Category: CONSEQUENCES_LAND_DEFORESTATION ECONOMICS_MN NEWS_ARCHIVE Science_Land_CN

My career as a songwriter began in Manhattan, not far from where I was born. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1968, I became part of the singer-songwriter community that coalesced around Laurel Canyon. I thought California would be wild in the sense of nature. It turned out to be wild in the sense of drugs and parties. I wanted to live close to the kind of wild nature that must exist somewhere on a large scale. Somewhere turned out to be Idaho.

Adrienne Nice woke up early on the morning of July 25 to news she’d been dreading. The power company, Xcel Energy Inc., had shut off the electricity to the small Minneapolis apartment she shares with her teenage son, just as a heat wave was bearing down on the city.

A new report from the think tank RMI has a banger of a graphic that puts new and recent energy laws into historical context.

Climate research finds modelling used cannot predict localised extreme weather, leading to poor estimations of risk.

Democrats this weekend muscled through what would be the biggest expenditure ever by the United States to slow global warming, but you wouldn’t necessarily know from the name of the measure that it had anything to do with climate.
The $370 billion bill — designed to move the country away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other renewable energy — is called the Inflation Reduction Act, and it’s expected to pass the House this week. (In case you don’t remember, Senator Joe

Trillions of dollars may be misallocated to deal with the wrong climate threats around the world because the models used by central banks and regulators aren’t fit for purpose, a leading Australian climate researcher says.
Prof Andy Pitman, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, said regulators were relying on models that are good at forecasting how average climates will change as the planet warms, but were less likely to be of use for predicting how extreme weather will imperil individual localities such as cities.

Reducing the workweek to four days could have a climate benefit, advocates say. In addition to improving the well-being of workers, they say slashing working hours may reduce carbon emissions.
It’s what you might call a “potential triple-dividend policy, so something that can benefit the economy, society and also the environment,” said Joe O’Connor, chief executive of the nonprofit group 4 Day Week Global. “There are not many policy interventions that are available to us that could potentially have the kind of transformative impact that reduced work time could have.”

The Senate could vote as soon as this week on a climate and tax bill that, if passed, would hand a good deal of power to an obscure group of accountants in Norwalk, Conn.
Yesterday a bipartisan group of former Treasury secretaries, including Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner, endorsed the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, saying it would fight inflation and address climate issues. The group also said the legislation was “financed by a prudent tax policy.”

One battered N.C. community illustrates how summer, fueled in part by climate change, is proving an especially perilous and costly season.

Amazon’s carbon emissions jumped 18% last year, as the company reckoned with a pandemic-driven surge in e-commerce and grew its business to meet that extra demand.
In its annual sustainability report issued Monday, Amazon said its activities emitted the equivalent of 71.54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021. That’s up 18% from 2020, and an increase of nearly 40% from 2019, the year Amazon first began disclosing its carbon footprint.