#climate-policy

#climate-policy

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.

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.

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.

It seems possible that what will ultimately emerge is a clarified sense of principles and a deeper commitment to them (which is why part of the conflict is over American history itself). On one hand, there are the heads of the federal government and their spokespeople, whose lies are part of their disdain for the electorate and the rule of law.

F or the first few months of Mark Carney's prime ministerial tenure, Canada's climate community of advocacy groups, think tanks, journalists, and scientists held their judgement-and their breath. A former United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance was now running the country; surely, that was a good thing. But the moment he took office, he stopped talking about emissions. Where was this going, exactly?

A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy. Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we'd built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings.

Hundreds of Arctic rivers and streams are turning bright red-orange, not from chemical pollution, but from naturally occurring iron spilling from long-frozen ground as temperatures warm. The "rusting rivers" phenomenon, which has been documented across the Brooks Range in northern Alaska, offers a vivid example of the effects of climate change in a region that is warming faster than the global average. The finding was reported in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual Arctic Report Card, released Tuesday. NOAA has released the report for 20 years as a way to track rapid changes in the northernmost part of the planet.

The once-rigid link between economic growth and carbon emissions is breaking across the vast majority of the world, according to a study released ahead of Friday's 10th anniversary of the Paris climate agreement. The analysis, which underscores the effectiveness of strong government climate policies, shows this decoupling trend has accelerated since 2015 and is becoming particularly pronounced among major emitters in the global south. Countries representing 92% of the global economy have now decoupled consumption-based carbon emissions and GDP expansion, according to the report by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

Governor Gavin Newsom stood before global leaders in Brazil recently at COP30, the annual United Nations climate conference, and introduced himself to the world as the new face of U.S. climate ambition. The scene raised a question back home in California: Why did Newsom recently veto climate solutions that would have made electricity cleaner and more affordable for Californians? For decades, California has shown the world that states and regions can drive climate and economic progress, even when national governments lag.

It also has a "Belém Mission to 1.5" aimed at "enabling ambition and implementation" of nations' emissions-cutting pledges. Elsewhere, the agreement calls for efforts to at least triple finance for climate adaptation by 2035. Between the lines: The carefully word-smithed document indirectly endorses movement away from fossil fuels. The section on the "Global Implementation Accelerator" shouts out the "United Arab Emirates Consensus." That's the outcome of the 2023 UN talks in Dubai that called for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems."