Group items tagged

Still, we should do something. We need to learn how much, if at all, we can influence emissions.

Politics is present-oriented.

Most nations aren’t willing to scrap the energy status quo — the very basis of modern civilization — before having a practical substitute

a “carbon dividend” plan. This would be a good start.

That’s a standard carbon tax. What defines the “carbon dividend” plan is that all the money collected would be rebated to households.

Under one proposal, the government would slap a $43 tax on each ton of CO2. That would equal about 38 cents on a gallon of gasoline

It would raise about $180 billion in the tax’s first year, he says. If the “dividend” — the tax rebate — were distributed evenly, that would be about $1,400 per household.

Without the tax, projected CO2 emissions would be 5.4 billion metric tons in 2035. With the tax, the total would be 3.6 billion metric tons, a 33 percent decline

the initial increase in gasoline prices of 38 cents a gallon is within normal market fluctuations. The rebate would sweeten the tax. Consumers who cut fossil fuel use would come out ahead.

The tax has another advantage. It decentralizes decision-making to individual companies and people

None of this has changed my long-standing skepticism that, without some major technological breakthrough (safer nuclear power?), it will be exceedingly hard to halt the increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The required changes in lifestyle and economic activity are simply too great.

They appeared to miss the so-called global warming hiatus between 1998 and 2013. At the time, scientists posited there wasn’t really a hiatus, but that the heat was simply building up in the oceans, or that there was a data collection issue. They were right, but that didn’t save the models from criticism.

The scientists combined four data sets to paint a picture of what has been happening in the oceans since 1991

Trenberth and his co-authors say ocean heat content, which is a measure of the warmth of the water down to about 2,000 meters, is a “great metric for measuring global warming” because the data isn’t as erratic as the temperature on land, and it captures much more of the planet.

n the process, they discovered something interesting: Their data agrees with what the climate models were predicting

Trenberth and his colleagues say if society continues to emit greenhouse gas at its current rate, oceans will rise one foot by the end of the century on top of the rise expected from melting land ice on Greenland and Antarctica.

This synthesis suggests the models are doing just fine

The IPCC reports have research deadlines at least a year before they are published; science in the most recent report may have been done six to eight years ago and “there’s a whole lot of stuff that has happened since then,”

Looking forward, there are two scenarios scientists are working with. The low-emissions scenario that the Paris climate change agreement was built around is no longer realistic, Trenberth said. The high-emissions, business-as-usual scenario will probably continue until about 2040, in his opinion, but eventually society will figure out how to manage the crisis.

“Yes, we need to try and stop emitting greenhouse gas. But the inertia is large,” Trenberth said. “Therefore the climate is going to continue to change.

Di Liberto agrees that we’re already feeling the effects, but he sees things changing in society, too

“We’ve spent too much time and effort on people who may not be convinced” that climate change is real and important, he said

But now there seems to be this grass-roots movement of young people who care. I don’t remember a time like this.”

That’s scary because all efforts at the moment are assuming if we reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 we can limit warming to 1.5C. That might now be rather too optimistic

Add into the mix came further news this week that glaciers appear to be melting 10 to 100 times faster than expected.

OK, here’s both sides of the debate – for well over 40 years scientists have been researching and testing evidence that climate change is occurring due to CO2 emissions. They have found conclusive evidence that there is a link and that on the current path by 2100 global temperatures will likely reach 3C above pre-industrial levels.

The other side is that they have kept researching and testing the data, and sorry, they were wrong – it’s even worse than they thought.

Extreme floods that have historically struck some coastal cities and small island nations once every 100 years will become an annual occurrence by 2050

if emissions continue to increase, global sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century — around 12 percent higher than the group estimated as recently as 2013

Melting glaciers could harm water supplies, and warming oceans could wreck marine fisheries.

“The conclusion is inescapable: The impacts of climate change on the ocean are well underway. Unless we take very serious action very soon, these impacts will get worse — much, much worse.”

