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There are glass-half-empty and glass-half-full ways to view renewable energy and climate finance in Africa, the second largest and most populous continent. The somber take: Africa and its countries are not even close to being on track to achieve the Paris Agreement or their own climate goals — their contributions to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 Fahrenheit — before 2030. The Climate Policy Initiative estimated the continent will require $277 billion of renewable energy investments each year from 2020 to 2030 to meet its goals and that isn’t happening. There is currently only $29.5 billion invested, a shortfall that will ultimately hamper the collective effort to avoid profound environmental problems and keep the earth livable. “It is unlikely that global climate change mitigation efforts can be successful without taking Africa into consideration,” Pieter Scholtz, the ESG Africa partner lead at KPMG, said i...

Republicans visited the global climate summit in Dubai this weekend — marking engagement on the issue from a party that is not typically enthusiastic about fighting global warming.  One of the climate solutions touted by some of the GOP lawmakers that attended the conference, however, is natural gas, which is still a fossil fuel that contributes to such warming. The lawmakers’ appearance at the summit as part of bipartisan delegations is somewhat surprising given that the GOP is not known for embracing actions aimed at protecting the climate: Republicans voted against Democrats’ major climate bill last year and have opposed a number of the Biden administration’s environmental policies, while the party’s current crop of presidential candidates has largely brushed off climate change on the campaign trail. But Republicans say they want to show both Americans and the world that gas, nuclear and mining can be cl...

Every December, some 320–390mn people hit the ski slopes globally. As these outdoor enthusiasts know all too well, trail conditions can make or break the experience. Poor skiing conditions don’t just detract from the consumer experience, for the companies operating these resorts these could spell losses—or even threaten survival. Last season, several resorts were forced to temporarily close due to conditions. Sixty-eight countries around the world offer snow-covered ski resorts, but Alpine countries (Switzerland, France, Austria, Germany, and Italy) and the United States take the lion’s share, welcoming two-thirds of skiers in the 2021–2022 season. About 80% of the world’s ski resorts that exceed 1mn skiers per year are in Europe, mostly in the Alps region. Over the past 50 years, the Alps has experienced an 8.3% decline per decade in seasonal snow cover (November to May), according to a paper published in the journal Natur...

Throwing away an item meant for the garbage may not seem like a big deal. However, when waste integrates with reusable items, it can contaminate the supply. The Ecology Action Center (EAC) of McLean County is warning residents about the long-term damage this can cause. Executive Director Michael Brown explains why this is harmful for the community. “It becomes the dominant material going down the conveyer belt at the sorting facility. So, it takes a lot more time and efforts, and more expensive technology to pull that,” he said. Contamination can directly affect the local trash and recycling services for people living nearby. “It really drives up the cost of recycling services making it less feasible. This is theoretically driving up the costs for residents through their rent, or through their services in family households,” said Brown. He goes by the slogan “when in doubt, throw it out,” when it comes t...

Several decades ago, when the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was well below 400 parts per million, climate scientists began warning of the negative consequences for Earth’s climate of burning fossil fuels. From those early warnings, a consensus emerged that carbon emissions would need to be lowered (and eventually zeroed out) to avoid dangerous consequences of global warming such as extreme heat, stronger storms, and more intense floods and droughts. Today the atmospheric CO2 concentration is well over 400 parts per million and still rising, and a plethora of research and recent severe weather events point to the fact that these dangerous consequences are already happening. Governments have set ambitious goals to curb emissions, and some progress is being made, but serious questions and concerns about the slow pace of this progress abound.  For each approach to carbon dioxide removal, questions rema...

“A superstar of the Denialosphere” is how former journalist Eric Pooley described Myron Ebell in his 2010 book “The Climate War.” Business Insider wrote in 2009 that Ebell “may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community.” “One of the single greatest threats our planet has ever faced,” the Sierra Club opined in 2016. Rolling Stone put him in its list of top six “misleaders.” And those are just the labels Ebell has boasted about in his own biography. Ebell, 70, has been at the forefront of climate change denial for more than two decades — and in fighting against conservationists before that — through his advocacy, commentary and influence with conservatives and Republicans. He’s played roles in blocking cap-and-trade legislation for carbon dioxide, the unsuccessful 1990s efforts to change the Endangered Species Act and former President Donald Trum...

In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet). The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time. Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened. For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn’t until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Norway. At the time, the so-called Draupner wave defied all previous models scientists had put together. Since then, dozens more rogue waves have been recorded (some even in lakes), and while the one that surfaced near Ucluele...