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Foreign investors selling their stakes in Canada’s oil industry

Foreign investors selling their stakes in Canada’s...

Capital keeps marching out of Canada’s oil industry, with Kinder Morgan Inc.’s sale of its remaining holdings in the country on Wednesday adding to more than $30 billion of foreign-company divestitures in the past three years. Pembina Pipeline Corp., based in Calgary, is snapping up Kinder’s Canadian assets and a cross-border pipeline in a $3.3 billion deal. For Houston-based Kinder, the deal completes an exit from a country...
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The Energy Transition in 4 Charts

The Energy Transition in 4 Charts

There is little debate that the energy transition is underway. However, the speed at which it is happening is very much in flux. Wood Mackenzie recently compiled some of its latest power and renewables forecasts into a presentation (available here) that shows its most recent outlooks across sectors. Here are a few of the highlights. Carbon emissions WoodMac’s analysts modeled a few different emissions scenarios in...
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New cause for concern over weedkiller glyphosate

New cause for concern over weedkiller glyphosate

New research from McGill University reveals an overlooked impact that the widely used herbicide glyphosate may be having on the environment. First commercialized by Monsanto under the name Roundup, glyphosate has come under scrutiny in the past, mostly in relation to its potential toxicity. This new research, published recently in the Ecological Society of America’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, focuses not on...
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Greenhouse Gases Reach Unprecedented Level

Greenhouse Gases Reach Unprecedented Level

A bleak new federal report found that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to levels the world has not seen in at least 800,000 years, highlighting the irreversible and mounting deleterious effects of human activity on the planet, as ABC News reported. Global carbon dioxide concentrations reached a record of 407.4 parts per million during 2018, the study found. That is 2.4 ppm greater than 2017 and “the highest in the...
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Green Turtles Are Mistaking Plastic for the Sea Grass They Normally Eat

Green Turtles Are Mistaking Plastic for the Sea Gr...

Endangered green turtles are having a problem. They’re mistaking plastic pollution for the seaweed they survive on, according to new research from the University of Exeter in the UK and the Society for the Protection of Turtles in Cyprus, as Newsweek reported. Green sea turtles use their eyesight to find food, so long, thin bits of green, black or clear plastic that resemble sea grass deceived many turtles. And, the...
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Sing for the climate Do it Now!

Sing for the climate Do it Now!

We need to wake up We need to wise up We need to open our eyes And do it now now now We need to build a better future And we need to start right now We’re on a planet That has a problem We’ve got to solve it, get involved And do it now now now We need to build a better future And we need to start right now Make it greener Make it cleaner Make it last, make it fast and do it now now now We need to build a better future And we...
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Greta Thunberg speech at the National Assembly in Paris 2019-07-23

Greta Thunberg speech at the National Assembly in ...

I have some good news and some bad news regarding the climate emergency. I will start with the good news. The world, as a small number of people have been saying lately, will not end in 11 years. The bad news however is that around the year 2030, if we continue with business as usual, we will likely be in a position where we may pass a number of tipping points. And then we might no longer be able to undo the irreversible...
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A solar-powered system can turn salt water into fresh drinking water for 25,000 people per day. It could help address the world’s looming water crisis.

A solar-powered system can turn salt water into fr...

People have been trying to turn seawater into drinking water for thousands of years, but the process is not usually energy-efficient or affordable. At a newly constructed facility in Kenya, however, a nonprofit called GivePower is tackling that challenge using solar power. The desalination system, which started operating in the coastal area of Kiunga in July 2018, can create 19,800 gallons (75,000 liters) of fresh drinking...
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The Arctic is burning and Greenland is melting, thanks to record heat

The Arctic is burning and Greenland is melting, th...

Blazes are pumping record amounts of CO2 into the air, which could make the problem worse The Arctic is on fire. Record-breaking temperatures and strong winds are fueling an unprecedented number of wildfires across the region this summer. In Siberia alone, hundreds of wildfires captured by satellite images July 28 spanned about 3 million hectares of land. Across Alaska, as many as 400 wildfires were burning as of mid-July....
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Trump is trying to kill electric cars but will kill jobs and the climate instead

Trump is trying to kill electric cars but will kil...

The global electric car boom can’t be stopped, but Trump policies would insure U.S. workers miss out on it. Two new analyses from Bloomberg this week make clear just how bad President Donald Trump’s policies are for the domestic electric car market and U.S. workers. In the first report, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) explains that Trump’s plan to roll back Obama-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards for...
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Nuclear power offers an abundant supply of low-carbon energy. But what to do with the deadly radioactive waste?

Nuclear power offers an abundant supply of low-car...

July 31, 2019 — There’s a small red hammer and sickle flag of the old Soviet Union on my dresser at home. I found it years ago on the floor of a primary school in Pripyat, the town built for workers at the doomed Chernobyl nuclear plant in what is now Ukraine. Perhaps it had been waved by a child at a state occasion, or had been left behind in the rush to evacuate Pripyat after the world’s worst nuclear disaster in April...
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Are We Heading Toward Extinction?

Are We Heading Toward Extinction?

The following has been excerpted from the long-form essay Facing Extinction. For much of my life, I thought our species would soon go extinct. I assumed we might last another hundred years if we were lucky. Now I suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can I speculate as to exactly when that might happen? Of course not. My sense of this is based only on probability. It might be similar to hearing about a...
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Why are harmful flame-retardant chemicals still showing up in children’s toys?

Why are harmful flame-retardant chemicals still sh...

July 26, 2019 — Environmental and children’s health advocates breathed a sigh of relief when, over a decade ago, U.S. manufacturers began to phase out a number of flame retardant chemicals from furniture, electronics, textiles and other everyday items. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, were facing increasing scrutiny (and some had already been banned in parts of Europe) for impacts on children’s brain development,...
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A brief introduction to climate change and national security

A brief introduction to climate change and nationa...

Extreme weather, rising seas, and a melting Arctic could worsen global tensions. A series of punishing droughts set the stage for the Syrian civil war in 2011. A drying East Africa fuels ongoing conflicts over natural resources in Somalia and Kenya. Rising seas threaten future refugee crises in Southeast Asia. Melting sea ice in the Arctic is opening new shipping lanes, creating new potential for tensions among competing...
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How Climate Change Is Fueling Extreme Weather

How Climate Change Is Fueling Extreme Weather

Across the globe, extreme weather is becoming the new normal. Torrential rains and flooding. Record hurricanes. Destructive wildfires. Deadly heatwaves and drought. From season to season and year to year, weather events that were once rare occurrences are now increasingly commonplace. Human activity is causing these rapid changes. When fossil fuels are burned for electricity, heat, and transportation, carbon dioxide, a...
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