Climate

Half of all new cars are now SUVs, making them a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis, say experts

Sales of SUVs hit a new record in 2023, making up half of all new cars sold globally, data has revealed. Experts warned that the rising sales of the large, heavy vehicles is pushing up the carbon emissions that drive global heating.

The analysis, by the International Energy Agency, found that the rising emissions from SUVs in 2023 made up 20% of the global increase in CO2, making the vehicles a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis. If SUVs were a country, the IEA said, they would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter of CO2, ahead of the national emissions of both Japan and Germany.

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And almost half of respondents back the filing of criminal charges against oil companies that have contributed to the climate crisis

As US communities take big oil to court for allegedly deceiving the public about the climate crisis, polling shared with the Guardian shows that a majority of voters support the litigation, while almost half would back an even more aggressive legal strategy of filing criminal charges.

The poll, which comes as the world’s first-ever criminal climate lawsuit was brought in France last week, could shed light on how, if filed, similar US cases might be viewed by a jury.

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Un nuevo análisis encontró que, desde mayo del año pasado, una persona promedio experimentó 26 días adicionales de calor anormal del que habría tenido sin el calentamiento global.

From badly behaved travellers to horrendous carbon emissions, summer holidays aren’t always an unmitigated good. Here is how to travel responsibly and still have a great time

Tourism is almost back to pre-pandemic levels – which is good news and bad news. However much holiday destinations rely on them, no one wants badly behaved tourists blocking views, partying wildly in the streets or pricing local people out of their own cities. Overtourism, carbon emissions, nature depletion and plastic pollution are all huge concerns. But that doesn’t mean you have to cancel your holiday. Here are 28 ways to be a better tourist this summer.

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Since last May, the average person experienced 26 more days of abnormal warmth than they would have without global warming, a new analysis found.

Officials expect New York City’s new tolling system to reduce air pollution, as well as carbon emissions. The impact may be uneven.

Labour and Liberal Democrats dominated list of MPs who were rated as very good in backing environmental policies

No elected Tory MPs have been rated as voting positively on climate issues, under a survey of parliamentary voting patterns since the Conservatives took power in 2010.

Only a single sitting Conservative was rated as “good” on climate votes in the ranking, but that was Lisa Cameron, the MP for East Kilbride, who defected from the Scottish National Party in October.

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Gardens could be part of the solution to the climate and biodiversity crisis. But what are we doing? Disappearing them beneath plastic and paving

In my 20s I lived in Manchester, on the sixth floor of a block of council flats just off the A57, or Mancunian (Mancy) Way. A short walk from Manchester Piccadilly station and the city centre, it was grey, noisy and built up. I loved every piece of it – my first stab at adulthood, at living on my own. I painted my bedroom silver and slept on a mattress on the floor, and I grew sweetcorn, tomatoes and courgettes in pots on the balcony. (I was 24 – of course I grew sweetcorn on the balcony.)

I worked and played in the bars and clubs of Manchester’s gay village, and I would walk home in the early hours, keys poking through my clenched fist to protect me from would-be attackers, and I would see hedgehogs.

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What overflowing septic tanks tell us about the future.

The president wants to shift America’s car fleet toward electric vehicles, but not at the expense of American jobs or national security.

Announcing recently that the world broke a record by generating 30 percent of all electricity from renewable sources in 2023, the British think tank Ember said the data proves we are in a “new era” of energy in which a permanent decline in fossil fuels is “inevitable.”

The new era would be even more inevitable if the United States fully committed to phasing out fossil fuels. More on that shortly. But first, the undeniably good news.

The new global record in the generation of renewable energy was powered primarily by solar and wind. Solar power has been the fastest growing source of electricity in the world for 19 years in a row according to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2024. Providing just 1.1 percent of the globe’s electricity in 2015, solar now produces 5.5 percent of the supply.