More than 100 scientists from around the world contributed to the latest report by the IPCC, which found that profound and potentially devastating consequences lie ahead for marine life, Arctic ecosystems and entire human societies if climate change continues unabated.

While dozens of smaller nations did unveil plans for coming years, the world’s largest emitters have stopped short of committing to transformational changes.

Sea level rise is accelerating, and the world could see 3.6 feet in total sea level rise by the year 2100 in a very high-emissions scenario. In 2013, t

The ocean is losing oxygen, growing more acidic, taking up an increasing amount of heat, and becoming more stratified, with warm water at the surface preventing cooler, nutrient rich waters from rising. All of these changes have profound consequences for marine ecosystems.

when scientists behind the report looked at an alternative method for gauging how much seas could rise — simply canvassing the views of experts — even larger estimates emerged. The group’s findings only highlight “likely” amounts of sea level rise, meaning they do not represent worst-case scenarios.

For some major coastal cities, a historical 100-year flood event will happen annually by the year 2050. That includes large cities such as Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Lima, Singapore, Barcelona and Sydney, the report says

“Even our language has to adapt: What once was called ‘climate change’ is now truly a ‘climate crisis.’ … We are seeing unprecedented temperatures, unrelenting storms and undeniable science.”

“The world’s coasts provide a home to around 1.9 billion people and over half of the world’s megacities — all of which are in grave danger if we don’t act immediately to prevent rising temperatures and sea levels,”

“Extreme high temperatures, coastal flooding, and more frequent natural disasters are becoming the new normal. ... This is what the climate crisis looks like now.

the system could still tip toward very large ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica. If that happens, the rate of sea-level rise could become truly catastrophic, especially by the years 2200 and 2300, when it could exceed 10 feet.

Permafrost, which contains enormous amounts of carbon that can be released as it thaws, has warmed to “record high levels.” Summer Arctic sea ice extent is now probably lower than at any time in “at least 1,000 years,” and the oldest, thickest ice has already declined by 90 percent.

“Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,”

In the United States, cities facing fast-moving sea-level danger include Los Angeles, Miami, Savannah, Honolulu, San Juan, Key West and San Diego.

One of the most shocking findings involves “marine heat waves,” which have been blamed for mass deaths of corals, kelp forests and other key ocean organisms. The large majority of these events are already directly attributable to climate change, and by the year 2100, they will become 20 times more common in the best case, and 50 times as common in the absolute worst case, compared with the late 1800s

Many of these changes to oceans and ice are unfolding in parts of the Earth where few people live, and so the shifts are not always readily visible to most humans. But the changes taking place there ultimately will affect people around the globe, in the form of rising seas and other impacts. And as those impacts worsen, so does the difficulty of adapting to them.

the grim findings in Wednesday’s report should be a call to action.

"We must not let these climate change impacts paralyze us,” she said in an email. “We must address root causes of climate change by slowing and eventually stopping accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions.”

There is much that humans can do to blunt the expected impacts in the meantime, she said, such as restoring mangroves and protecting reefs and marshes to reduce storm impacts on coastal communities.

“Alone, these measures cannot meet all the challenges of climate change to oceans and coasts, but they are doable, cost-effective and make a difference,”

The rollback of water quality rules has endangered drinking water, fisheries and recreational waters that support the health and economies of communities throughout the country. The failure to adequately fund cleanups at Superfund sites has left communities with contaminated land, fenced off from any beneficial use for years as remediation is delayed.

By August 2017, it was clear that EPA leadership had little regard for the expertise and historical knowledge of its career employees. That’s when I made the decision to publicly protest against the Trump administration when resigning from the agency after 33 years of service.

