BEIJING, 9 December 2015 (AP) – Unhealthy smog hovered over downtown Beijing as limits on cars, factories and construction sites kept pollution from spiking even higher Wednesday, on the second of three days of restrictions triggered by the city’s first red alert for smog. Cars with even-numbered license plates were kept off roads, and schools […]
By Tom Phillips in Beijing7 December 2015 (The Guardian) – Beijing has issued its first pollution red alert as acrid smog enveloped the Chinese capital for the second time this month. The alert will begin at 7am on Tuesday and should see millions of vehicles forced off the roads, factories and construction sites shut down […]
By Tom Phillips, with additional reporting by Luna Lin8 November 2015 BEIJING (The Guardian) – Residents of north-eastern China donned gas masks and locked themselves indoors on Sunday after their homes were enveloped by some of the worst levels of smog on record. Levels of PM2.5, a tiny airborne particulate linked to cancer and heart […]
[cf. Peak Coal in China? Not so fast –Des] By Tom Phillips, with additional reporting by Luna Lin 4 November 2015 (Beijing) – China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has been dramatically underreporting the amount of coal it consumes each year, it has been claimed ahead of key climate talks in Paris. Official Chinese data, […]
By Katherine Purvis16 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Around the world, fresh water supplies are drying up: California in the US and São Paulo in Brazil are enduring historic droughts, groundwater sources have been plundered in south Asia, and globally more than 750 million people lack access to safe drinking water. The global fresh water […]
By Lee Fang25 August 2015 (The Intercept) – Christopher Horner, an attorney who claims that the earth is cooling, is known within the scientific community for hounding climate change researchers with relentless investigations and public ridicule, often deriding scientists as “communists” and frauds. Horner is a regular guest on Fox News and CNN, and has […]
By Dan Levin 13 August 2015 BEIJING (The New York Times) – Outdoor air pollution contributes to the deaths of an estimated 1.6 million people in China every year, or about 4,400 people a day, according to a newly released scientific paper [pdf]. The paper maps the geographic sources of China’s toxic air and concludes […]
By Simon Evans21 July 2015 (Carbon Brief) – It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that the shale gas revolution has led to a fall in US emissions. But what if that wasn’t true? New research published in Nature Communications suggests it was the global financial crisis, not fracking, that has done most to reduce […]
March 2015 (CoalSwarm / Sierra Club) – Because coal is the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel and coal plants have a long lifespan, growth in coal capacity has major implications for climate stability. From 2004 to 2013, increased coal utilization outweighed all other sources combined, producing 62 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions growth from fossil […]
By Brad Plumer 9 July 2015 (Vox) – Earlier this week, I wrote about the global coal renaissance — arguably the most important climate-change story in the world right now. Since 2000, developing countries like China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia have been building coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace. On the upside, this boom […]