In that regard, the United States is a major player. Our share of solar electricity has grown from 1 percent to 6 percent since 2015. In terms of raw numbers, the United States is the world’s second-leading generator of electricity from solar energy, with China the global leader by far.

Wind power offers a similar story, having more than doubled its share of the world’s electricity from 3.5 percent in 2015 to nearly 8 percent in 2023. And again, the United States looks great, doubling wind’s share of US  electricity generation from 5 percent in 2015 to 10 percent in 2023, coming in, again, second behind China.

The combined 16 percent of wind- and solar-powered electricity flowing throughout the nation is especially impressive given the fact that only 0.2 percent of US electricity came from these sources just a quarter century ago. The shift helped the United States to drop its share of fossil fuels in the energy mix from 67 percent in 2015 to 59 percent last year. The shift, combined with the huge shift from ultra-dirty goal to more-moderately dirty gas helped cut our power sector carbon dioxide emissions by 41 percent  from a peak in 2007.

US still needs to do more

But that pace of change remains far from sufficient for the United States to do its part for climate change and to help the planet’s temperatures stay under the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-degrees Fahrenheit) limits of the 2015 Paris Agreement. The main reasons: our unsustainable levels of energy consumption as a wealthy nation and our too-slow phaseout of fossil fuels.

According to the Ember report, per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are three times higher than the global average and remain among the highest of all major economies.

Many US politicians who are apologists for the fossil fuel industry often deflect blame for heat-trapping gases onto newer mass emitters such as China or India. Indeed, China is a conundrum, adding more than half of the world’s solar and wind installations last year yet still producing more than half the world’s electricity from coal and spewing nearly a third of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Countries like China and India clearly need to do more. But the fact remains that, even with reductions of recent years, the United States, which produced one quarter of the world’s global warming gases two decades ago, still produces between 13 percent and 14 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, more than triple our share of the world’s population. As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its Climate.gov website: “The United States bears a greater share of the responsibility for current conditions—on both a national and per-person level.”

A recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) shows that the best ways for the United States to meet its climate goals under the Paris Agreement and achieve a near phaseout of fossil fuels are to ramp up renewables in the power sector, increase energy efficiency, and  electrify buildings, transportation, and industry.

Doing so would generate tremendous benefits, including a more than $100 billion reduction in consumer energy costs in 2030, $800 billion in public health benefits by 2050, and nearly $1.3 trillion in avoided climate damages by 2050. While the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) roughly doubles the current pace of annual emissions reductions to about 3 percent per year through 2030, the country will need to further accelerate its reductions to roughly 5 percent per year to achieve its climate targets.

Slash gas

Fully decarbonizing the power sector—which is a key strategy for meeting our climate goals—will require dramatically slashing gas use as we continue to phase out coal. A UCS analysis showed that wind, solar and other renewables would nearly triple to 60 percent of US electricity generation in 2030 and 92 percent in 2050, while gas use would fall from more than 40 percent of the US electricity mix today to 25 percent in 2030 and a mere 2 percent in 2050.

Gas once played an important role in suppressing coal-fired electricity, with less carbon emissions. But the benefit has expired. The emissions of methane, which traps heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide, is now widely viewed alongside carbon dioxide as a critical threat that could lead the United States to miss its commitment to the Paris Agreement.

One key reason our power sector emissions are triple the global rate, according to the International Energy Agency, is that we still source 42 percent of our electricity from gas. Politicians can sneer at China all they want for coal and carbon emissions, but the United States spews so much methane via gas and oil operations that it is far and away the world leader for that fossil fuel. The United States pumped a world-record amount of crude oil last year, with ExxonMobil and Chevron seeing some of their biggest profits in a decade. Our gas generation last year hit a new record too, preventing a global drop in generation.

Globally, the IEA’s net zero scenario says the world’s gas generation must fall from its current 23 percent of the world’s electricity to just 2.4 percent over the next 16 years, with “no need for new long lead time upstream oil and gas conventional projects.” To help meet that goal, both UCS and IEA analyses call for roughly tripling the electricity generated by wind, solar, and other renewables by 2030. 

