Climate

Last week, we received our voter information guides in the mailbox. Before I had a chance to even take a look, I found my fifth-grader reading through the guide with a checklist. Looking over her shoulder, I saw her list of the proposition numbers – most with question marks next to them – but one with a big, bold check mark: Proposition 4.

Even though I hadn’t said a word, she gets it. In her short life, she has been through three wildfire evacuations, she has been told not to drink the toxic drinking water in our friend’s neighborhood in Merced County, and she has been kept inside for days and weeks on end due to dangerous, orange, smoky skies. I don’t have to explain why investing in climate resilience is about the best financial decision California could make right now for her future. The kids get it.

But don’t just take it from them, take it from the esteemed climate scientists who I work with at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who have been analyzing how climate change is impacting the Golden State in a myriad of ways:

• From more dangerous and destructive wildfires: The Fossil Fuels Behind Forest Fires
  
• To melting summers and prolonged extreme heat: Too Hot to Work: Assessing the Threats Climate Change Poses to Outdoor Workers
  
• To more intense droughts and floods, drying up crops and contaminating drinking water: Troubled Waters: Preparing for Climate Threats to California’s Water System
  
• To higher seas, threatening communities and critical infrastructure: Looming Deadlines for Coastal Resilience: Rising Seas, Disruptive Tides, and Risks to Coastal Infrastructure
  

I probably don’t need to tell you any of this, because you are living it. We know the facts: recent wildfires have burned millions of acres of forest and cost taxpayers billions of dollars; more than a million Californians don’t have access to clean drinking water; and our state’s precious farmland and wildlife are at risk from the impacts of a changing climate.

Proposition 4 invests in a more resilient future by providing much needed funding to address these threats, particularly in the most vulnerable and low-income communities where the needs are greatest. It will invest almost $4 billion in safe drinking water, drought, flood, and water resilience, $1.5 billion in wildfire and forest resilience, $1.2 billion in sea level rise and coastal resilience, and about a half billion in extreme heat mitigation. As a water scientist, it’s particularly important to me that the bond prioritizes storing water underground, refilling our depleted groundwater aquifers. Groundwater storage, unlike surface water storage (or dams) will continue to work even as it gets hotter and drier.

Some people say it’s too expensive and we should have made these investments earlier. (Ironically, these are many of the same people who also argued that climate change wasn’t “real” just a few short years ago.) In fact, there couldn’t be a better time to borrow money as interest rates have plummeted over the last few months to the lowest point in many years. At the same time, the costs of inaction are rising. Fire suppression costs, alone, more than doubled from below a half billion in 2020 to over $1.2 billion in 2022.

Climate change is here and it’s costly. Wildfire risks are already driving up insurance and utility bills. Proposition 4 marks an historic shift from simply throwing money at disaster response to proactive investing in disaster prevention, saving billions of dollars in future costs from devastating fires, water shortages, and other climate hazards. The only question is whether we do the right thing now or let the problem get bigger and more expensive for our kids to deal with later.

The science and the kids are clear: Proposition 4 is the right thing to do—we should listen.

Ocean acidification close to critical threshold, say scientists, posing threat to marine ecosystems and global liveability

Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems.

“Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.”

Continue reading...

A transformed China, conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere, and intractable clashes over money have pushed the prospects of progress to a new low.

From Covid to dengue, viral outbreaks seemed to be popping up all over. But maybe Americans are just more attuned to threats now.

There’s a war brewing between those who want to plan for future challenges and those who want to turn back the tide

• Sign up for the Rural Network email newsletter
• Join the Rural Network group on Facebook to be part of the community

The leadership of Australian farming is a club that has strict rules. Like the classic movie Fight Club, the first rule about farm club is you don’t talk about farm club.

But that doesn’t always work out well for farmers. There are clever people in the leadership club who are loath to speak out.

Sign up to receive Guardian Australia’s fortnightly Rural Network email newsletter

Continue reading...

Corporations such as ExxonMobil and Blackstone also big funders of climate crisis, new trade union report finds

Some of the world’s largest companies have been accused of undermining democracy across the world by financially backing far-right political movements, funding and exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union rights and human rights in a report published on Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

Amazon, Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard and Glencore are the corporations included in the report. The companies’ lobbying arms are attempting to shape global policy at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York City on 22 and 23 September.

Continue reading...

Requiring key sectors to switch to clean energy by specific times could trigger benevolent cascades, report claims

In the terminology of the climate and ecological crises the phrase “tipping point” is loaded with dreadful implications.

