The Washington Post
For decades, the federal government has prioritized oil and gas drilling, hardrock mining and livestock grazing on public lands across the country. That could soon change under a far-reaching Interior Department rule that puts conservation, recreation and renewable energy development on equal footing with resource extraction.
The final rule released Thursday represents a seismic shift in the management of roughly 245 million acres of public property — about one-tenth of the nation’s land mass. It is expected to draw praise from conservationists and legal challenges from fossil fuel industry groups and Republican officials, some of whom have lambasted the move as a “land grab.” […]
“Today’s final rule helps restore balance to our public lands as we continue using the best-available science to restore habitats, guide strategic and responsible development, and sustain our public lands for generations to come,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
The Independent (UK)
The Department of Interior is set to announce a ruling that would effectively halt a major mining development in Alaska over concerns that dozens of local tribes will be disrupted by the project.
The Biden administration was set to issue a “no action” ruling for the federal land previously set to be the site of Ambler Road, a proposed 211-mile industrial road deep through the Alaskan wilderness, multiple news outlets reported.
The project was set to go through the Arctic National Park and Preserve, a major piece of protected land in the northern half of the state. […]
The project was also a controversial issue for the tribes as it was approved just days before Donald Trump left office by an Interior head who Politico found to have covered up environmental and tribal impacts studied as part of the planning process.
CBS News
California has quietly passed a major energy milestone this week signaling advancements in renewable energy usage across the state. Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson has seen a surprising trend.
For a period of time -- 15 minutes to 6 hours -- each day for the last month or so, the state's energy grid has been fueled 100% by clean renewables.
"California has exceeded 100% of its demand on the grid by just wind, water and solar," Jacobson said. […]
Jacobson added that the state's taxes on natural gas have made equipment like solar energy more economically attractive.
EuroNews
Last year was the best year on record for new wind energy installation.
The world installed 116 gigawatts of new wind power capacity in 2023, according to the latest Global Wind Report from industry trade association the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). That is a 50 per cent increase from 2022 making it the best year on record for new wind projects. […]
Seven countries now generate all of their energy from renewable sources, according to figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
More than 99.7 per cent of electricity in Albania, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iceland, Nepal, Paraguay and the Democratic Republic of Congo comes from geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power.
E&E News / EnergyWire
U.S. renewable energy investment reached a record $88 billion in 2023, rebounding from a spike in interest rates that saw banks retreat from the sector in 2022. The findings, presented Wednesday at the BloombergNEF clean energy summit in New York, illustrate the growing financial strength of wind and solar.
Lending to renewables dropped in 2022 as central banks around the world raised interest rates to combat inflation. In 2022, lending to renewable projects fell by 27 percent in North America, 33 percent in Europe and 32 percent in Asian countries outside of China, BloombergNEF’s figures show.
But investment rebounded last year, driven by new financing strategies by developers and utilities and a surge of government policies aimed at stimulating clean energy investment.
Inside Climate News
The four western states that have traditionally exported large amounts of electricity generated with fossil fuels to neighboring states are poised to draw tens of billions of dollars by exporting clean energy across state lines, but only if the region can successfully expand the vast network of interstate transmission lines needed to distribute the electricity, according to a new study released Wednesday by RMI, the clean energy research and advocacy group.
At stake is a market for electricity from Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Montana that could grow to nearly $50 billion by 2050 or dwindle to just $3 billion if more transmission lines aren’t built. The economic impacts could be far-reaching, not just for those four states, but the entire Western U.S. If the entire region was able to coordinate interstate transmission lines, for example, it could reduce the cost of shifting to a carbon-free grid by 30 percent, according to the report, saving billions of dollars for ratepayers across the West and enabling states to better meet their clean energy goals.
“The larger area you plan over, the larger the savings,” said Tyler Farrell, a senior associate at RMI’s carbon-free electricity program and co-author of the study.
Mongabay
Forest clearing detected by Brazil’s deforestation alert system fell to the lowest level in nearly five years, according to data released last week by the country’s space agency, INPE.
INPE’s satellite-based tracking system recorded deforestation of 162 square kilometers in March, bringing the total loss over the past twelve months to 4,816 square kilometers, the lowest annual level registered since May 2019. This 12-month tally is down 53% relative to this time last year.
The deforestation alert system run by Imazon, an independent Brazilian NGO, reports an even larger decline of 65% for the year ended February 29, 2020.
The University of Vermont
While it’s common knowledge that mountaintops are colder than the valleys below, a new University of Vermont (UVM) study is flipping the script on what we know about forests and climate.