Other wealthy nations are proving that the technology is already here to reduce our carbon intensity and speed the energy transition. While 59 percent of electricity in the United States is produced by fossil fuels, the share in several other wealthy major economies such as the United Kingdom and Germany, now stands under 50 percent. Britain’s per-capita carbon emissions are a quarter of those in the United States.

Tug of war

The major question in this country is the will to act. We are currently in a tug-of-war between progress and the pugnacity of the fossil fuel industry. Our potential to speed toward net zero is obvious. There are the commercial-scale offshore wind farms being developed off the East Coast. Solar offers many avenues for adoption, from individual rooftops to large-scale fields. Electrification, from home heat pumps to vehicles, is no longer an oddity.

Significant tax credits and incentives are available in the Inflation Reduction Act that will significantly ramp-up investments in all these areas. The Biden administration has also launched several initiatives to boost renewable energy infrastructure and announced several major rules to cut methane emissions and carbon pollution from coal plants and motor vehicles and trucks. If they all became permanent, the United States would take a rightful place in global leadership.

But some of those rules are already being challenged in the courts by the fossil fuel and auto industries, and conservative states friendly to oil and gas interests; more are likely to be challenged. The ultimate future of those rules may rest in the hands of a conservative US Supreme Court and former President Trump, who pledges to kill those rules if elected.

He renewed that pledge last month at a private gathering of oil and gas executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In attendance, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times, were executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron and the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s top lobbying arm.  

Meanwhile the oil industry continues to smother this nation like no other wealthy nation with disinformation, denial, and delay on the transition. Last month, Democrats in the House and Senate published a joint staff report loaded with so much evidence of disinformation that Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin last week urged the US Department of Justice to investigate the fossil fuel industry for its coordinated campaign.

Last fall, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods deployed the industry’s playbook of doubt and diversion in a speech to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit. Despite the IEA’s assessment that no more major oil and gas projects are needed, Woods claimed, “While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient—wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”

This month, the American Petroleum Institute launched an ad campaign urging the nation to “harness America’s abundant oil and natural gas.” The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a top trade organization representing many top oil and chemical companies, launched a Don’t Ban Our Cars ad campaign against the Biden administration’s new tailpipe rules. The rules are not a ban; rather, they tighten standards that the administration hopes will result in incentivizing 56 percent of new cars to be electric by 2032.

When you consider all the disinformation, it’s remarkable that the United States has any kind of leadership in the renewable revolution. What we can hope for is that reports such as the one from Ember are a sign that, for all the huffing and puffing of Big Oil and Gas, the market—that is to say, the people—are speaking more loudly.

Most people in the United States—perhaps because of disinformation—are not yet be ready to completely do away with oil and gas. Still, according to a Pew survey last year, two of every three people in the United States want policies that prioritize renewables over more fossil fuel generation. In a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll last year, three out of four respondents say they would be comfortable with solar panels in their community and nearly 7 in 10 respondents said they would be comfortable with wind turbines.

As Darren Woods pontificates about the “unmatched” societal benefits of oil and gas, the deficits are piling up all around us. Climate change and its associated storms, heat waves, droughts and spread of infectious diseases now stand at the tipping point of making life miserable and unsustainable across the planet. Woods skips over the wealth of studies in recent years that say millions of people die every year around the world from pollution associated with fossil fuels.  

More and more, people no longer want to join Woods and the fossil fuel industry in skipping over the carnage. No matter the disinformation, the nation has begun to say the benefits are far greater from weaning ourselves off oil and gas. A majority wants the United States to enter the new era of renewable energy and play its part in assuring that inevitable decline of fossil fuels.

The Coalition has no climate policy. But Labor’s positions are undermined by its confused stance on gas and the delay of new environmental laws

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Federal parliament is back for the next fortnight and I have a wishlist. Not for things that will happen – let’s not get ahead of ourselves – but for questions that could be addressed if the country is to treat the climate and extinction crises as seriously as our leaders claim they do.

