agency’s top air official before announcing plans to resign Wednesday amid scrutiny over possible violations of federal ethics rules. But during that time, Wehrum served as one of the […]
By Andrew Beatty 13 June 2019 (AFP) – Australia approved Thursday the construction of a controversial coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef, paving the way for a dramatic and unfashionable increase in coal exports. Queensland’s government said it had accepted a groundwater management plan for the Indian-owned Adani Carmichael mine—the last major legal hurdle […]
By Andy Krol 19 June 2019 (Rolling Stone) – It could have been an episode of The Apprentice. On a summer day in 2016, a group of businessmen and women descended on Trump Tower in Manhattan. They exited their black SUVs and rode the golden elevators to the 26th floor, where they assembled in a […]
By Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis 7 June 2019 (The New York Times) – President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses. [cf. Trump regulation rollbacks will […]
By Spencer Dale 11 June 2019 (BP) – The Statistical Review of World Energy has been providing timely and objective energy data for the past 68 years. In addition to the raw data, the Statistical Review also provides a record of key energy developments and events through time. My guess is that when our successors […]
9 June 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – It’s time to update one of Desdemona’s favorite graphs: human carbon emissions per capita. In the last update, four years ago, we had carbon emissions data through the year 2013, and it was clear that per-person emissions growth followed a nearly perfect exponential curve. The curve passed through one ton […]
4 June 2019 (The Consciousness of Sheep) — One of the advantages of being a rocky island in the northeast Atlantic, right underneath the Gulf Stream is that you get to deploy record amounts of offshore wind turbines to delay the day when your economy grinds to a halt. This is the reality of modern […]
5 June 2019 (AFP) – The noxious air hanging over India’s towns and cities kills more than 100,000 children under five every year, a damning study published Wednesday for World Environment Day found. India has repeatedly failed to address environmental concerns. Last year a UN report found 14 of the world’s 15 most polluted cities […]
