were | Environment.org

Though the election of Donald Trump has loomed over this month’s United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, Biden administration officials and prominent Democrats have given speech after speech pledging that the nation’s transition to renewable energy will continue. White House representatives have touted the economic benefits of the billions of dollars in climate-related subsidies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and officials from California and Washington have pledged that individual states will continue the march to net-zero emissions.

But the U.S. officials with the most power over the country’s energy future did not even arrive in Baku until the end of the first week of the U.N. conference, which is known as COP29. When Trump assumes the presidency in January, these five Republican members of Congress will enjoy unified control of the federal government, giving them wide latitude to write …

We’re in debt to the Earth. How can we repay it?

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| Pollution

On Christmas Day 1971, for the first time in Homo sapiens’ roughly 300,000 years of hobbling about, humanity’s demands on the Earth exceeded what the planet could provide in a year. That practice has continued, and worsened, for the last half century.

Since the early 2000s, the nonprofit Global Footprint Network has calculated what it calls “Earth Overshoot Day,” the date on which we outstrip our resources each year. At present, human society consumes resources at a rate that would take 1.75 Earths to sustain. So, from August 1 of this year onward, everything we consume adds to our collective debt. In the language of ecological economists: We’re in overshoot.

The date itself is a handy construct, meant to illuminate a larger problem — in reality, the Earth does not reset each year. In the science of planetary …

The hazards of gas stoves were flagged by the industry — and hidden — 50 years ago

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| Pollution

Newly uncovered documents reveal that the gas industry understood that its stoves were polluting the air inside homes 50 years ago — and then moved to conceal that information. It stands in stark contrast to the industry’s denial of the health dangers posed by gas stoves today.

In a draft report on natural gas and the environment in January 1972, the American Gas Association included a section on “Indoor Air Quality Control” that detailed its concerns with pollution from gas appliances like carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. The document showed that the trade group was in the process of researching solutions “for the purposes of limiting the levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides in household air.” But all that information disappeared from the final text, according to reporting by the climate accountability site DeSmog on Thursday.

That draft report…

The past 8 years were the hottest in recorded history

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| Pollution

Last year was the fifth-warmest ever recorded in planetary history, scientists announced on Tuesday. The data reflects a wider warming trend driven by emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the past eight years being the warmest on record, and 2016 the hottest yet.

The record heat is hitting some parts of the globe harder than others. This past summer was the hottest ever recorded in Europe, where a series of punishing heat waves claimed more than 20,000 lives. Prolonged heat waves also swept through parts of Pakistan, northern India, and central and eastern China.

“2022 was yet another year of climate extremes across Europe and globally,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which announced the findings. “These events highlight that we are already experiencing the devastating consequences of our warming world.”…