There is no shortage of discussion about nuclear energy due to the Coalition’s much-hyped but yet-to-appear plan to overturn a national ban and bring it to Australia. The issue won plenty of attention after a CSIRO-led assessment that it would be far, far more expensive than wind and solar backed by energy storage and new transmission lines.

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He has vowed to shred President Biden’s E.V. policies and has threatened that “You won’t be able to sell those cars.”

Exclusive: Bronze age remains and Roman roads among 12,802 sites discovered using latest technology

Bronze age burial mounds, Roman roads and deserted medieval villages are among almost 13,000 previously-unknown ancient sites and monuments that have been discovered by members of the public in recent months, it will be announced this week.

Truck drivers and doctors are among more than 1,000 people who participated in Deep Time, a “citizen science project” which has harnessed the power of hobbyists to scour 512 sq km (200 sq miles) of Earth Observation data, including high-resolution satellite and lidar – laser technology – imagery.

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• Read more from My DIY climate hack, a new series on everyday people’s creative solutions to the climate crisis

Among food, travel, decor and single-use items, parties can create an enormous amount of waste – and weddings are among the most egregious offenders.

For Cindy Villaseñor, 33, that reality just didn’t sit right with her eco-conscious mindset. So when it came time to plan her own wedding, she and her partner agreed to do things differently.

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Reduce emissions, build resilience, repair ecosystems, remove greenhouse gases: these are the four Rs that can save us

• David King is chair of the global Climate Crisis Advisory Group

In 2008, the late American climate scientist Wally Broecker warned of the global repercussions of polar ice loss. Today, his predictions echo louder than ever as Greenland ice haemorrhages at an alarming rate, threatening rapid sea-level rise. Over the past 15 years, the Arctic Circle region has been heating up at four times the global average; it’s now more than 3C above levels in the 1980s. In 2023, we witnessed a staggering loss of Antarctic Sea ice.

Over the past year, land and ocean temperatures have soared, far beyond what was anticipated for an El Niño year. Global average temperatures have breached the 1.5C mark, indicating that climate transition has been unleashed. From record-breaking wildfires across continents to catastrophic floods threatening to submerge major cities, extreme climate events have become the new norm, causing massive loss of life and economic damage worldwide.

David King is the founder and chair of the global Climate Crisis Advisory Group

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Vulnerable economies must be supported with finance and practical aid to find long term solutions, says Jorge Moreira da Silva of Unops

The world has a “moral responsibility” to support the fight for survival being faced by small island states, according to a leading UN agency chief.

Ahead of the fourth annual conference of small island developing states (Sids) being held in Antigua and Barbuda this week, Jorge Moreira da Silva, the executive director of the (Unops), called for recognition of the problems faced by what he called “some of the most vulnerable economies in the world” who contributed less than 1% to global carbon emissions.

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Un enorme agujero en el paisaje siberiano debería ser una advertencia sobre los peligros de la extracción. En la zona, las carreteras se están agrietando como en un terremoto en cámara lenta.

The first-term Pennsylvanian has battled with progressives on Israel, immigration and energy, adopting a more caustic political persona and alienating some supporters.

Cut free from the constraints of reporting, a story can take its own shape, can lead you down rabbit holes you’d never expected

During my nearly 40 years as a journalist, the climate crisis has been a constant, creeping refrain – from the first greenhouse conference in the late 1980s and the first IPCC report in the early 90s. There was the Hawke governments’ plan to cut emissions by 20% below 1988 levels by 2005, and the subsequent walking back of that plan.

Then on through the decades of bitter political division and debate and policy failures; the proposal for an Emissions Trading Scheme under John Howard; Kevin Rudd’s “great moral challenge of our generation”; the ill-fated Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the Gillard ETS, the relentless campaign against it by Tony Abbott and the wasted decade of what’s become known as the “Climate Wars” that followed.

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