Bill McKibben

The next President will have to deal with a stream of unnatural disasters. So perhaps it would be wise for Harris to more aggressively remind voters of the stakes.

Solar fields turn out to be ideal for pollinators, too.

California Is Showing How a Big State Can Power Itself Without Fossil Fuels

Now, with rapid increases in temperature powering a never-ending stream of fires, floods, droughts, and storms, it’s easy to capture images—perhaps too easy, in that we’re so inundated with inundation and conflagration that, at some point, we seem to shut down. Last year’s record chaos, featuring the hottest temperatures in a hundred millennia, feels barely remembered; the news this spring that carbon dioxide has taken a record leap didn’t make the front pages. Those of us in the eastern U.S. cl…

But Trump’s request must have bemused some of the execs—why pay up when he’s already said that he’ll be a dictator just for Day One, when the country will “drill, drill, drill”? Everything he laid out for them (an end to Biden’s pause on L.N.G-export permits and to his policies on electric vehicles) he has already loudly promised. Indeed, Politico reported last week that the industry is already drawing up “ready-to-sign” executive orders for its wish list. As one gleeful lobbyist explained, “It’…

The best examples of that latter category came on Thursday, first with a new rule on cleaning up power plants which could save more than a billion tons of carbon by mid-century, and then with a little-noticed ruling by the Department of Housing and Urban Development which will require builders putting up federally funded houses and apartments to comply with a set of more recent building and energy codes instead of earlier, laxer standards. (The timing of the move owes less to Earth Day than to t…

In February, several big financial institutions announced that they were leaving the Climate Action 100+ group, which many had joined following the Glasgow climate-change conference, in 2021, making broad but vague commitments to support an energy transition with their lending practices. They said that they would continue to work to reduce emissions, but reports have suggested that they may also have been trying to avoid the risk of lawsuits accusing them of E.S.G.ism—that is, caring about the e…

It took him a dozen more years to be elected to the Senate from Massachusetts, but he eventually became the chair of that same Foreign Relations Committee, and then the Democratic Presidential nominee, in 2004, and then Hillary Clinton’s successor as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Among other accomplishments in that role, he signed the landmark Paris climate accord for the United States, in 2016, which stipulated a global effort aimed at limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius…

Minneapolis—where winter temperatures are normally among the lowest for any major metropolitan area in the Lower Forty-eight, about the same as in Anchorage—may have felt the fever more keenly than any place in the country. The Twin Cities set a record twenty-three straight days in which the temperature was above the freezing mark; the final weekend of the U.S. Pond Hockey championships was cancelled, owing to insufficient ice; and the Ice Palace of Minnesota closed for the season on January 27t…

Instead, dire things began happening much, much sooner. This spring, the keepers of various data sets pointed out that sea-surface temperatures around the globe were setting records. In July, a buoy off the Florida Keys recorded what some meteorologists believe is the highest marine temperature ever measured, setting in at 101.1 degrees, which is right about where people keep their hot tubs. That extreme heat soon moved onshore; because the northern hemisphere has more land than the southern, th…

Danielson, aged thirty-three, is a self-taught botanist who works for the Western New York Land Conservancy, helping to, among other things, identify rare and endangered plant communities. “I’m particularly interested in mosses and liverworts,” he said, and, indeed, we’d barely left the dirt road between Indian Lake and Inlet, New York, before he was bent over a carpet of green. But, in his spare time, Danielson is a big-tree hunter, at work for the Gathering Growth Foundation, on a book about t…

Green Mountain Power is at the forefront of this push; last month, it announced plans to install storage batteries for many of its customers—two hundred and seventy thousand homes and businesses, in total—in the next decade, pending regulatory approval. (Castonguay says it is testing a new home battery system, from FranklinWH—a company named for Ben Franklin, who actually coined the term “battery”—and that this apparatus seems to work as well as the Powerwall.) But other companies are starting t…

The data are from an analysis by Robert Warren Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell who is one of the world’s premier methane scientists. The analysis attempts to establish the greenhouse-gas footprint of L.N.G. exported to Europe and Asia, and the numbers presented are astonishing. Coal-fired power has long been the standard for measuring climate damage: when burned, coal releases carbon dioxide into the air in large quantities. In recent years, Howarth has demon…

The liquefied-natural-gas buildout—and fossil-fuel exports—challenge progress on global warming.

But this movement clearly needs to expand again.

By burning fossil fuels, humans force the oceans to soak up the heat equivalent of a Hiroshima-size bomb, over and over again.

Andrew Hickey has embarked on a heroic and wild effort to tell the history of rock music in five hundred songs.

The hours of coverage a day provide a pleasurable distraction from flooding rains, air-quality alerts, and climate dread.

A rapid end to burning fossil fuel would arrest the heating that has caused extreme damage in recent weeks; and that rapid end is possible.

The latest record temperatures are driving, again precisely as scientists have predicted, a cascading series of disasters around the world.