Replace the Obama Clean Power Plan, which limited harmful emissions from power plants, with a rule that is projected to significantly increase exposure to fine particles and ozone in the air. More people, especially those living in frontline communities, will have heart attacks; suffer from asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases; and miss days of work and school because of illness.

oll back successful clean car regulations and fuel economy standards, which reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, improved air quality and increased fuel economy. The rollback is projected to increase GHG emissions by 1.5bn metric tons through 2040, contributing to the destructive impacts of climate change, and resulting in 18,500 more premature deaths by 2050.

ctions by the Trump administration over the past four years have set us back. But we will not let this administration obliterate 50 years of environmental and public health progress. We owe that to the generation that will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Earth Day in 2070.

Under the Congressional Review Act, any regulation finalized within 60 legislative days of the end of a presidential term can be overturned with a simple majority vote in the Senate.

The most significant of those would be the rules on methane, which were published by the Environmental Protection Agency. While most climate change regulations target carbon dioxide, the most damaging greenhouse gas, methane is a close second, lingering in the atmosphere for a shorter period of time but packing a bigger punch while it lasts. By some estimates, methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years in the atmosphere.

While the Postal Service moves lowly toward adopting electric vehicles, Robert Puentes of the Eno Center for Transportation, a transportation think tank, says Biden is on the right track in pushing for EVs.

"Transportation is the No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, and the U.S. lags far behind," he says. "And so for the president to try to put the government purchasing power in play and to try to convert those vehicles certainly makes sense."

Our history provides many examples of hopes for progress that seemed hopelessly naïve, up until suddenly they weren’t: abolition, female suffrage, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and now, possibly, a just climate policy. Let’s not throw in the towel, Mr. Krugman.

These paid family leaves need to be divided into two parts: postpartum recovery time for a parent who gave birth to the child joining the family, and additional weeks of paid leave for each parent for the purpose of family bonding and adjustment.

The distinction between postpartum time and bonding time is key. Research has shown that, in many professional fields at least, gender-neutral family leave programs advantage male parents and disadvantage women parents. Men, receiving equal benefits with nothing close to the same burden, use the extra time off to advance their careers while women fall farther behind.

In just a few hours, the plane’s instruments identified six sites with unusually high methane emissions

Methane is loosely regulated, difficult to detect and rising sharply

Operators of the sites identified by The Times are among the very companies that have lobbied the Trump administration,

either directly or through trade organizations, to weaken regulations on methane,

Next year, the administration could move forward with a plan that would effectively eliminate requirements

By the E.P.A.’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than a million homes for a year.

A worker went to check on the tank, climbing some stairs and walking into the plume.

The reporters drove to the sites armed with infrared video gear that revealed methane billowing from tanks, seeping from pipes and wafting from bright flares that are designed to burn off the gas,

The regulatory rollback sought by the energy industry is the latest chapter in the administration’s historic effort to weaken environmental and climate regulations while waging a broad-based attack on climate science.

The findings address the mystery behind rising levels of methane in the atmosphere. Methane levels have soared since 2007 for reasons that still aren’t fully understood.

Methane also contributes to ground-level ozone, which, if inhaled, can cause asthma and other health problems.

In the course of about four hours of flying, we found at least six sites with high methane-emissions readings, ranging from about 300 pounds to almost 1,100 pounds an hour, including at DCP Pegasus, which is part owned by the energy giant Phillips 66.

At the DCP Pegasus plant, south of Midland, the camera transformed a tranquil scene into a furnace. Hot columns of gas shot into the air. Fumes engulfed structures.

“This site’s definitely leaking,”

The companies found an administration willing to listen.

Before his appointment to the post of assistant administrator at the E.P.A.

Americans choosing Trump would send the signal that they don’t care about the climate, Light said.

“In the case of a second Trump term, we’ve got to totally double down on the efforts to communicate how serious the non-federal actors are in the United States,” Light said. “And what you really want to try to make sure is that those people in other countries who are not in favor of strengthening their countries’ own climate target are not able to point to the United States and say nothing’s going on there.”

The concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases is at a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. The planet is already 1C hotter than it was before industrialization.

As the technology for retrieving oil and gas has advanced, with hydraulic fracturing, the cost of production has plummeted. The US is now a net exporter of oil products.