The study, published in Ecology and Evolution, explores forests that experience “cold-air pooling,” a phenomenon where cold air at higher elevations drains down into lower-lying valleys, reversing the expected temperatures—warm at the bottom, cold at the top—that typically occurs in mountainous areas. That is, the air temperature drops with descent from mountain to valley.
“With temperature inversions, we also see vegetation inversions,” says lead study author and former UVM postdoctoral researcher Melissa Pastore. “Instead of finding more cold-preferring species like spruce and fir at high elevations, we found them in lower elevations—just the opposite of what we expect.”
And the effect on these ecosystems is substantial: “This cold-air pooling is fundamentally structuring the forest,” says study coauthor and UVM professor Carol Adair.
Grist
In much of the United States, groundwater extraction is unregulated and unlimited. There are few rules governing who can pump water from underground aquifers or how much they can take. This lack of regulation has allowed farmers nationwide to empty aquifers of trillions of gallons of water for irrigation and livestock. Droughts fueled by climate change have exacerbated this trend by depleting rivers and reservoirs, increasing reliance on this dwindling groundwater.
In many places, such as California’s Central Valley, the results have been devastating. As aquifers decline, residential wells start to yield contaminated water or else dry up altogether, forcing families to rely on emergency deliveries of bottled water. Large-scale groundwater pumping has also caused land to sink and form fissures, threatening to collapse key infrastructure like roads, bridges, and canals. These local impacts have been the price of an economic model that provides big farmers with unlimited access to cheap water.
At a tense 12-hour hearing that lasted well into the night on Tuesday, California officials struck a big blow against that model. The state board that regulates water voted unanimously to take control of groundwater in the Tulare Lake subbasin, one of the state’s largest farming areas, imposing a first-of-its-kind mandatory fee on water pumping by farmers in the area.
NPR News
Cary Fowler was enjoying a comfortable retirement at his country home in New York. The food activist, who's in his 70s, already has shelves full of prestigious awards honoring his efforts to preserve the seeds of endangered crop varieties around the globe.
But something gnawed at him. A job left undone. "There was one big project I hadn't had a chance to tackle," he says.
He's now taking on that daunting project and has recruited partners that include the U.N. and the African Union. It's a quest to revive traditional food crops and fight the unhealthy dominance of major crops like corn, wheat and rice in farmers' fields and consumers' diets. Fowler has made it the centerpiece of his new job as the U.S. State Department's special envoy for global food security.
CPR News
The Olander family has been farming near Loveland since the 1920s. They’ve grown everything from alfalfa to corn used to feed dairy cows. […]
Nearly a decade ago, Todd Olander, 44, started worrying about that snowpack, the future of the family’s farm, and whether he could count on the run-off being a reliable source of irrigation water. […]
In 2016, Olander opened Root Shoot Malting, which supplies grain and malt for Colorado’s craft beer industry, which is one of the biggest in the country and produced more than 830,000 barrels last year, according to data from the Brewer’s Association. […]
Olander said microbrewers prize barley that can be grown with less water and varieties he said respond well to more sustainable farming practices. Root Shoot has successfully used low-till farming methods and tried different crop rotations that keep the soil moist and healthy. Olander said he’s also had good results with varieties of winter barley, which are planted in the fall and often need less irrigation because they hit their peak before spring moisture bakes away.
Wired
Patrick Holden strolls across the field, pausing from time to time to bend and point out a bumblebee, or a white butterfly, or a dung beetle. A wide expanse of blue sky stretches above. Beneath, undulating green hills, sprawling hedgerows, a horizon broken only by the jagged tips of Wales’ Cambrian mountain range. Sun-soaked goodness.
“Can you see that bumblebee working the clover?” he asks, voice breathy with exertion. “The bird life, insects, butterflies, small mammals, and bats ... the biodiversity of this place is unbelievable.” This is all here, he says, because he’s farming in harmony with nature.
The secret to this small oasis, Holden says, is the way he works his land. He is one of a growing number of farmers shaking off conventional methods and harnessing practices to rebuild soil health and fertility—cover crops, minimal tilling, managed grazing, diverse crop rotations. It is a reverse revolution in some ways, taking farming back to what it once was, when yield was not king, industrialization not the norm, and small farms dabbled in many things rather than specializing in one. […]
Soil is second only to the ocean in its carbon-absorbing capacity—it holds more than the atmosphere and all the planet’s plants and forests combined. But centuries of damaging, industrialized agriculture have left the earth depleted and spewed ton of CO2 into the ether.
