#climate-policy

#climate-policy

Many books describe how the first atomic bomb was built. But this history by Emily Seyl stands apart. It tells the story of the bomb's Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945 through restored photographs from the Los Alamos National Laboratory's National Security Research Center, where Seyl works. These include images of once-clandestine documents and experiments, as well as unfamiliar restored photographs of 'trinitite' - green glass found at the test crater - which fell from the bomb's fireball in molten drops.

The moment you really take your own climate policy seriously, then you should at least restrict the availability of all those promotional materials, where the only thing they try to do is to promote and normalize these high-carbon lifestyles. Burning fossil fuels is one of the key drivers of climate change, with transport, including cars, aviation and shipping, accounting for about a quarter of global emissions.

Absolutely, I have experienced investing in a way that green growth has led to both equitable growth and decarbonization, but also have lived experience of what degrowth can do to a country, and how, in my view, [degrowth] is not really a solution.

Reaching net zero would cost about 4bn a year, the CCC found, or close to 100bn by 2050, which was roughly equivalent to the energy-related costs of the fossil fuel shocks that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The findings contradict widespread claims made by rightwing thinktanks and populist politicians including the Reform party that net zero would represent a crippling cost of 9tn to the UK's economy.

Hudson Valley families are being suffocated with rising energy costs, because of Governor Hochul's failed and disastrous energy policies. It is time to reverse course. I'm calling for Indian Point to be rebuilt and reopened.

While the previous law required most newly installed heating systems to use at least 65% renewable energy, often with a heat pump, the reformed legislation will allow households to keep using oil and gas. It also removes a mandate for expert consultation when installing a new heating system.

Many planned projects have been delayed or scrapped. Adrian Odenweller and Falko Ueckerdt at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany tracked 190 projects globally that were due to begin operating in 2023. The researchers found that only 7% of these had begun operations as scheduled.

Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.

Maher had a lot to say about the current president's recent attacks on climate change. "He thinks it's just some bullshit that people made up out of nothing to get rich. You know, like crypto," Maher said. He went on to say that the EPA's recent decision to stop regulating climate change was arguably "the biggest dick move in American history."

President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government's legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet." - The New York Times A new ruling from the Trump administration says that when the sun disappears at night, we don't know where it goes. All remaining top scientists have been taken from their positions and tasked with getting to the bottom of this.

Donald Trump is temporary. He'll be gone in three years,

Campaigners from the Climate Action Network, a pan-European group of NGOs, said European industry was under real pressure from high energy prices, ageing assets, global overcapacity and delayed investments, but these issues could not be solved by watering down climate and environmental policies. Deregulation is not an industrial strategy, the group wrote in an open letter, which argued that the problems facing energy-intensive industries, including steel, cement and chemicals, were driven by prices of fossil fuel-derived energy and global market dynamics, rather than environmental regulation.

New York is an incongruous state. We're home to fabulous wealth - if the state were a country, it would have the tenth largest economy in the world - but also the highest rate of wealth inequality. We're among the most diverse - but also the most segregated. We passed the nation's most ambitious climate law - but haven't been meeting its deadlines and continue to subsidize industries hastening the climate crisis.

Jewish community sees eye-to-eye on, especially these days. So when over a thousand members of the community from all denominations and across the state get behind a single issue, it's no small deal. The issue at hand? Governor Hochul's abdication of leadership when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. It's pretty simple. The Governor, previously a keen champion for climate action, is quietly (and sometimes, not so quietly) walking back previous commitments and refusing to take on new ones.

"Let's be realistic." That's the advice coming from a growing number of voices in climate circles in the United States. In October, billionaire Bill Gates argued that a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius is unavoidable and not a " super bad outcome"-a view unlikely to be shared by the millions of people whose homes would be destroyed by the resulting killer storms and rising seas.

Most Americans now accept the basic physics of climate change-that manmade greenhouse-gas emissions are raising global temperatures. Yet the public discussion of climate change is still remarkably broken in the United States. Leaders of one political party frame climate change as an existential emergency that threatens human life and prosperity. Leaders of the other dismiss it as a distraction from economic growth and energy security. Economists like me, trained to think about trade-offs,

The year 2025 began with President Trump withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement the opening salvo in what would become a concerted campaign to dismantle the nation's ability to combat climate change. From there, the Trump administration moved aggressively to gut key emissions standards for power plants and vehicles; suspend offshore wind projects; open millions of acres of protected land for fossil fuel extraction; extend the life of dirty coal plants; and reverse key Inflation Reduction Act initiatives.

"Without a large global carbon tax (which is, unfortunately, politically unachievable), market forces do not properly incentivize the creation of technologies to reduce climate-related emissions," Gates writes. To stop global temperatures from increasing, we need to replace all emissions-emitting activities with affordable alternatives, Gates says. He particularly calls out industrial emissions and aviation as areas that need innovation. And governmental policies-"in rich countries," he notes-are crucial to bringing about that innovation, "because unless innovations reach scale, the costs won't come down and we won't achieve the impact we need."

A few months ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a Georgia representative, held a hearing on her bill to ban research on geoengineering, which refers to technological climate interventions, such as using reflective particles to reflect away sunlight. The hearing represented something of a first a Republican raising alarm bells about human activity altering the health of the planet. Of course, for centuries, people have burned fossil fuels to power and feed society, emitting greenhouse gases that now overheat the planet.