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Electric vehicles produce less carbon dioxide than petrol cars across the vast majority of the globe – contrary to the claims of some detractors, who have alleged that the CO2 emitted in the production of electricity and their manufacture outweighs the benefits.

Across the world, passenger road vehicles and household heating generate about a quarter of all emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. That makes electric vehicles essential to reducing overall emissions, but how clean an electric vehicle is also depends on how the electricity is generated, the efficiency of the supply and the efficiency of the vehicle.

Scientists from the universities of Exeter, Nijmegen and Cambridge conducted lifecycle assessments that showed that even where electricity generation still involves substantial amounts of fossil fuel, there was a CO2 saving over conventional cars and fossil fuel heating.

If the United States wants to get serious about tackling climate change, the country will need to build a staggering amount of new energy infrastructure in just the next 10 years, laying down steel and concrete at a pace barely being contemplated today.

That’s one conclusion from a major study released Tuesday by a team of energy experts at Princeton University, who set out several exhaustively detailed scenarios for how the country could slash its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by 2050.

That goal has been endorsed by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as numerous states and businesses, to help avoid the worst effects of global warming.

Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.

“True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”

His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”

Delhi’s air is so filthy that on November 13th the government decreed an indefinite closure. One rarely mentioned reason for the pollution also plays a part in a host of other troubles: subsidies.

For years, opium has been the monster too big to slay. One Afghan government after another has pledged to stamp out opium production and trafficking, only to prove unable to resist billions of dollars in illicit profits.

But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the Taliban’s own 20-year insurgency.

The Taliban announced on April 3 that poppy cultivation had been outlawed, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.

The details of the discussions on “The McLaughlin Group” weren’t nearly as important as the chemistry and the pacing. Unlike it gray competitors, “The Group” was as much about the speed of the discussion as the intensity. Under McLaughlin’s lash, the panel churned through multiple topics in minutes, establishing the modern standard.

McLaughlin taunted the panelists to elicit counter-opinions, and he demanded predictions — creating, in short, the kind of speculative, subjective conversations that political junkies and sports fans adore. Who cared whether all the guessing and opinion-mongering probably influenced no one and ultimately meant nothing but a good show?

Some critics, including Germond, were appalled by what the show had wrought. They thought it trafficked in superficiality and oversimplification, reducing complicated policy questions to a point-scoring exercise. No less a critic than President Reagan said “The Group” had turned the traditional Sunday morning talk show into “a political version of ‘Animal House.’ ”

The scientist and historian Vaclav Smil called Haber-Bosch “the most important technical invention of the 20th century.” Bosch had effectively removed the historical bounds on crop yields, so much so that he was widely credited with making “bread from air.” By some estimates, Bosch’s work made possible the lives of more than two billion human beings over the last 100 years.

They depend on electric fans to pull air into the ducts and over a special material, known as a sorbent, laced with granules that chemically bind with CO₂; periodic blasts of heat then release the captured gas from the sorbent, with customized software managing the whole catch-and-release cycle.

“The first thing they said was: ‘This will never work technically.’ And finally in 2017 we convinced them it works technically, since we built the big plant in Hinwil. But once we convinced them that it works technically, they would say, ‘Well, it will never work economically.’ ”For the moment, skeptics of Climeworks’s business plan are correct: The company is not turning a profit.

Whereas successful political movements used to have a single ideology, they can now combine several. Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: They do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favorable demographic. New political parties can now operate like that: You can bundle together issues, repackage them and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging — based on exactly the same kind of market research — that you know has worked in other places.

Opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to feminism and same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration, especially by Muslims; anger at corruption; boredom with mainstream politics; a handful of issues, such as hunting and gun ownership, that some people care a lot about and others don’t know exist; plus a streak of libertarianism, a talent for mockery and a whiff of nostalgia

All of these are the ingredients that have gone into the creation of Vox.

But history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated. Here is a look at how pandemics have remade the world.

Many historians trace the fall of the Roman empire back to the Antonine Plague, which swept Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Nobody has ever nailed down the exact cause, but symptoms recorded by a physician named Galen — gruesome skin sores, high fever, diarrhea and sore throats — strongly suggest it was smallpox and measles.

Thought to be the world’s first episode of bubonic plague, its namesake was the Byzantine emperor who was in power when it hit, likely arriving in the form of infected fleas hitching rides across the world on the backs of rodents.

