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The 2020 presidential election pits one candidate making climate change integral throughout his platform against another who dismisses its importance and pledges to keep pushing a deregulatory agenda.

Mr. Biden calls climate change an urgent crisis and has proposed the most aggressive climate agenda of any major presidential finalist ever, analysts say. He proposes to marshal vast government resources, with $2 trillion in spending and plans to make environmental policy and climate change a driving force in decisions on the economy, infrastructure, transportation, social justice, foreign relations and more.

Mr. Trump has challenged the science documenting global warming and cast Mr. Biden’s strategy as a threat to U.S. businesses.

the planet’s land and water resources are so poorly used, according to a new United Nations report, that, as climate change puts ever-greater pressure on agriculture, the ability of humanity to feed itself is in peril.

The report, published in summary form Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, magnifies a dual challenge: how to nourish a growing global population, but do so in a way that minimizes agriculture’s carbon footprint.

Answering that challenge requires a huge overhaul of how we use land and water for food production

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

The complaint also cites internal records about the platform’s Climate Science Information Center, a much-touted hub designed to connect people with authoritative climate information. Awareness of the webpage was “very low,” even for people who had visited it.

“Climate change knowledge is generally poor,” one of the internal reports from 2021 said. “Given how many people use Facebook for information about climate change … climate science myths are a problem across all surveyed markets.”

The filings argue that it’s particularly urgent that Facebook tackle climate change misinformation, in part because of the popularity of the site. An internal company document cited in the complaint says Facebook is the second-most common source for news related to climate change, behind only television news and ahead of news aggregators, movies, online climate news sources and other social media platforms.

Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs director who now leads the Bank of England, sounded a warning. Global warming, he said, could send the world economy spiraling into another 2008-like crisis

He called for central banks to act aggressively and immediately to reduce the risk of climate-related catastrophe

the U.S. Federal Reserve was the pivotal American institution in stopping a second Great Depression. Its actions were “historically unprecedented, spectacular in scale,” he writes, and widely understood by experts to be the “decisive innovation of the crisis.”

It’s remarkable: A number of polls suggest that Democratic voters now consider climate change to be a top-tier issue, as important as health care

That revolution’s main objective: achieving a “100% clean energy economy” in the United States by the year 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, both more stringent and longer-sighted than what the previous Democratic White House—which Biden unfailingly calls the “Obama-Biden administration”—pledged under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Today Inslee debuted a plan to reenter the Paris Agreement and enshrine climate at the center of U.S. diplomacy. It runs more than 50 pages single-spaced.

And those memories have me thinking about climate change. As a father, Christian pastor and full-time climate organizer, climate change is rarely far from my mind. But now that President Joe Biden has made it the centerpiece of his legacy-defining American Jobs Plan -- with its investment in clean energy, its overhaul of our outdated energy grid, its commitment to clean transportation, and its promise of millions of family-sustaining jobs -- it's bound to be top of mind for many Americans for some time to come.

After all, the phrase "climate change" elicits a laundry list of emotions for most of us: anger, dread, guilt and grief, among them. A growing body of research is revealing the toll climate grief is taking on our collective mental health, and insomnia and other mental health concerns related to climate-induced anxiety have been documented across 25 countries. Absent from most of our climate-related emotional inventory is delight, contentedness or joy.We need to change that.

What else can I feel but shame as the land God has commanded me to hold in trust for my children and grandchildren is desecrated? What else is there to feel but guilt at my own ignorance and complicity, and rage at the behemoth vested interests who have worked so hard to thwart my efforts at every turn?

most Americans would support energy-conserving policies only if they cost households less than $200 per year — woefully short of the investment required to keep warming under catastrophic rates. This inaction is breathtakingly immoral.

Why would we mortgage our future — and that of our children, and their children — rather than temper our addiction to fossil fuels? Knowing what we know, why is it so hard to change our ways?

Deeply empathic people tend to be environmentally responsible, but our caring instincts are shortsighted and dissolve across space and time, making it harder for us to deal with things that haven’t happened yet.

why not do it all over again — but instead of going to another astronomical body and planting a flag, why not save our own planet? Why not face it with the kind of inspiration that John F. Kennedy projected

the moon shot had a clearly defined goal: Land on the moon. A finish line for fighting climate change is less clear. Back to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? (We have already passed 412 parts per million.)

“moon shot” has become shorthand for “a big push,” and it’s almost become a trope: ‘We need a ‘project Apollo for name-the-big-thing-of-your-choice’.”

For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats can approach climate policy with a sense of imagination. They can also approach it with a sense of humility, because their last two strategies didn’t work particularly well. When the party last controlled Congress, in 2009, Democrats tried to pass a national cap-and-trade bill, a type of policy that allows polluters to bid on the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It failed to pass in the Senate. Starting in 2011, President Obama tried to use the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act to fight carbon-dioxide emissions. After President Trump was elected, he terminated that effort by executive order.

