Region: International
Blow Your Mind on Space Pics to Save the World
NASA
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
Hope, optimism, humility and awe have been in short supply. This week, I felt all of these things not once but twice — first while sitting in the dark at the movies and again while watching the NASA livestream of Artemis II’s lunar flyby. There is nothing like space exploration to change your frame of …
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CONTINUE READINGNever Give Up! Every Ton of Carbon We Can Cut Still Matters
It’s easy to be disheartened when we miss climate targets. But climate change isn’t a yes/no thing. It’s a matter of degree.
It’s easy to lose heart about our prospects for limiting climate change. The US has pulled out of international climate negotiations. Most of the countries that joined the Paris Agreement have missed targets , targets that weren’t aggressive enough in the first place. The 1.5 °C target is already basically out of reach. Is time to give up on slowing climate change and focus on adapting to it? The answer is no. Here’s why.
Climate change is a matter of degrees. That sounds like a truism or a pun, but it’s true in a deeper sense. There is no point past which further warming becomes irrelevant. degree, and every fraction of a degree makes things that much worse.
Dear UNFCCC, Subnational Governments are Key to Protecting Forests
GCF Task Force and Regions4 Submit Comments to COP30 Roadmap on Halting and Reversing Deforestation and Forest Degradation by 2030
Two of the world’s largest subnational governmental networks – the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF Task Force, a project of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law), and Regions4 – submitted a comment letter today providing input to the Roadmap on Halting and Reversing Deforestation and …
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CONTINUE READINGThe War and the Energy Transition
The Iran War it is hitting energy markets hard. Will that affect the energy transition?
The Iran War has been a big shock to the global energy system. It’s natural to wonder what the long terms will be. What it will lead to an orgy of oil and gas drilling, or will it speed up the energy transition? There are enormous uncertainties, and making confident predictions would be a clear mistake. In this post, I’ll try to unpack some of the issues and offer a semi-educated gas about the answers.
Policy Implications of Accelerating Warming
If warming is coming more quickly, we need to pick up the pace on policy responses.
There seems to be an emerging scientific consensus that the rate of global warming is rising. After screening out the effects of natural factors like El Niño, scientists have concluded that the pace of warming has roughly doubled since the 1970s. What does this tell us about policy? Some of the implications are more obvious than others, and at least one implication may be unsettling for some climate advocates. Most obviously, we need to accelerate our efforts to carbon emissions. We will be closing in on possible tipping points faster than expected. Climate impacts that we might have expected twenty years from now could hit in half that time.
CONTINUE READINGThe Environment is a System, Not an Array.
In 1969, Barry Commoner summed up much of environmental science in six words. Today’s conservatives don’t get it.
People have an intuitive tendency to focus on an action’s immediate direct effects. The same intuition leads us to downplay effects that are indirect, long-range, and cumulative. This can lead us astray, as it has the Supreme Court, when dealing with impacts on environmental systems. Writing at the outset of the modern environmental world, biologist Barry Commoner tried to crystalize what was known about the environment into four crisply phrased laws. The first law read simply: “Everything is connected to everything else.” What we have learned since Commoner published The Closing Circle in 1969 has only confirmed that insight.
This interconnected means that the environment is a system (really, a nested set of systems), where interactions are paramount. It’s not just an array of different things happening independently in different places or times. That’s true, as we’ve learned, not only of the environment but the global economy to which it is linked and of the geopolitical realm linked to that.
CONTINUE READINGWe are Hitting a Major Methane Milestone
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
This year, we celebrate 250 years since its discovery. No, I don’t mean America (though plans are underway to celebrate the semiquincentennial this July.) I’m talking about methane — that colorless, odorless, flammable and short-lived but super potent greenhouse gas that is helping heat the planet faster than carbon dioxide. It was 250 years ago …
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CONTINUE READINGEarth is Getting Darker. Here’s Why That’s Alarming
Some climate scientists are calling attention to yet another alarming recent climate trend: Earth’s declining reflectivity and what it may mean for feedback effects on future warming.
Some recent Earth observations are spreading new alarm among climate scientists. The observations have been reported in many scientific and environmental outlets, and have provoked a fair amount of confusion and some misrepresentation. Some scientists have been informally calling these observations “the most important climate risk you’ve never heard of.” But they have not yet …
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CONTINUE READINGA Tour of BYD’s Factory in Lancaster, California
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
Next time you travel to Mexico, look out for seals, dolphins, and sharks. Not at the beach —when you’re driving. Those are names of a few of the EV models made by China’s BYD that are quickly proliferating in Mexico. The dolphin is a hatchback mini. The seal is a 4-door that looks a little …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Scent of Spring vs the Stench of Black Rain
Why the war on Iran is an environmental justice crisis we cannot ignore
Here in the Bay Area, the air quality is pristine today. The sky is a clear, uninterrupted blue, and the sweet scent of blooming jasmine catches on the breeze. It’s a picture of absolute peace. Yet, the country I live in is currently orchestrating a devastating war on the other side of the world, a …
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