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ExxonMobil is under investigation by the New York attorney general for possibly lying about the risks of climate change, the New York Times reports.

A group of 24 companies - including Apple, Facebook, Google, HPE, Ingersoll Rand, Johnson Controls, Microsoft, Tiffany & Co, Unilever, and VF Corporation - signed a statement urging President Trump to "keep the United States in the Paris Agreement on climate change for the good of the U.S. economy." The statement was featured as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Post.

Sixteen hotels, including the Waldorf and Pierre, have joined the NYC Carbon Challenge -- a city program aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 30% over the next decade.

"The effect of long-term warming is to make it harder to count on snowmelt runoff in wet times," said David S. Gutzler, a climate scientist at the University of New Mexico. "And it makes the dry times much harder than they used to be."

On January 31, The Hong Kong Legislative Council voted 49 to 4 to phase out the sale of antique ivory. As Tiffany May at The New York Times reports, the city will ban all sale of ivory, new and antique, by 2021, closing a system that poachers have previously exploited. The move will help staunch a significant player in the ivory market, which drives the destruction of elephant populations. In recent years, the United Nations estimates that poachers kill up to 100 elephants each day, which has devastated their populations.

NEW DELHI - Violent protests broke out in the southern state of Karnataka on Monday after the Indian Supreme Court ordered the state to release water to the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, the latest chapter in a longstanding dispute.

What's the best way to protect elephants? One way is refusing to buy ivory-demand for the material stokes poaching, which has demolished elephant populations in Africa. Now, the United States is taking an even stronger stance on ivory in a bid to protect the majestic creatures. As Jada F. Smith reports for The New York Times, the United States will now almost totally ban the sale of African elephant ivory.

Utility FirstEnergy, one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the US, has responded to shareholder demands and agreed to reduce its carbon emissions, the New York Times reports. The company - the eighth-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the US according to the Greenhouse 100 index - says it will study and report on what it can do to meet President Barack Obama's goal of reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

Coca-Cola and Nike are among the global companies that have acknowledged that climate change is a major threat to commerce and adapted their business practices as a result, the New York Times reports.

The Paris climate accord heralds a new era for the global economy, with a wide range of investors and industries now likely to seek ways to avoid carbon risks and adopt less carbon-intensive ways of doing business, experts say. Secretary of State John Kerry says the deal will be a net job creator and sends a powerful message to the marketplace. Nancy Pfund, managing partner of DBL Partners, agrees. "It's very hard to go backward from something like this. People are boarding this train, and it's time to hop on if you want to have a thriving, 21st-century economy," she says. 

Chipotle became the first major restaurant chain to announce it would use only non-genetically modified organisms in its food preparation across its over 1,800 locations, according the New York Times.

Whole Foods, Bon Appétit and Dickinson College are among the organizations saving money by recycling food waste, the New York Times reports.

Californians aren't doing enough to reduce their water use, despite being caught up in a years-long drought, writes the editorial board of The New York Times. "The state must focus on longer-term policies that encourage people to alter their lifestyles and businesses to change how they operate," the board writes

The industry has resisted pressure for years from environmental groups to warn investors of the risks that stricter limits on carbon emissions could have on their businesses, although that appears to be changing. Energy experts said prosecutors may decide to investigate companies that chose to fund or join organizations that questioned climate science or policies designed to address the problem, such as the Global Climate Coalition and the American Legislative Exchange Council, to see if discrepancies exist between the companies' public and private statements.

The Christmas gifts have been delivered, and Secret Santa is done. Now, the work begins for Optoro, a start-up company that aims to reduce the financial and environmental costs of another great holiday tradition: returns. Little known to shoppers, however, is that a majority of returned items never make it back to retailers' shelves. Instead, the items wind their way through liquidators, wholesalers and resellers, many of the purchases ending up in landfills. According to some estimates, as much as two million tons of returned items - most of it undamaged merchandise - are thrown away each year, enough to fill over 200,000 garbage trucks.

The recycling industry is wasteful and ineffectual, and it will prove neither economically nor environmentally sustainable, writes John Tierney. You'd have to recycle 100,000 plastic bottles to offset the emissions from a single business-class transatlantic flight, and you probably wouldn't turn a profit in the process, Tierney notes. "How can you build a sustainable city with a strategy that can't even sustain itself?" he asks. 

Warming ocean waters are bleaching the world's corals to an unprecedented degree and could destroy huge swaths of coral reefs in areas ranging from Australia to Africa. "This is a huge, looming planetary crisis, and we are sticking our heads in the sand about it," says Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland in Australia.

An organic activist group and a subsequent article in The New York Times said testing has shown small amounts of the weed killer glyphosate in some Ben & Jerry's ice cream samples. Traces of the widely used pesticide can be found in many food products, and the company says it is working to determine how amounts from 0 to 1.74 parts per billion got into its supply chain.

Conscious Commerce, founded by actress Olivia Wilde, partnered with H&M to launch a Conscious Exclusive shop in New York City's Times Square, which houses clothing made from sustainable materials

Extreme heat can kill, as it did by the dozens in Pakistan in May. But as many of South Asia's already-scorching cities get even hotter, scientists and economists are warning of a quieter, more far-reaching danger: Extreme heat is devastating the health and livelihoods of tens of millions more.