Canada’s National Observer
A group of researchers and conservationists is trying to bolster the soil health of hundreds of farms in Ontario's Greenbelt to help alleviate climate change.
The two-year project offers farmers in the Greenbelt — a strip of protected farmland and conservation areas near Toronto — free soil testing and advice on how to improve their soil's health. Healthy soils are less prone to erosion and nutrient runoff. They also act as a carbon sink to help moderate the amount of planet-warming gases in the atmosphere by storing organic matter and other forms of carbon in the ground.
The Washington Post
The camels had thump-thumped for seven days across northern Kenya, ushered by police reservists, winding at last toward their destination: less a village than a dusty clearing in the scrub, a place where something big was happening. People had walked for miles to be there. Soon the governor pulled up in his SUV. Women danced, and an emcee raised his hands to the sky. When the crowd gathered around an enclosure holding the camels, one man said he was looking at “the future.”
The camels had arrived to replace the cows. […]
The regional government had purchased the camels from traders near the border with Somalia, at $600 per head. So far 4,000 camels, as part of that program, have been distributed across the lowlands of the county, speeding up a shift that had already been happening for decades across several other cattle-dependent parts of Africa. A handful of communities, particularly in Kenya and Ethiopia, are in various stages of the transition, according to academic studies.
The global camel population has doubled over the last 20 years, something the U.N. agency for agriculture and investment attributes partly to the animal’s suitability amid climate change. In times of hardship, camels produce more milk than cows.
AP News
There was no shortage of stressors to the global economy when Ajay Banga took charge at the World Bank almost a year ago: inflation eating at nations drowning in debt, a once-in-a-generation pandemic, climate disasters and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. […]
Banga highlighted new initiatives being announced at the meetings, including plans to provide 300 million people in Africa with electricity by 2030 and 1.5 billion people worldwide with health care access over the same time frame.
He stressed the bank’s role in financing climate projects and renewing its focus on major cross-border projects that can affect large numbers of people, especially as member nations increasingly compete in trade and isolationism is on the rise. […]
Banga is under pressure to deliver on putting climate at the forefront, while climate activists and advocates for developing nations have their own ideas about how to proceed.
Nature
Climate litigation is in the spotlight again after a landmark decision last week. The top European human-rights court deemed that the Swiss government was violating its citizens’ human rights through its lack of climate action. The case, brought by more than 2,000 older women, is one of more than 2,300 climate lawsuits that have been filed against companies and governments around the world (see ‘Climate cases soar’).
But does legal action relating to climate change make a difference to nations’ and corporations’ actions? Litigation is spurring on governments and companies to ramp up climate measures, say researchers.
“There are a number of notable climate wins in court that have led to action by governments,” says Lucy Maxwell, a human-rights lawyer and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, a non-profit organization in London.
The New York Times
The faithful gathered in an imposing modernist building, thousands of men in skullcaps and women in veils sitting shoulder to shoulder. Their leader took to his perch and delivered a stark warning.
“Our fatal shortcomings as human beings have been that we treat the earth as just an object,” Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar said. “The greedier we are toward nature, the sooner doomsday will arrive.”
Then he prescribed the cure as laid out by their faith, which guides almost a quarter of humanity. Like fasting during Ramadan, it is every Muslim’s Fard al-Ayn, or obligation, to be a guardian of the earth. Like giving alms, his congregants should give waqf, a kind of religious donation, to renewable energy. Like daily prayers, planting trees should be a habit.
Yale Climate Connections
[…] Last fall, India’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs launched a $7 billion initiative to support 10,000 new electric buses in 169 Indian cities. The PM-eBus Sewa program prioritizes small to medium-sized cities of up to 4 million people, particularly those now lacking organized bus service. India hopes this will make public transport — not private vehicles — integral to sustainable urban growth and city culture in the country that last year overtook China to become the world’s most populous nation.
India’s burgeoning cities are expected to be home to an estimated 416 million more people by 2050 — the largest urban increase in the world. Massive growth could worsen both traffic congestion and air quality in a country that already has nine of the 10 most polluted cities on the planet and ranks second in deaths related to transportation pollution.
But more traffic and pollution is not inevitable, since India has yet to build 70 to 80% of city infrastructure that will be needed by 2050. The government initiative aims to make clean, electrified public transportation the norm. […]
In India, transportation is the third-largest source of emissions, after power generation and industry.