Economists tend to prefer policies that work across the entire economy at once by integrating the costs of climate change into the price of gas, food, and other consumer goods. But voters—who have more quotidian concerns than optimally elegant economic policy—don’t always feel the same way. They don’t want gas prices to go up. And that means they support policies that remake one sector of the economy at a time, usually by mandating the use of technology. Economists like to disparage these policies as “kludges” or “command and control.” But Americans like them

climate policy’s Boring as Dirt problem: the BAD problem. The BAD problem recognizes that climate change is an interesting challenge. It is scary and massive and apocalyptic, and its attendant disasters (especially hurricanes, wildfires, and floods) make for good TV. But the policies that will address climate change do not pack the same punch. They are technical and technocratic and quite often dull. At the very least, they will never be as immediate as climate change itself. Floods are powerful, but stormwater management is arcane.

Sadly, I get this reaction a lot. One word about my five years at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or my work in the climate justice movement broadly, and I’m bombarded with pious admissions of environmental transgressions or nihilistic throwing up of hands. One extreme or the other.

underneath all that is a far more insidious force. It’s the narrative that has both driven and obstructed the climate change conversation for the past several decades. It tells us climate change could have been fixed if we had all just ordered less takeout, used fewer plastic bags, turned off some more lights, planted a few trees, or driven an electric car. It says that if those adjustments can’t do the trick, what’s the point?

It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold these ethics.

the debate over whether great-power competition or transnational threats pose the greater danger to the United States is a false one. Look back at strategic assessments from ten years ago on China and Russia, on the one hand, and those on pandemics and climate change, on the other, and it is clear that Washington is experiencing near-worst-case scenarios on both. Great-power rivalry has not yet sparked a hot war but appears to be on the brink of sparking a cold one. Meanwhile, the worst pandemic in a century is not yet over, and the climate crisis is only accelerating. 

What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other.

By the same token, ramping up competition with China without a plan to rally the world to deal with transnational threats (which can themselves fuel rivalry between great powers) would only guarantee future disasters. 

suddenly, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France asked for opposition to the deal and, hearing none, gaveled the session closed.

The new accord changes that dynamic by requiring action in some form from every country, rich or poor. The echoes of those divides persisted during the negotiations, however.

Mr. Fabius, who has presided over the assembly, made an emotional appeal.

Every other rich country also needs to make similar cuts, immediately. The developed nations with large emissions (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Britain and others) can afford their own Green New Deals; perhaps they can be persuaded to do their parts, if we do.

developing nations — such as India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Malaysia — aren’t going to unilaterally constrain their own economies. If carbon-based energy sources help them compete in the global marketplace, that’s what they’ll use — unless, economists say, they get financial help to develop sustainably, with industrialization powered by renewable energy instead of oil, gas and coal. And there’s only one place they can get that help: from wealthy countries like ours. Giving them cash needs to be part of any Green New Deal.

In the poorest developing countries, where many people live without electricity or other basic necessities, it is unrealistic to expect emissions to drop from their already low rates in the next decade. Some of these countries, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are very populous, and their industrialization could cause emissions to skyrocket.

even here in Oklahoma, there's a growing hunger for accurate information on climate change: "I don't get the resistance I got at the beginning of my career because it's getting harder and harder to deny."

As they scooted out of the classroom on the first day of Lau’s two-day lesson, a few of the sixth-graders said this was the first they had heard of climate change. Others said they knew a little about it.

In teaching about climate change, Lau says she is fortunate to have support from her school’s administration. She has also learned how to choose her words carefully, especially given that so many people in the state (including members of her family) earn a living from carbon-intensive industries such as farming and oil and gas.

climate change made the temperatures reached in France last week at least five times more likely to occur than in a world without global warming

The scientists with the World Weather Attribution Project decided to take action when they saw the heatwave coming and ended up performing a real-time analysis while at a climate conference in Toulouse, France

“We discussed our approach and gathered data and looked at climate models between talks,”

OLYMPIA, Wash.—What if a meteor were hurtling toward the Earth, about to kill millions and reshape life on the planet as we know it?

And what if the president, instead of doing anything to help, made it worse in just about every way, and called it a hoax (and any solutions a scam) instead of the very real, very clear disaster taking shape?And what if all the Democrats running to beat him in the next election went on and on about how concerned they were and how it’s our most pressing problem—but none had ever done much more than talk about the problem, and for the most part only started doing that in just the past few years?

That’s where Jay Inslee thinks America is when it comes to climate change. And that’s why he’s going to run for president.

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.

Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”

As the planet continues to warm, vast new stretches of Russia will become suitable for agriculture.

A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm;

Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter.

the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication polled 1,067 registered voters on climate change. The study found that while they disagree on the cause, majorities in both parties agree that the world is experiencing global warming and call for government action to address it.

The poll asked whether the United States should “set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public heath,” even if “the cost of electricity to consumers and companies would likely increase.” Eighty-seven percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said yes.

Should the United States require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax and use the money to reduce other taxes (such as income tax) by an equal amount? Eighty-four percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said yes.