Climate Change

President Biden has an ambitious climate change and energy plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Yet, his agenda offers little on how to prepare for climate impacts, even after wildfires ravaged the West Coast, a record number of hurricanes churned in the Atlantic, and early freezes and drought devastated crops in 2020. Alongside societal decarbonization, we must simultaneously plan for an already changing climate. The Biden administration should develop a national adaptation strategy that prepares us for accelerating climate impacts, steers market and local responses, and promotes justice, writes Linda Shi in The Hill.

Thawing permafrost is releasing microorganisms, with consequences that are still largely unknown, writes Kimberley Miner in the November issues of Scientific American.

... As Americans cast their ballots in next Tuesday’s election, voters have a choice: continued deregulation that could lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions, worsening symptoms of climate change and mass species die-offs or a reversal of those policies and slate of new governmental restrictions.

At the annual UN General Assembly, President Xi of China pledged that his nation would peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and hit net zero emissions by 2060, without revealing how the nation plans to reach those goals. Joe Aldy, an economist and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, joins Host Steve Curwood of Living on Earth to discuss what this step by the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter means for international climate policy in the context of the failed climate leadership by the Trump Administration.

On October 20, Nick Jensen provided testimony before the California State Assembly on the connections between plants, climate change and wildfire. You can watch his testimony starting at timecode 01:02:46 in the video below. He spoke for more than 45 minutes.

It is abundantly clear that climate change is not a future event; it is happening now, and it affects our lives, and our health. In a new report from The Yale Center on Climate Change and Health, Fellow Laura Bozzi and Robert Dubrow tracked 19 indicators on climate change and health in Connecticut across four broad categories — temperature, extreme events, infectious diseases, and air quality — and found disturbing trends in each.

Abstract

Under the hood, Facebook — the sixth most visited website, according to Alexa — is basically a bunch of data centers. Those data centers use up loads of energy, consuming up to 50 times the energy of a typical commercial office building of the same size, the US Department of Energy says. In fact, they account for more than 95% of the energy that Facebook consumes. Urvi Parekh’s job is to make sure the energy they use is clean.

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