Scientific American
In the 1970s a nation confronted a crisis of traffic deaths, many of them deaths of children. Protesters took to the streets to fight an entrenched culture of drivers who considered roads their domain alone. But this wasn’t the U.S.—it was the Netherlands. In 1975 the rate of traffic deaths there was 20 percent higher than in the U.S., but by the mid-2000s it had fallen to 60 percent lower than in the U.S. How did this happen?
Thanks to Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop Child Murder”), a Dutch grassroots movement, traffic deaths fell and streets were restored for people, not cars. Today the country is a haven for cyclists and pedestrians, with people of all ages commuting via protected bike lanes and walking with little fear of being run over. It’s time the U.S. and other countries followed that example.
The U.S. has the highest number of traffic deaths among wealthy countries, with more than 38,000 deaths per year between 2015 and 2019. The death rate is more than double the average rate in other wealthy countries. Vehicle crashes are among the leading causes of death in the U.S. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can design or redesign streets to make people drive more slowly or to discourage driving altogether. We can invest in better public transit, including subways and buses with dependable, on-time service. And we can change zoning laws to allow denser housing and mixed-use developments, so people can live closer to where they work, attend school or socialize. These are changes that even the largest, most sprawling cities can and should implement.
The Guardian
[…] In many cities, forests and ecosystems around the world, the sounds of nature are falling silent. But in New Zealand’s capital, people are experiencing a crescendo in birdsong, thanks to decades of conservation efforts. Some species, such as the kororā, are still at risk, but many native birds have bounced back in their thousands, transforming the city’s morning chorus. […]
Fifty years ago, when Jack and Jill Fenaughty bought their then bare, rugged farmland in Mākara – 25 minutes from the city centre – they were lucky if they encountered an introduced bird species, let alone a native one.
“You saw hardly any native birds,” Jill says. “Now,” Jack jumps in, “the dawn chorus is so loud, we have to shut the doors if we want a lie-in.”
Wellington may be bucking local and international trends, but nearly 30 years ago conservationist Jim Lynch described the city as a “biodiversity basket case”. […]
In the mid-1990s, Lynch began work to found a new bird sanctuary in a patch of native forest around a decommissioned city reservoir. Dubbed “Zealandia”, it would become the world’s first fully fenced urban ecosanctuary. By 2000, all major predators – cats, possums, rats and ferrets – had been eradicated inside. As native species thrived within the fence, Zealandia worked as a centre, from which recovered bird populations radiated out into the city’s neighbourhoods.
NASA
As extreme weather events increase around the world due to climate change, the need for further research into our warming planet has increased as well. For NASA, climate research involves not only conducting studies of these events, but also empowering outside researchers to do the same. The artificial intelligence (AI) efforts spearheaded by the agency offer a powerful tool to accomplish these goals.
Foundation models serve as a baseline from which scientists can develop a diverse set of applications, enabling powerful and efficient solutions. “Foundation models only know what things are represented in the data,” explained Manil Maskey, the data science lead at NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer (OCSDO). “It’s like a Swiss Army Knife—it can be used for multiple different things.”
NPR News
[…] Corals are the builders of reefs, their skeletons creating the vast infrastructure that tens of thousands of other species depend on. But corals are powered by the tiny algae that live in their tissue, which provide food for them.
"They're these microscopic, sort of nondescript algae," says Matthew Nitschke, research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, as he magnifies a few under a microscope, revealing golden-brown circles. […]
"I think anyone who wasn't worried, needs to be worried now," says Kate Quigley, coral biologist at James Cook University in Australia and the Minderoo Foundation. "Nature has time to make mistakes and then adjust. We don't have that time." […]
"What we're really doing is natural selection in a bottle," [Nitschke] says. "We're really excited about the possibility for that to help corals persist into the future."
Science
The helicopter hovered overhead, whipping up snow. Shielding his face, Peter Neff grabbed the dangling cargo load and guided it to the Antarctic ice. The helicopter sped back to the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon, 20 kilometers away, to fetch more gear. One trip down, 17 more to go, thought Neff, a polar glaciologist at the University of Minnesota (UM) Twin Cities. Time was ticking away on this day in January. In the best-case scenario, Neff and his team would have just 10 days to drill ice cores on Canisteo, a peninsula on the west coast of Antarctica—and a blizzard was already looming.
Everything about Neff’s plan was unconventional. Scientists usually target sites deep in the continent’s interior, where the weather is calmer and they can spend years collecting kilometers-long ice cores that record hundreds of thousands of years of climate history. Neff needed just a couple hundred years of history, and he only needed to drill 150 meters deep to get it. But his chosen location was exceptionally remote and stormy.
