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Elon Musk’s journey from climate champion to backing EV-bashing Trump

The Guardian Climate Change - February 7, 2025 - 06:00

Musk believes Tesla’s rivals are more vulnerable to Trump’s moves against electric vehicles

Donald Trump’s attempts to slash incentives for electric cars would cause sales of the vehicles to plummet, with this effort cheered on by a seemingly confounding supporter – Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis.

Trump has said that he “will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers”.

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Categories: Climate

Trump’s Executive Orders Leave Imprint on the Fed

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 7, 2025 - 05:02
The central bank has halted hiring to align with a White House directive and pulled back its work on climate change.
Categories: Climate

Lawsuit Seeks to Block New York’s Climate Change Law Targeting Energy Companies

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 20:04
Emboldened by President Trump, West Virginia and other states are challenging a law that makes corporate polluters pay for past emissions.
Categories: Climate

Green campaigners fear UK to renew subsidies to Drax power station

The Guardian Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 15:27

Billions of pounds from energy bill payers to run out in 2027 but could be extended as soon as Monday

Green campaigners fear ministers are poised to award billions of pounds in fresh subsidies to Drax power station, despite strong concerns that burning trees to produce electricity is bad for the environment.

Drax burns wood to generate about 8% of the UK’s “green” power, and 4% of overall electricity. This is classed as “low-carbon” because the harvested trees are replaced by others that take up carbon from the atmosphere as they grow.

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Categories: Climate

In Greenland, the Ice Doesn’t Just Flow, It Quivers and Quakes

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 14:00
By using a fiber-optic cable to detect tiny vibrations a mile below the surface, scientists discovered a surprising way that ice sheets move.
Categories: Climate

Why Coal Has Been So Hard to Quit in the U.S.

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 11:58
What the economics of coal-rich states like Wyoming tells us about the transition away from the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Categories: Climate

How Chablis Winemakers Are Fighting Back Against Climate Change

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 11:41
Producers are struggling to stave off environmental threats to Chablis’s distinctive character.
Categories: Climate

‘We water, rest, water’: the green belt of vegetable plots cooling a city

The Guardian Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 08:02

A green belt circling the capital of Burkina Faso is preparing the country for the climate crisis

As far as the eye can see is a hodge-podge of trees, vegetable plots and water tanks. Up close it may look like a gigantic allotment, but this unusual project actually stretches for 2,000 hectares (4,942 acres), a green belt that now completely rings the city of Ouagadougou.

The green belt began life many years ago in the 1970s, with the aim of building a protective wall against the encroaching desert that lies beyond the greenery, just a few steps away. In Burkina Faso, one-third of the territory – about 9 million hectares of productive land – is degraded, with an estimated average degradation rate of 360,000 hectares per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Burkina Faso is not a climatically favoured country, but the drought of the 1980s exacerbated the problem, leading to significant population movements toward less degraded areas,” explains Sidnoma Abdoul Aziz Traoré, an environmental economist and expert in land degradation at the Centre Universitaire de Ziniaré (CUZ). But the situation, he says, is not irreversible.

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Categories: Climate

Documentarian Alex Gibney Teams Up With a Google Billionaire

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 08:00
The Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney has sold a majority stake in his Jigsaw Productions to the philanthropist Wendy Schmidt.
Categories: Climate

Jeff Bezos fund ends support for climate group amid fears billionaires ‘bowing down’ to Trump

The Guardian Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 07:21

Concerns raised as $10bn Bezos Earth Fund halts funding for Science Based Targets initiative, which monitors companies’ decarbonisation

Jeff Bezos’s $10bn climate and biodiversity fund has halted its funding of one of the world’s most important climate certification organisations, amid broader concerns US billionaires are “bowing down to Trump” and his anti-climate action rhetoric.

The Bezos Earth Fund has stopped its support for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international body that assesses if companies are decarbonising in line with the Paris agreement. Earth Fund had been one of two core funders of the SBTi, with the Ikea Foundation: the two accounted for 61% of its total funding last year. Earth Fund’s decision was first reported by the FT.

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Categories: Climate

Trump’s EPA to prioritize AI, lobbyists and staff cuts in ‘mission to traumatize’

The Guardian Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 06:00

New EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s pillars pledge to help auto industry and have no mention of the climate crisis

A new and starkly different vision for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been outlined by the Trump administration – one that involves mass staff cuts, an influx of industry lobbyists and, unusually, the promotion of artificial intelligence as a key agency priority.

