Pollution | Environment.org

As dozens of heads of state arrived in Azerbaijan for the annual United Nations climate talks this week, one absent world leader’s name was on everyone’s lips. At press conference after press conference, questions arose about the election of Donald Trump. The U.S. president-elect has threatened to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement — for a second time — and slow down the country’s transition to renewable energy.

The Biden administration has tried to project confidence in the early days of the conference, which is known as COP29, given the country’s status as the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of planet-warming carbon. At a packed-house presser on the conference’s first day, President Joe Biden’s senior climate advisor, John Podesta, said he expected many of Biden’s clean energy achievements — which are projected to …

Here are the 5 issues to watch at COP29

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It’s possible there has never been a worse time for the United Nations to hold negotiations on climate change. Post-pandemic inflation has upended countries around the world, straining public budgets and distracting governments from climate action. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to rage, scrambling the priorities of powerful countries like Russia, Iran, and those of the European Union. To top it all off, the United States just elected former President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and removed the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate agreement during his first term in office.

Nevertheless, in a few days thousands of negotiators and activists will convene in Baku, Azerbaijan, to try to make progress on the global climate fight. This year’s conference, known as COP29, is widely acknowledged as a transitional affair without the marquee …

The race for clean energy is local

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The U.S. power grid is at a critical crossroads. Electricity generation, like every other industry, needs to rid itself of fossil fuels if the country is to play its role in combating the climate crisis — a transition that will have to happen even as energy providers scramble to meet what they claim is an unprecedented spike in electricity demand, attributed to the rise of AI.

Considered as a physical object, the North American grid is the world’s largest machine; in its political form in the United States, however, it’s a mess of overlapping jurisdictions. So whether the country meets this newly rising demand for electricity in a climate-friendly way or by prolonging the fossil fuel industry’s dominance will largely be up to the 200 or so regulators who sit on state utility commissions. No single person or body …

San Francisco’s surprisingly difficult quest to turn a century-old highway into a park

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On a chilly weekend in mid-September, the wind-blasted dunes of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach loomed over the Great Highway — two lanes that run along the Pacific coast in either direction separated by a median of sand and ice plant succulents. In a section of the southbound lanes, the Autumn Moon Festival reverberated with a DJ’s tunes. Birds squawked in formation overhead, and squealing children tumbled down the dunes and scribbled the road with chalk. From the top of the sandy bumps, between clumps of beachgrass, you could see massive container ships sailing out of the Golden Gate and into that famous fog.

The evening represented a compromise. In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of San Francisco closed the Great Highway and turned it into a promenade, much as other cities blocked off roads to let people …

Chronic health problems amplify heat risk in the Rio Grande Valley

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Something seemed amiss when police officer Oscar Lizarraga arrived at the Conquistador Apartments.

Maria Ester Singh hadn’t yet paid that month’s rent, and the apartment manager said that was unusual. Singh’s daughter, who lives outside Houston, hadn’t heard from her since April. She asked a cousin in Brownsville to check in on her. Now it was May 8, and no one answered a knock at the door of unit 1012, which was latched from the inside.

Joaquin Galvan, 82, Maria Trinidad Galvan, 78, and Singh, 60, lived in the apartment complex on Billy Mitchell Boulevard with three small dogs. Singh was the personal care attendant for Joaquin, her father, and Maria Trinidad, her aunt.

Lizarraga checked the windows and doors for signs of forced entry. Finding none, he pried the door open. He saw a body slumped on the floor. …

‘Tattoos for the climate concerned’: Why people are getting inked for the planet

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The vision

“Are you sure you don’t want to just, you know, remove it?” the artist asks assertively.

I considered this before making my appointment at the open-air studio. It’s a relic from a bleak time, after all. But history wasn’t meant to be erased.

“Yep, let’s stick with the plan.”

I’m nervous I’ll prickle too much once the algae ink-coated needle pierces my forearm, now sun-loved and wrinkled. But the process ends up being way less painful than I remember.

After a couple of pokes, the tattoo of my youth, The climate changed, has a new ending: And so did we.

— a drabble by Emma Loewe

The spotlight

Roughly half of L.A. tattoo artist Sonny Robinson Bailey’s clients come to him for climate-themed tats: a motley crew of surfers, scuba divers, scientists, and environmental scholars no …

The tiny potato at the heart of one tribe’s fight against climate change

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Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.

The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.

James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in …

Trump’s proposed mass deportations could ‘decimate’ the US food supply

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As Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump campaigns for a second term in the White House, the former president has repeatedly promised to enact the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history. It’s a bold threat that legal experts say should be taken seriously, despite the significant technical and logistical challenges posed by deporting 11 million people from the U.S.

Even if only somewhat successful, Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration — with its laser focus on removing immigrants who live in the U.S. without permanent legal status — has the potential to uproot countless communities and families by conducting sweeping raids and placing people in detention centers.

Mass deportation would also, according to economists, labor groups, and immigration advocates, threaten the economy and disrupt the U.S. food supply chain, which is reliant on many forms of migrant labor.

The ramifications of a …

Environment.org

Category: Pollution

‘We may have less to offer’: US negotiators confront diminished standing at COP29

Here are the 5 issues to watch at COP29

The race for clean energy is local

San Francisco’s surprisingly difficult quest to turn a century-old highway into a park

Chronic health problems amplify heat risk in the Rio Grande Valley

‘Tattoos for the climate concerned’: Why people are getting inked for the planet

The vision

The spotlight

The tiny potato at the heart of one tribe’s fight against climate change

Trump’s proposed mass deportations could ‘decimate’ the US food supply