He was there because of what lay some 130 kilometers away, across a bay from Canisteo: the gargantuan rivers of ice known as the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, which jut into the Amundsen Sea as frozen shelves tens of kilometers wide. These glaciers act as corks in the bottle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which spans a large swath of the continent and stores enough water to raise sea level by 3 to 5 meters. Global warming is loosening the corks.
The University of Washington
As carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, the Earth will get hotter. But exactly how much warming will result from a certain increase in CO2 is under study. The relationship between CO2 and warming, known as climate sensitivity, determines what future we should expect as CO2 levels continue to climb.
New research led by the University of Washington analyzes the most recent ice age, when a large swath of North America was covered in ice, to better understand the relationship between CO2 and global temperature. It finds that while most future warming estimates remain unchanged, the absolute worst-case scenario is unlikely.
The open-access study was published April 17 in Science Advances.
“The main contribution from our study is narrowing the estimate of climate sensitivity, improving our ability to make future warming projections,” said lead author Vince Cooper, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. “By looking at how much colder Earth was in the ancient past with lower levels of greenhouse gases, we can estimate how much warmer the current climate will get with higher levels of greenhouse gases.”
The Guardian
With private investors poised to profit from water scarcity in the west, US senator Elizabeth Warren and representative Ro Khanna are pursuing a bill to prohibit the trading of water as a commodity.
The lawmakers will introduce the bill on Thursday afternoon, the Guardian has learned. “Water is not a commodity for the rich and powerful to profit off of,” said Warren, the progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. “Representative Khanna and I are standing up to protect water from Wall Street speculation and ensure one of our most essential resources isn’t auctioned off to the highest bidder.”
Water-futures trading allows investors – including hedge funds, farmers and municipalities – to trade water and water rights as a commodity, similar to oil or gold…
Warren and Khanna’s Future of Water Act has been reintroduced amid growing concerns about meddling from investors in western water rights. The bill was originally introduced two years ago but did not get taken up for a vote. The lawmakers and supporters of the bill argue that now is a crucial moment to re-introduce it – and stop water-futures trading before the climate crisis and booming water speculation threaten to shrink supplies and inflate prices.
Yale Climate Communication
Most Americans think global warming is happening and human-caused; however, there are important knowledge gaps and misconceptions. For example, only one in five Americans understand that nearly all climate scientists (more than 90%) agree that human-caused global warming is happening. Understanding these knowledge gaps and what people want to know can help communicators identify what topics to emphasize. […]
Americans are most interested in learning about solutions to global warming (44%), followed by evidence that it is happening (20%) or information about the causes (18%). Fewer Americans (11%) would ask first about the impacts of global warming. […]
While Americans are less likely to ask first about the impacts of climate change…
Research has found that emphasizing climate change as an urgent threat happening “here and now” and causing harm to many people (e.g., children, local communities) can promote public support for climate action.
CNN
Record-breaking heat waves, severe floods and acute wildfires, exacerbated by climate change, carry a colossal price tag: an approximately 19% reduction in global income over just the next 26 years, a new study published Wednesday found.
That financial gut punch won’t just affect big governments and corporations. According to the United Nations, the world is heading toward a gain of nearly 3 degrees of global warming in the next century, even with current climate policies and goals – and researchers say individuals could bear the economic burden.
The researchers in Wednesday’s study, published in Nature, said financial pain in the short-term is inevitable, even if governments ramp up their efforts to tackle the crisis now. […]
However, they say immediate actions to reduce climate change could stem some losses in the longer term. […]
“For many Americans, this financial loss will require difficult decisions about how to pay for food, housing, and other daily expenses, which climate change will increase by approximately 9 percent over their lifetime,” the paper said.
Ars Technica
Almost from the start, arguments about mitigating climate change have included an element of cost-benefit analysis: Would it cost more to move the world off fossil fuels than it would to simply try to adapt to a changing world? A strong consensus has built that the answer to the question is a clear no, capped off by a Nobel in Economics given to one of the people whose work was key to building that consensus.
While most academics may have considered the argument put to rest, it has enjoyed an extended life in the political sphere. Large unknowns remain about both the costs and benefits, which depend in part on the remaining uncertainties in climate science and in part on the assumptions baked into economic models.
In Wednesday's edition of Nature, a small team of researchers analyzed how local economies have responded to the last 40 years of warming and projected those effects forward to 2050. They find that we're already committed to warming that will see the growth of the global economy undercut by 20 percent. That places the cost of even a limited period of climate change at roughly six times the estimated price of putting the world on a path to limit the warming to 2° C.