A set of five “pillars” issued by new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, to guide the agency, set up under President Richard Nixon in 1970 to protect US public health and the environment, does include one referencing “clean land, air and water for every American”.

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Categories: Climate

Hottest January on record mystifies climate scientists

The Guardian Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 04:41

EU monitor says global temperatures were 1.75C above preindustrial levels, extending run of unprecedented highs

A run of record-breaking global temperatures has continued, even with a La Niña weather pattern cooling the tropical Pacific.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the warmest January on record, with surface – air temperatures 1.75C above preindustrial levels.

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Categories: Climate

Dog treat made from lab-grown meat on sale in UK as retailer claims a ‘world first’

The Guardian Climate Change - February 6, 2025 - 00:00

Chicken used in dog treat was cultivated from single sample of cells taken from one egg, says manufacturer Meatly

A dog treat made from lab-grown meat has gone on sale at Pets at Home in a move the retailer claims is a world first.

Chick Bites are made from plant-based ingredients combined with cultivated meat, which is produced by growing cells and does not require the raising or slaughter of animals.

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Categories: Climate

January Was Hottest January on Record, Scientists Report

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 5, 2025 - 22:00
Earth’s prolonged streak of abnormal heat continued into 2025 despite the arrival of La Niña ocean conditions, which typically bring cooler temperatures.
Categories: Climate

Urgent action needed to ensure UK food security, report warns

The Guardian Climate Change - February 5, 2025 - 19:01

The UK’s food supply has been threatened by recent events, such as the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic

Urgent action is needed to secure the UK’s food supply in the face of climate change-induced extreme weather, the imposition of tariffs and global insecurity, a report has warned.

Days after the US president, Donald Trump, warned Europe would be next for tariffs on trade after he imposed tax levies on Canada, China and Mexico, the report said the UK’s post-second world war food system was no longer fit for purpose, and the country’s food security was in a precarious state.

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Categories: Climate

On the edge: Massachusetts home at peril of tumbling into bay from erosion

The Guardian Climate Change - February 5, 2025 - 16:49

Multimillion-dollar home perched at edge of Cape Cod Bay in Wellfleet affected by erosion accelerated by climate crisis

The waters of Cape Cod Bay are coming for the big brown house perched on the edge of a sandy bluff high above the beach. It’s just a matter of when.

Erosion has marched right up to the concrete footings of the multimillion-dollar Massachusetts home where it overlooks the bay. Massive sliding doors that used to open onto a wide deck, complete with a hot tub, are now barricaded by thin wooden slats that prevent anyone from stepping through and falling 25ft to the beach below.

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Categories: Climate

Doge staffers enter Noaa headquarters and incite reports of cuts and threats

The Guardian Climate Change - February 4, 2025 - 20:11

Members reportedly sought access to IT systems at agency that Project 2025 has called ‘harmful to US prosperity’

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

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Categories: Climate

Minister promises to spend £250m to top up England’s flood defences

The Guardian Climate Change - February 4, 2025 - 17:30

Labour pledges to protect 66,500 more properties, criticising previous Tory efforts

Ministers are topping up flood defence investment in England to a “record” £2.65bn, after accusing the previous government of “putting lives at risk” by under-spending.

An extra £250m is being pledged on top of the £2.4bn previously announced, to shore up defences and protect an extra 66,500 properties from flooding over a two-year period, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

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Categories: Climate

Trump Rehires Neil Jacobs, Former NOAA Chief Involved in ‘Sharpiegate’

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 4, 2025 - 15:52
A respected atmospheric scientist, Dr. Jacobs was found to have violated NOAA’s code of ethics in 2019.
Categories: Climate

Deaths of 30,000 fish off WA coast made more likely by climate change, research finds

The Guardian Climate Change - February 4, 2025 - 15:00

Analysis drawing on satellite data and 13 climate models concludes that global heating makes marine heatwaves 20 times more likely

Marine heatwaves linked to the deaths of 30,000 fish off the Western Australia coast were up to 100 times more likely to occur because of climate change, new research has found.

Waters off WA have been affected by prolonged marine heatwaves since September.

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Categories: Climate