Climate Change

While burning fossil fuels produces benefits, such as powering the electric grid and fueling cars, it also generates widespread costs to society – including damages from climate change that affect people around the world now and in the future. Public policies that reduce carbon pollution deliver benefits by avoiding these damages. Fellow Joe Aldy argues that President Trump's executive order to reverse Obama-era rules to cut carbon pollution is missing a key element of the equation.

Make no mistake, writes Fellow Heather Coleman of Oxfam America, the President’s skinny budget is climate denialism in action. It essentially zeros out all international climate programs while slashing US climate funding, effectively prioritizing ideology over morality.

The US helped forge the Paris agreement for international reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Now the election of Donald Trump is resetting the climate-diplomacy landscape, and casting a Green Climate Fund for developing nations into doubt. ... “I have nothing positive to say about the financing. Developing countries are right to worry,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, a former Obama official who helped negotiate a 2014 bilateral emissions reduction pact between the US and China.

Midwest Energy News’ 40 Under 40 award program highlights emerging leaders throughout the region and their work in America’s transition to a clean energy economy. ...

Climate-driven disturbances are having profound impacts on coastal ecosystems, with many crucial habitat-forming species in sharp decline. However, among these degraded biomes, examples of resilience are emerging. For this episode of BioScience Talks, we're joined by Dr. Jennifer O'Leary, a California Sea Grant Marine Biologist based at California Polytechnic State University, and Dr. Fiorenza Micheli, from Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.

So now what? That’s the question those of us who care about the planet, its people — and, you know, basic human decency — have been asking since Election Day. Donald Trump, a climate denier who has promised to gut the Paris accord, scrap the Clean Power Plan, bring back coal, and roll back pollution restrictions is our next president, and the civil and human rights of so many in this country are threatened.

China’s dominance in wind, solar, and hydro energy is growing as the U.S. is falling behind, experts have said.

... Yet, when it comes to the challenge of global warming, California cannot go it alone. There are economic considerations. As White cautioned in La Jolla, "If California remains something of a green island, then it will be that much harder and more costly. The ISO expansion project shows that." In political terms, he added, "it will also be much easier to be picked off… by those who want to see us fail." That could happen at any number of federal venues, suggested White — the EPA, FERC or Congress with budget decisions.

Last year marked the first time in several million years that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 passed 400 parts per million. By looking at what Earth’s climate was like in previous eras of high CO2 levels, scientists are getting a sobering picture of where we are headed. ...