It is no exaggeration to say that his signature immediately severed the history of climate change in America into two eras. Before the IRA, climate campaigners spent decades trying and failing to get a climate bill through the Senate. After it, the federal government will spend $374 billion on clean energy and climate resilience over the next 10 years. The bill is estimated to reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by about 40 percent below their all-time high, getting the country two-thirds of the way to meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement.

Far less attention has been paid to the ideas that animate the IRA.

, the IRA makes a particularly interesting and all-encompassing wager—a bet relevant to anyone who plans to buy or sell something in the U.S. in the next decade, or who plans to trade with an American company, or who relies on American military power

London (CNN Business)OPEC has agreed to pump more crude oil over the next two months as Russian production begins to drop because of Western sanctions.

The oil exporters' cartel said it would increase supply by 648,000 barrels per day in July and August, 200,000 barrels per day more than scheduled under a supply agreement with other producers, including Russia, known as OPEC+.

Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, hit $125 a barrel on Tuesday, its highest level since early March.

One solution? Go low. “The possibilities are endless,” says Stephen Cheney, owner of Cheney Custom Homes, who is currently constructing a roughly 16,000-square-foot home and guest home with a 5,600-square-foot “bunker” below for a bowling alley, 3-D golf simulator, and spa..origami-wrapper *{margin:0;padding:0;border:0}.origami-top-border{border-top:1px solid #dadada;padding-top:10px}.origami-headline{font-family:Retina,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:500;color:#333;font-size:18px;line-height:20px;margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image-wrapper{display:flex;margin-bottom:10px;gap:10px}.origami-image-wrapper:last-of-type{margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image{flex:1 1}.origami-image img{max-width:100%;width:100%;height:100%;display:block;max-inline-size:100%}.origami-image figcaption{display:none}.origami-caption{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:18.6667px;margin-bottom:4px}.origami-credit{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:20px;text-transform:uppercase}@media (min-width:640px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-desktop{display:none}}@media (max-width:639px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-mobile{display:none}}

Basements can dwarf homes above. Designer Andrew Kotchen, a principal at Workshop/APD, is working on a 5,000-square-foot Nantucket abode that will have a 10,000-square-foot basement with a basketball court, garage, bedrooms and a wellness space.

For the 10,000-square-foot grotto, workers are using the same waterproofing technique as Boston’s Big Dig highway project, Mr. Kotchen says. An emergency pump system and thick concrete slab underneath will prevent the foundation from floating up should water levels rise, he says.

The Law and Justice Party rode to power on a pledge to drain the swamp of Polish politics and roll back the legacy of the previous administration. One year later, its patriotic revolution, the party proclaims, has cleaned house and brought God and country back to Poland

Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.

In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.

When the rice shoots began to wither on Lam Thi Loi’s farm in the heart of the Mekong Delta, a usually verdant region of Vietnam, she faced a hard choice: Let them die in the parched earth, or pump salty water from the river to give them a chance.

The Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s premier rice growing region, is suffering its worst drought since French colonial administrators began recording statistics in 1926.

The increasingly dramatic effect of El Niño, the weather phenomenon that causes excessive heat and reduced rainfall in Southeast Asia, is the prime reason for the crop failures in the delta, scientists say. But it is not the only one.

Those riches came during a year of tremendous market volatility that was so bad for some Wall Street investors that the billionaire manager Daniel S. Loeb called it a “hedge fund killing field.”

The 25 best-paid hedge fund managers took home a collective $12.94 billion in income last year,

top hedge fund managers earn more than 50 times what the top executives at banks are paid.

That's the promise of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which 132 countries, including the United States, have ratified or accepted, pledging to make the air less deadly and to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of global warming

he United States could not actually nullify the global agreement on its own, and withdrawing from the agreement would take one to four years, depending on the approach. But that may not matter much. The White House says it wants to revive coal, oil and natural gas production, all of which pollute the atmosphere, contributing to the likelihood of mass extinction, worsening droughts, deadlier heat waves, flooded coastal cities and other climate disasters.

Because the Paris Agreement does not levy sanctions or fines against countries that fail to meet their pollution-reduction pledges, it's possible the Trump administration could choose to remain in the agreement while basically polluting as usual.Either tactic -- defection or de facto not caring -- could weaken the pact, potentially leading other nations to defect. The United States, after all, is the second biggest annual climate polluter, after China, and helped negotiate the Paris deal.