years | Environment.org

For nearly a decade, Holly Alpine (née Beale) loved working at Microsoft. Shortly after finishing college, in July 2014, she landed a job there as a technical account manager. Less than four years later, Alpine was leading a program that invests in environmental projects in the communities where Microsoft’s data centers are located. She was also helping organize a worker-led sustainability group called the Sustainability Connected Community, which would grow to nearly 10,000 Microsoft employees worldwide by late 2023.

But at the end of last year, Alpine reached a painful decision: She could no longer ethically work at Microsoft. On January 24, 2024, Alpine sent an email to Microsoft president Brad Smith, CEO Satya Nadella, and several other senior company officials, letting them know why.

Writing on behalf of herself and a colleague who resigned at the same time, Alpine …

From peak to plummet in 15 years: Coal continues its precipitous decline

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| Pollution

Not long ago, coal was booming in the United States. The country’s power generators used more of that fuel in 2007 than ever before — a little over 1 billion tons. Four years later, the generating capacity of the nation’s coal-fired power plants peaked at 318 gigawatts, enough electricity for 238 million homes.

But over the last decade, the U.S. energy sector has made a dramatic pivot away from the greenhouse gas-spewing fossil fuel. Research shows it continues to do so at an astonishing pace. Nearly half of the generating capacity seen in 2011 is expected to vanish by the end of 2026, according to a report published Monday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit think-tank focused on the global energy transition. The analysis also found that coal use by U.S. electric-power producers could hit …

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

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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.”…