Climate Change

It’s music to an environmentalist’s ears: Six Flags Great Adventure wants to power its park with solar energy by installing a solar panel farm on a portion of the 134 acres of land it owns in Jackson, New Jersey. But as the company spells out its plan, the needle scratches across the record: To make room for the panels, it plans to level 66 acres of trees. ...

Proving Paris was not a disaster will mean bridging three main gaps left in the wake of this historic agreement.

I think the agreement has the potential to transform collective action on climate change. Whether the long-term goals of holding warming well below 2 degrees C, or even 1.5 degrees C, are met will depend on how Parties implement their existing commitments and also the extent to which they come forward with greater ambition in the future.

California Sea Grant is pleased to announce the selection of 12 outstanding doctoral graduate students and postdoctoral researchers as recipients of the 2016 Delta Science Fellowship. Awarded periodically by the Delta Stewardship Council’s Delta Science Program and administered by California Sea Grant, the fellowship partners junior scientists with academic and community mentors to work on collaborative data analysis and research projects applicable to the California Bay-Delta system. ...

As part of the White House Water Summit, hosted today in honor of World Water Day, more than 150 institutions have announced their efforts to enhance the sustainability of water in the United States by managing our water resources and infrastructure for the long term. Commitments by two groups with ties to the Energy & Resources Group (ERG) are included:

The Port of Los Angeles paid a Chinese government-owned shipping company $5 million in 2005 to equip cargo vessels to plug into electric shore power while at dock to keep their massive diesel engines from polluting neighborhoods near the harbor. The company, China Shipping, used the money to upgrade 17 ships, but the city didn't get all the promised environmental benefits. Most of the vessels stopped traveling to Los Angeles in 2010, a Times review of shipping industry data showed.

On the Paris agreement itself, I believe that this was the strongest deal that we could have achieved at the global level at this time in history, especially given the constraints that we face in the US Congress on this issue.

Depending on who you ask, the agreement that came out of the conference was either a watershed deal that heralded in the end of the age of fossil fuels or a weak, corporate-driven compromise that consigns marginalized populations, and all of us, to climate chaos. It’s hard at this point to be sure which is closer to the truth.

For thousands of years, the marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern day Iraq were an oasis of green in a dry landscape, hosting a wealth of wildlife. The culture of the Marsh Arab, or Ma'dan, people who live there is tightly interwoven with the ecosystem of the marshes.