The United States’ commitment to combatting climate change will affect the entire world. Last week, the Supreme Court froze Obama’s plan to uphold that commitment, sparking fears that the Paris climate agreement would fall apart. But the death of justice Antonin Scalia over the weekend changes everything.
Will we look back and remember this week as the week it all changed?
In the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement, it is pretty shocking to see these photographs taken in the Shanxi province in Northern China. Shanxi is the leading producer of coal in the most populated country in the world, with about 260 billion metric tons of coal deposits, a third of China’s total. The region…
Hours before the historic Paris climate accord was to be ratified in a final vote, someone noticed that a word had been changed in the final draft of the text—a single word that threatened to derail the entire deal.
After two weeks of marathon negotiations, 195 countries approved an accord that would wean the world off fossil fuels this century, limiting global warming to 2ºC, with an aspirational target of 1.5ºC. It’s the first successful end to a global climate summit after two decades of failed negotiations.
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.
Despite pulling another all-nighter, world leaders have been unable to reach a firm consensus over their climate negotiations in Paris. It’s now expected that an agreement won’t be signed before Saturday.
The historic Paris climate talks have reached their eleventh hour, and world leaders are scrambling to put the finishing—but very important—touches on the accord that could save our planet from apocalyptic climate change.
In December of 2015, 195 countries announced that even a global effort to reduce emissions probably won’t prevent the catastrophic warming of the planet. But there is a way we can reach our climate goals. It’s not a pledge. It’s not a tax. It’s easier than that. We ban cars.
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.
As the second week of global climate negotiations gets underway, the world waits for national leaders to make meaningful commitments to save the planet. But it’s become clear that cities, not countries, are leading the way in the fight against climate change.
As the Paris climate summit draws to a close and world leaders scramble to find more ways to make a dent in humanity’s carbon problem, a commonsense but oft-ignored strategy has made its way onto the table: sticking carbon back in the soil.
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.
As the world warms, we lose arable land to grow the food we all need to survive. But although our changing climate is one big problem our food supply faces, it’s certainly not the only one—and even fixing the effects of climate change might not generate enough food to feed future generations.
In more temperate parts of the world, ice is just ice, but in Antarctica, ice is everything. It defines Antarctica: Earth’s southern polar ice cap, a 5.4-million square mile ice sheet, covers 98% of the continent. But within the next hundred years, Antarctica stands to lose much of that ice, especially in its western…
The building and construction industry is a massive source of global CO2 emissions—but it could easily reduce its impact with existing technology. At today’s climate talks in Paris, 18 countries and 60 organizations formed a new alliance aimed at doing just that.
At the climate talks in Paris, the French government has announced a global competition which aims to create a small electric car that will sell for under $7,500.
In the late 1960s a good chunk of the world’s brightest minds and fanciest labs were devoted to one thing: space exploration. When NASA’s funding peaked in 1966 the organisation employed 400,000 people and consumed more than 4% of the US federal budget. Three years later, after less than a decade of serious…
When your town is continually threatened by floods or your village’s fields become too dry to grow crops, there are two options: move on, or stick around and try to make things work. At the Paris climate talks, there’s a swell of opinion to encourage the latter.
Right now, world leaders in Paris are trying to stop climate change from altering the world inexorably. But for hundreds of thousands of people who live in some low-lying nations, it’s already late in the game.
