Browsing tag
6 Mins Read By: Lynn Freehill-Maye When Jackie Augustine opens a chicken coop door one brisk spring morning in upstate New York, the hens bolt out like windup toys. Still, as their faint barnyard scent testifies, they aren’t battery-powered but very much alive. These are “solar chickens.” At this local community egg cooperative, Geneva Peeps, the birds live with […]
6 Mins Read By: Annie Leonard The fossil fuel industry is dependent on our plastic dependency. We can starve it. The fossil fuel industry is in trouble and has a sneaky idea for saving itself: It wants to produce lots more plastic. Many people don’t realize it, but almost all plastic is made from fossil fuels. So the same […]
6 Mins Read By: Julia Fine A record number of Americans are concerned about climate change, a recent study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication found. If you’re among them, you may be interested in learning more about the climate crisis and what you can do about it. Luckily, […]
7 Mins Read The hunger for images that show new and existing solutions to the climate crisis continues to grow exponentially as our collective awareness deepens. But relevant and engaging imagery is hard, or even impossible, to source. As a career photojournalist focused on environmental stories – researching, finding, chasing and shooting climate solutions is a provocation and frustration […]
4 Mins Read By: Charis McGowan A startup is recycling tonnes of discarded fishing nets throughout Chile. Is this a template for tackling the global plastic waste problem? In Tumbes, a village in southern Chile, discarded plastic fishing nets are crammed into gaps between parked cars and market stalls, evidence of a global waste problem that the town is […]
8 Mins Read By: Oscar Schwartz The tech giant’s pledge to go carbon negative by 2030 leans heavily on nascent technology such as machines that suck carbon out of the air. Microsoft drew widespread praise in January this year after Brad Smith, the company’s president, announced their climate “moonshot”. While other corporate giants, such as Amazon and Walmart, were pledging […]
5 Mins Read By: Margaret Brennan & Kelsey Micklas Wednesday marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and since well before the COVID-19 outbreak, the World Health Organization has been tracing and analyzing the impact of how climate change is impacting public health. But as the global community continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, top climate officials say […]
3 Mins Read By: Jenessa Duncombe Take extreme weather risks into account, and markets could prove hardier in a changing world. Energy investors looking to steel themselves against topsy-turvy market transitions could try something new: factoring extreme weather risks into their investments. At present, financial markets may be failing to account for the physical risks of extreme weather from […]
6 Mins Read By: Jasmine C. Leyva Jasmine Leyva, director of The Invisible Vegan, unpacks the complicated relationship between people of color and the climate movement. Math is one of the only subjects I trust because, as much as I hate it, math is without bias. Learning the Pythagorean theorem and quadratic equations never challenged my identity as a […]
9 Mins Read By: Justin Mikulka Shell recently announced plans to “stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050,” a move hailed by some as a major step towards addressing climate change. Around the same time, however, the oil and gas major confirmed it would go ahead with its investment in a joint $6.4 billion gas project in Australia. This approach of saying one thing […]
4 Mins Read By: Yoshiyuki Ito The novel coronavirus pandemic has forced the postponement of this year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26), but it has not prevented young Japanese from continuing their calls for action against global warming. Inspired in part by Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish environmental activist, Japanese around the same age are trying to engage […]
7 Mins Read By: Dana Drugmand Petroleum products continue to fuel most of our vehicles while fouling our air, leaving some people more vulnerable to suffering severe impacts from respiratory illnesses like COVID-19. Transportation is also the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and studies show that powering our cars, trucks, and buses with electricity would reduce climate pollution. With the […]
4 Mins Read By: Irina Ivanova The millions of Americans who are skipping their morning commute and working from home because of the coronavirus have drastically reduced smog over America’s largest cities and otherwise benefited the environment. Yet the growing ranks of workers now plying their trade online using tools like Zoom and Slack are taking their own toll. […]
5 Mins Read By: Bill McKibben We’re cooked unless investors stop funding fossil fuel companies. Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.) Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and […]
4 Mins Read By: Samantha Arechiga We are currently facing a climate crisis that we cannot seem to imagine any way out of. The climate change we are experiencing is accelerating at unnatural levels, and some experts believe it’s disproportionately impacting communities of color and the countries in the Global South. Due to the scale of climate change and the grip that the fossil fuel industry […]
37 Mins Read By: Adria Vasil Laura Väyrynen & Toby Heaps In the 50 years since Earth Day was launched, which companies stepped up to deliver green solutions? It’s been 50 years since the first Earth Day in 1970, when 10 million people took to the streets for a national teach-in on the environment. At the time, questions […]
6 Mins Read By: Mark Hertsgaard Author Michael Pollan talks about whether drugs that comfort the terminally ill can also help people mourning the climate future. The dread that many people are feeling these days about the coronavirus is nothing new to those acquainted with climate grief. As terrible as the virus is, the heat waves, droughts, fires, and […]
4 Mins Read By: Tim Radford If we farm efficiently, scientists say, we can cut climate change, slow extinction and feed the world even as it asks for more. Forget about organic farming: get the best out of the best cropland, return the rest to nature and still feed the world. It could work, say researchers. Once again, […]
4 Mins Read By: Alan Simson The 21st century is the urban century. It has been forecast that urban areas across the world will have expanded by more than 2.5 billion people by 2050. The scale and speed of urbanisation has created significant environmental and health problems for urban dwellers. These problems are often made worse by a lack of […]
5 Mins Read By: Tom Levitt Switching from meat production to growing crops for vegan foods can be good for farmers and the environment. The future of food doesn’t have to include animals. At least that’s what Miyoko Schinner believes. “A lot of farmers see us as a threat,” Schinner said of her Californian plant-based dairy company, Miyoko’s […]
5 Mins Read By: Erin McCormick From singing birthday cards to baby food pouches, a growing trend of mixing materials is making recycling even harder. The cheerful, singing voice inside your musical “Happy Birthday” card is enough to strike horror in the heart of your local recycler. The musical cards, which play a recording when opened, look like […]