Earlier this week, one of the biggest re-insurance companies in the world started implementing a policy reflecting the growing risk around new coal projects. Swiss Re announced on Monday it would no longer insure companies that get 30 percent of their revenue or generate 30 percent of their power from coal burned for…
To fix climate change, everything has to change. This much is true and known. But new research out in Nature Climate Change this week shows how tall the task is in particularly stark terms.
If you’re looking for a beacon of climate hope in our dark, wretched world, look to Costa Rica. The country accounts for a fraction of the world’s carbon emissions, but something like 99 percent of global ambition to address climate change. Case in point: this week, its new president announced he plans to make the…
Earth Day is nearly upon us, which means it is time for brands to declare their love for Mother Earth in corporate reports and Medium posts. On Thursday, Lyft did the latter, announcing the company was buying carbon offsets for all rides.
On Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt announced his intent to weaken fuel economy standards with a bunch of auto industry reps there to cheer him on, because of course.
Wooden skyscrapers are fast becoming a trend in sustainable construction, with dozens planned across the country. Two buildings in Portland, Oregon—Carbon12, a new all-timber high-rise building, and Framework, another in progress that will be 12 stories—offer an early look at what it will take for the trend to develop…
Coal is dying. Long live renewables.
Everyone with half a brain knows we need to address climate change by cutting carbon emissions. One of the policy options you may have heard a lot about is cap and trade. But what exactly is that, and does it really work?
The world’s carbon emissions were flat for three years, leaving many scientists to speculate about if we’d hit a turning point in our fight with climate change.
Scientists at NASA have created a stunning high-resolution 3D visualization showing the complex ebbs and flows of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere over the course of an entire year. It’s a unique perspective that’s sure to change the way you think about this problematic greenhouse gas.
In what’s being seen as a huge step forward in the effort to curb climate-warming emissions, the United States and China have ratified the Paris global climate agreement. Other countries are now expected to follow suit.
This may look like just another rock, but its so much more than that. It’s also a storage unit for carbon emissions—and it could finally give us a way to backtrack a bit on what we’ve done to our climate.
Whether you’re counting by calories, pounds, or dollars, the world is wasting a huge amount of food. But there’s also another way to measure it: The quantity of resources we burn up for nothing at all.
The final climate agreement draft won’t come until this weekend but a group of activists have found a way to mark the end of the COP21 summit on a somewhat hopeful note.
Let’s face it, if we’re going to save the planet from ourselves, we’re going to have to develop cleaner technologies. Here’s what the future has in store once we make the transition to a high-tech, low-carbon world.
There might not be any better news as 196 countries head into a second week of climate negotiations in Paris. A Stanford-led study claims that we might have hit global peak emissions in 2014. But that’s not a call for complacency: There is still much work to be done.
Infectious diseases like polio and malaria might be gone in 15 years because the founder of Microsoft devoted a foundation to eradicating them. Now Bill Gates has turned his attention towards our global energy crisis, which he thinks can also be fixed with better R&D. And, yes, he’s going to fund it.
Geoengineering — hacking Earth’s climate system to reverse global warming — often sounds a bit preposterous, whether we’re talking about deploying giant space mirrors or dumping a bunch of iron filings into the ocean. The latest proposal? Dusting the stratosphere with billions of dollars worth of powdered diamond.
Need to get from New York to Paris? Or San Diego? Chances are, you’re hopping on a plane. But commercial flights aren’t just annoying and expensive — they also input a ton of carbon into the environment, contributing to climate change. So what if we stopped flights to save the planet? What would happen next?
At a UNESCO climate conference last week, scientists declared (once again) that climate change is already happening. The evidence is our wacky weather—even Paris, where the conference was held, was broiling in a historic heatwave. But the biggest red flag is the rise in peak global mean temperatures: Which means…