Much of the expansion expected would be for feedstocks to make chemicals and plastics, explained Courtney Bernhardt, the group’s research director.

“The US is already struggling to meet climate commitments and transition to a low-carbon future,” Bernhardt said. “This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas and petrochemical industries.”

In the race against Trump, all the major Democratic candidates have similarly pledged to seek at least net-zero emissions by 2050.

The League of Conservation Voters’ called the House committee effort encouraging and said the announcement “is further proof that elections have consequences”. But other groups were critical, saying the plan would not transition away from fossil fuels fast enough.

The researchers identified a common set of drastic changes that the United States would need to make over the next decade to stay on pace for zero emissions.

This year, energy companies will install 42 gigawatts of new wind turbines and solar panels, smashing records. But that annual pace would need to nearly double over the next decade

The capacity of the nation’s electric grid would have to expand roughly 60 percent by 2030 to handle vast amounts of wind and solar power

By 2030, at least 50 percent of new cars sold would need to be battery-powered, with that share rising thereafter.

Most homes today are heated by natural gas or oil. But in the next 10 years, nearly one-quarter would need to be warmed with efficient electric heat pumps, double today’s numbers.

Virtually all of the 200 remaining coal-burning power plants would have to shut down by 2030.

“The scale of what we have to build in a very short time frame surprised me,” said Christopher Greig, a senior scientist at Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

To start, the United States could make enormous strides over the next decade by rapidly scaling up solutions already in use today, like wind, solar, electric cars and heat pumps. Doing so would require $2.5 trillion in additional investments by governments and industry by 2030.

Wind and solar power could be backed up by batteries, some existing nuclear reactors and a large fleet of natural-gas plants that run only occasionally or have been modified to burn clean hydrogen.

Devices that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could help offset emissions.

But most of those technologies are still in early development. That would have to change quickly.

“We need to be building up our options now,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton.

The studies found that, if done right, getting to net zero appears broadly affordable, largely because technologies like wind and solar have become so much cheaper than anyone expected over the past decade.

“It’s not a question of whether we have enough land, because we do,” said Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton. “But with that many new projects, you have to ask if they’ll run into local opposition.”

Then there are jobs to consider. Net zero would mean eliminating coal and drastically reducing oil and gas use, displacing hundreds of thousands of fossil-fuel workers.

On the flip side, millions of new green jobs would spring up for workers retrofitting homes or building wind farms, though those jobs might not be located in the same regions.

Politicians would need to figure out how to gain public acceptance for the sweeping changes unfolding, while protecting vulnerable Americans from harm.

What both studies do illustrate is that there’s little room for delay.

“It may seem like 2050 is a long way off,” said Dr. Jenkins. “But if you think about the timelines for policies, business decisions and capital investments, it’s really more like the day after tomorrow.”

Developing countries contribute a small fraction of the emissions from cars and power plants. But they're enduring some of the worst damage from climate change, like island nations that face being erased by sea level rise.

The U.S has committed to a 50% to 52% reduction in emissions by 2030,

Over that period, the U.S. has cumulatively emitted the most of any country.

The United Nations is calling on countries to be carbon neutral by 2050, which means if a country is still emitting greenhouse gas emissions, they're being absorbed by forests or other means to keep them from entering the atmosphere.

With hundreds of millions of people vulnerable to extreme weather like severe storms and droughts, developing countries secured a promise for $100 billion in climate finance annually from developed nations. The funding goes to projects like sustainable transportation and renewable energy, as well as helping communities prepare for more extreme events. Still, as of 2019, developed countries are still below the goal, which will be a point of contention in the COP26 negotiations.

Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.

Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.

In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).

These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.

adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.

Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.

“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”

They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.

Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.

they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.

Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.

Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.

Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”

But these measures have costs. Schooling time is cut short, so students learn less. People do not travel to their jobs, so work is less productive. The heat kept some farmers inside and stunted harvests, so crop yields fell and global food prices increased. Social life is disrupted.

