A (non-comprehensive) list of interesting and relevant climate change, climate policy, and environmental justice stories.
What If the Clean Energy Transition Costs Much Less Than We’ve Been Told? Talk about the astronomical costs of a sustainable economy is leaving out some of the savings of using fewer fossil fuels, according to a new analysis. (read the full story here)
A Common Fishing Practice Called Bottom Trawling Releases Significant Amounts of CO2 Into Earth’s Atmosphere. Bottom trawling disturbs the ocean floor, researchers found. Critics question whether “trawl disturbance” is different from the carbon flux that naturally occurs in oceans. (read the full story here)
Supreme Court Weighs Overturning a Pillar of Federal Regulatory Law. While federal agencies are promulgating a slew of climate regulations, the high court heard arguments for limiting regulators’ power. (read the full story here)
Advocates Welcome EPA’s Proposed Pollution Restrictions On Trash Incineration. But Environmental Justice Concerns Remain. Known to emit some of the most toxic pollutants with no safe level of exposure, waste-to-energy facilities disproportionately harm adjacent, mostly disinvested communities and strap them with new health-related costs. (read the full story here)
Climate crisis to increase cancer risk for tens of millions of people in Bangladesh. Scientists say sea level rises, flooding and extreme weather will accelerate release of arsenic into water supply. (read the full story here)
Greenland losing 30m tonnes of ice an hour, study reveals. Total is 20% higher than thought and may have implications for collapse of globally important north Atlantic ocean currents. (read the full story here)
Butterflies could lose spots as climate warms. Female Meadow Brown butterflies have fewer spots if they develop in warmer weather — so climate change could make them less spotty, new research shows. (read the full story here)
How fossil fuels went from sidelines to headlines in climate talks. For a quarter-century, fossil fuels were absent from Cop climate agreements – so how had they become so ubiquitous at Cop28? (read the full story here)
Justice considerations in climate research. Climate change and decarbonization raise complex justice questions that researchers and policymakers must address. The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the IPCC. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations. Here we propose a conceptual framework grounded in philosophical theory for this purpose. We apply this framework to climate mitigation scenarios literature as proof of concept, enabling a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice. We identify areas of future research, including new metrics of service provisioning essential for human well-being. (read the full story here)
U.S. takes another big step on climate ‘super-pollutant.’ The action is one of the Biden administration’s strongest against the fossil fuel industry under provisions of a 2022 climate law. (read the full story here)