Editorial: Environmental sirens are sounding

If things don’t change soon, we’re toast. We saw it last week when Hurricane Michael wiped out entire communities in Florida and last month when Florence wreaked havoc in the Carolinas. We’ve seen it on Long Island, where we will face even worse flooding than the destruction from superstorm Sandy. The Earth is getting hotter, and more-intense storms are only one result. If we don’t stop the warming, the changes will be...

States can lead the way on climate change policy a...

As Trump guts environmental protections, states must take charge on smart climate policy. The world’s leading panel of climate experts sounded the alarm this week that we are running out of time to get rising temperatures under control. Its latest report calls for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented” steps to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, from worsening wildfires and extreme drought to rising sea levels and...

Ohio Residents Fed Up With Fracking Wastewater

Much of the wastewater from Pennsylvania’s fracking industry is trucked across the border to Ohio.  Last year, Pennsylvania and West Virginia contributed nearly half of the more than a billion gallons of frack waste that were  injected into underground wells in Ohio. Residents in at least one county say they’ve had enough. State representative Glenn Holmes (third from right) has introduced two bills in the Ohio House of...

Clean up climate change? It’s just good for busine...

If the world’s largest companies live up to the promises they’ve made to slow climate change, together they could reduce emissions by an amount equal to those of Germany. The corporate pledges gained new attention this week after an ominous report was issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said that government policies alone won’t ensure the “unprecedented” societal changes needed over the next decade...

Editorial: United States can’t afford to wai...

Buried in a report from the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration of President Donald Trump is an acknowledgement that the planet is on course to warm by 6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. That could be disastrous, and carbon emissions from car and truck tailpipes is contributing to that. This acknowledgement, from a Republican environmental administration, no less, weakens the case that was already not fully...

Editorial: The government needs to take action aga...

On Oct. 8, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report saying humanity has until 2030 to prevent a disastrous level of global warming. If we continue on the same path, by 2030 the Earth will have warmed by 1.5 degrees Celsius. This may not seem like a lot, but a temperature increase of this magnitude would drastically increase “climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water...

Climate reality requires starting at home: Weaning...

Fossil fuels have to go. It didn’t take the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to tell us that: we’ve known it for three decades. But the report makes it clearer than ever: Burning billions of tons of coal, oil, and natural gas is creating a thickening blanket over the Earth, holding in its heat and disrupting all kinds of systems, from oceans temperatures and chemistry to storm patterns,...

Net-zero emissions energy systems

Prof. Nathan S. Lewis from California Institute of Technology mentioned this article during his presentation at Denison on 10/11/2018. Path to zero carbon emissions Models show that to avert dangerous levels of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions must fall to zero later this century. Most of these emissions arise from energy use. Davis et al. review what it would take to achieve decarbonization of the energy...

Why We Can’t Reverse Climate Change With ‘Negative...

In a much-anticipated report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the world will need to take dramatic and drastic steps to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change. Featured prominently in the report is a discussion of a range of techniques for removing carbon dioxide from the air, called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies or negative emissions technologies (NETs). The IPCC said the...

Plastic on Remote South Atlantic Beaches Up 10 Fol...

The number of plastics washing up on the beaches of remote islands in the South Atlantic has increased 10 times in the past 10 years, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) found. This is a devastating development for the unique biodiversity of islands in the UK’s overseas territories like Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Gough and the Falkland Islands, both because the plastic harms marine life and because...

Climate Change Economists Win Nobel Prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics to a duo for their work on how the world can achieve sustainable growth. The prize was divided equally to William D. Nordhaus of Yale University and to Paul M. Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business, both Americans, who have “designed methods for addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions...

Historical records in the climate crosshairs

Climate change is a high priority for many Americans. But on election days, many of those passionate environmentalists do not vote. Stinnett: “We’ve identified 10.1 million who didn’t even vote in the 2016 presidential election, an election that was only decided by seventy-seven-thousand votes. So this is an enormous population of environmentalists just waiting to be energized.” They contact unlikely voters – Republican,...

Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Cr...

INCHEON, South Korea — A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.” The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a...

Don’t Frack So Close to Me: Colorado to Vote on Dr...

Coloradans will vote on a ballot initiative in November that requires new oil and gas projects to be set back at least 2,500 feet from occupied buildings. If approved, the measure—known as both Initiative 97 and Proposition 112—would mark a major change from their state’s current limits: 500 feet from homes and 1,000 feet from schools. As sociologists who have researched oil and gas drilling in the communities that...

Homeowners switch to solar to save money. Some cit...

Jeffrey Hebrank wants to install solar panels on his Highland home to take advantage of federal, state and regional incentives that have created something of a solar boom in Illinois. But a city fee of $25 a month would reduce the savings on his power bill and extend the time it would take to recoup his investment. ”Highland owns its own municipal power plant, so they don’t want us to install solar panels and generate our...