The geography of poor countries — many are close to the Equator — is not the only reason climate change is such a burden for them. Their poverty is another factor, leaving them with fewer resources to adapt.

“Climate change is one of the most profound inequities of the modern era,”

There is a paradox to the climate crisis. Because India never fully industrialized, it has not released as many greenhouse gases as the U.S., European nations and other rich countries. But because it has not industrialized, it also has fewer resources to adapt than the richer, polluting nations.

Fewer than 10 percent of Indians have air-conditioning at home.

The rush for clean energy technologies, like solar and wind power, is an effort to break that tension — to give countries a way to industrialize without the planet-warming pollution. With climate disasters already hitting much of the world, that effort is in a race against time to prevent more crises like India’s.

The federal Bureau of Land Management also announced that it would strengthen its ability to handle a growing number of applications by wind, solar and geothermal developers by creating five new offices across the West to review proposed projects.

The decision comes as the Biden administration also seeks to raise the royalty fees it charges oil and gas companies to drill on federal land and in federal waters. Last month, the administration canceled three oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, prompting Republican lawmakers to criticize the new renewable energy policies as harmful to energy producing states.

“Here is Biden‘s energy policy: wind, solar and wishful thinking,”

President Biden has pledged to cut greenhouse gases generated by the United States roughly in half by 2030.

Last year, for example, the administration gave a green light to two major solar projects on federal lands in California that it said would generate about 1,000 megawatts, enough electricity to power about 132,000 homes.

The reduction in fees and rental rates comes at a challenging time for the solar industry. A Commerce Department investigation into whether Chinese companies are circumventing U.S. tariffs by moving components for solar panels through four Southeast Asian countries has held up hundreds of new solar projects across the country.

The new projection, released on Monday, was carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School. They were commissioned by the Club of Rome for a followup to its seminal Limits to Growth study more than 50 years ago.

“This gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won’t go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective. We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.”

Previous studies have painted a grimmer picture. Last year, the UN estimated the world population would hit 9.7 billion by the middle of the century and continue to rise for several decades afterwards.

But the authors caution that falling birthrates alone will not solve the planet’s environmental problems, which are already serious at the 7.8 billion level and are primarily caused by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority.

The report is based on a new methodology which incorporates social and economic factors that have a proven impact on birthrate, such as raising education levels, particularly for women, and improving income.

In the business-as-usual case, it foresees existing policies being enough to limit global population growth to below 9 billion in 2046 and then decline to 7.3 billion in 2100.

too little too late: “Although the scenario does not result in an overt ecological or total climate collapse, the likelihood of regional societal collapses nevertheless rises throughout the decades to 2050, as a result of deepening social divisions both internal to and between societies. The risk is particularly acute in the most vulnerable, badly governed and ecologically vulnerable economies.”

In the second, more optimistic scenario – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – it estimates human numbers could hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by more than a third to about 6 billion in 2100. Under this pathway, they foresee considerable gains by mid-century for human society and the natural environment.

“By 2050, greenhouse gas emissions are about 90% lower than they were in 2020 and are still falling,” according to the report. “Remaining atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial processes are increasingly removed through carbon capture and storage. As the century progresses, more carbon is captured than stored, keeping the global temperature below 2C above pre-industrial levels. Wildlife is gradually recovering and starting to thrive once again in many places.”

Before this study, continuous temperature record reconstruction only went back about 2,000 years. The temperature trend produces a line shaped like a "hockey stick" with a sudden spike after what had been a fairly steady line. That data came from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments.

the general downward trend of temperatures that reversed 100 years ago seemed to indicate the Earth was heading either toward another ice age or little ice age from about 1550 to 1850. Or it was continuing to cool naturally until greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels changed everything.

"We have, through human emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, indefinitely delayed the onset of the next ice age and are now heading into an unknown future where humans control the thermostat of the planet,