It evokes a climate breakdown supercharged by the mass escape of methane locked in Siberian permafrost, or the great currents of the oceans smothered by freshwater melting from the Greenland ice sheet, or the Amazon turning from great rainforest to parched savannah after the felling of one too many trees.

Continue reading...

The Hollywood actor and activist backs Harris for president as she warns of climate emergency and talks Taylor Swift

Young people’s understandable unhappiness with the Biden administration’s record on oil and gas drilling and the war in Gaza should not deter them from voting to block Donald Trump from again becoming president of the United States, the Hollywood actor and activist Jane Fonda has warned.

“I understand why young people are really angry, and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”

Continue reading...

As climate change brings water shortages to vacation hot spots, we look at Greece’s tourism-dependent islands, where residents sometimes compete with visitors for a dwindling supply.

By tweaking the chemistry of rivers and oceans, humans could remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air. But huge challenges loom.

By tweaking the chemistry of rivers and oceans, humans could remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air. But huge challenges loom.

It looks like and feels like a regular street. But beneath the surface, six layers are working to keep rainwater from overwhelming New York City neighborhoods.

From flooding to drought, extreme weather is devastating our communities. It is time for the world’s heaviest emitters to help mitigate the impacts of climatic breakdown on the countries most affected

Millions of people in my country, Malawi, face unprecedented existential crises driven by climate breakdown. The frequency of extreme weather events and the massive impact they have on communities have left government officials like me with a huge dilemma of how to act fast enough to save lives. In the past three years, we have gone from facing the worst flooding in recent times to the most severe drought in a decade. The impact has been devastating to communities across the country.

When Cyclone Freddy hit us in March 2023, it killed more than 600 people. The cyclone injured many more, tore families apart, destroyed livelihoods, and the long-term effects from diseases were even worse. A little over a year later, we were in the middle of a raging drought, which the president, Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, declared a national disaster in March. Millions of people are facing acute food insecurity, leading to malnutrition and health issues that are putting lives at risk, not least for people on long-term treatment for conditions such as tuberculosis and HIV.

Continue reading...

Unbearable heat and worsening storms prompt residents of states such as Florida to move elsewhere

As a Rust belt town of 65,000 people in eastern Indiana, Muncie may not be the most exciting place in the world. It doesn’t have beaches, year-round warm weather or much in the way of cosmopolitanism.

But for Laura Rivas, a cybersecurity engineer formerly of North Miami Beach, Florida, Muncie is perfect.

Continue reading...

Electrifying the world could produce the largest development gains since the 1990s.

The Marshall Project and the Prison Journalism Project asked incarcerated reporters to document the impact of extreme heat on their facilities. Their stories reveal the brutal reality

After a summer of record-breaking temperatures, scientists predict that 2024 could end up being the hottest year on record. For people in US prisons and jails – who often lack access to even the most basic cooling measures – conditions behind bars exacerbate the risks of dangerously high temperatures.

Several courts have ruled that extreme temperatures in prison violate the eighth amendment’s provision against “cruel and unusual” punishment. But these rulings have not led to a widespread adoption of air-conditioning or other methods to cool prison facilities or prevent heat-related deaths. Public health researchers at Brown University estimate that just one day of above-average summer temperatures is associated with a nearly 4% increase in deaths of incarcerated people. Suicides spike 23% in the three days following a heatwave. And for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit above the average summer temperature, those deaths increase by 5%.

Continue reading...

Showing climate delivery can be done effectively and fairly would be an extraordinary climate legacy for Keir Starmer

A well-intentioned but badly designed and poorly communicated energy policy from the German government, and more recent protests by farmers in France and the Netherlands, have knocked the confidence of European political leaders that environmental progress can be delivered in a way that works for people and enjoys democratic support. Unashamedly popular climate policies from Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband offer the chance to reshape European climate politics and confound these sceptics.

Showing climate delivery can be done fairly, effectively, affordably and with strong public support would be an extraordinary climate legacy for Starmer. It would build on Britain’s relatively strong record of having halved its climate footprint already, and it would offer hope amid all the gloom.

Joss Garman is executive director of the European Climate Foundation

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Continue reading...

Are we ready for the future of meat?

Now would be a good time for Congress to pass a federal spending bill to make a permanent pay increase a reality.

The Rev Sue Parfitt has lost right to conduct religious ceremonies after her arrest at a Just Stop Oil demonstration

An 82-year-old retired priest has spoken of her pain at losing her right to conduct religious ceremonies because of her participation in Just Stop Oil protests.

The Rev Sue Parfitt was arrested in May after allegedly causing damage to the glass around Magna Carta at the British Library in London as part of a protest with the climate action group. She is still awaiting trial.

Continue reading...