Category: En_So_Renew_CN TalkingClimate_MN

Renewables are popular, and most Americans don’t mind living near them. That’s the message of an interesting new poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, which found that about 70% of Americans would be comfortable living near a wind or solar farm “in their community.” Now, Americans slightly prefer solar over wind, and there’s a partisan gap among the respondents — 79% of Democrats are comfortable living near a wind farm, while only 59% of Republicans are — but overall the message is clear: Americans as a whole don’t mind living near a new renewables project.

We are a group of six graduate researchers with diverse professional backgrounds and opinions on fossil fuel companies’ role in funding affiliate program research. Three of us have been actively protesting fossil fuel funding at the Doerr School. Three of us are in favor of maintaining an open dialogue with fossil fuel companies. We agree that addressing climate change is serious enough to demand a clear strategic response from the University. Working together, we have reached a consensus on recommended criteria for evaluating the sources and objectives of research funding through affiliate programs, as well as a set of actions for enforcing these criteria.

Communities big and small are trying to rein in climate change. But many people working on these climate solutions are running into a big obstacle: falsehoods and conspiracy theories about their work. So what does this mean for fighting global warming?

As renewable energy becomes more widespread in the United States, large and bipartisan majorities of Americans say they wouldn’t mind fields of solar panels and wind turbines being built in their communities, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

Too much “apocalyptic language” on climate change risks undermining the fact humanity can still do plenty of things about it, according to the new British head of the UN’s climate science body. Professor Jim Skea was a professor in sustainable energy at Imperial College London before this year being elected the new head of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which advises all UN governments on the latest climate science.

Kathleen Maxwell has lived in Phoenix for more than 20 years, but this summer was the first time she felt fear, as daily high temperatures soared to 110 degrees or hotter and kept it up for a record-shattering 31 consecutive days.

“The climate is always changing!” So goes a popular refrain from climate deniers who continue to claim that there’s nothing special about this particular moment. There is no climate crisis, they say, because the Earth has survived dramatic warming before. Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently exemplified misconceptions about our planet’s climate past. When he asserted that “carbon dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere is still at a relative low through human history,” he didn’t just make a false statement (carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest they’ve been in at least 4 million years). He also showed fundamentally wrong thinking around the climate crisis.

There is no argument against the need to decarbonize our economy if we want an inhabitable planet.

Yet the term “net zero” — shorthand for efforts to balance greenhouse emissions going into the atmosphere with those coming out, as well as the movement to get more organizations working on it — generates a lot of grumbling (maybe “absolute zero” is better), finger-pointing (we need to create regenerative businesses) — and, most worrisome, skepticism.

Political battles over climate change are increasingly being fought in the classroom. Conservative activists and politicians in states across the country are trying to limit or distort the teaching of climate science to schoolchildren, marking a growing front in the culture war against social movements over race, gender identity and the environment.

It started with a paper in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world.
Patrick T. Brown, who co-directs the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank, published a paper in late August showing that warming temperatures have increased the likelihood of wildfire growth in California. News outlets, including NPR and the Los Angeles Times, dutifully covered the story.