Environmental

Earth withered through a second straight day of record-breaking temperatures on 22 July, the EU’s climate monitor said Wednesday, as parts of the world suffer devastating heatwaves and wildfires. Preliminary data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed the daily global average temperature was 17.15 degrees Celsius on Monday, the warmest day in recorded history. This was 0.06 Celsius hotter than the day before on 21 July, which itself broke by a small margin the all-time average high temperature set only a year before. “This is exactly what climate science told us would happen if the world continued burning coal, oil and gas,” said Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist from Imperial College London, on Wednesday. “And it will continue getting hotter until we stop burning fossil fuels and reach net zero emissions.” Copernicus, which uses satellite data to update global air and sea temperatures close to real time, s...

The Biden administration announced new tailpipe emission standards for new passenger cars that aim to cut over 7 billion tons of carbon emissions, as well as other harmful air pollutants. The standards will apply to new passenger cars and light-duty trucks, beginning with model year 2027 through 2032. The Environmental Protection Agency, in announcing the tougher standards, said the reduction of carbon emissions and other harmful air pollutants will help prevent premature deaths and reduce heart attacks, respiratory and cardiovascular illness, as well as asthma. “Three years ago, I set an ambitious target: that half of all new cars and trucks sold in 2030 would be zero-emission,” said President Biden in a statement. “Today, we’re setting new pollution standards for cars and trucks.” However, the new standards also ease a draft rule by the EPA that would have required car companies to  rely on all-electric vehicles as the s...

In order to drive the progress and development of innovative solutions that tackle climate change and help the environment, there needs to be regulatory frameworks in place that help companies make bolder steps forward, top industry CEOs told CNBC. Ester Baiget, the CEO of biosolutions firm Novozymes, said that “roadblocks” usually stand in the way of companies producing sustainable solutions which needed to be removed. “We need to work more with authorities to create the framework that we can move bolder … faster,” Baiget said on an “IOT: Powering the digital economy” panel moderated by CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We have a regulation which is based on the past,” she added, pointing out that in her own sector it can take six years to register a new microbe (or microorganism) to replace fertilizers, for example. Microbes have been put...

Three-quarters of the British public have a poor understanding of commonly-used climate terminology like ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘locally grown’. The majority of people in the UK struggle to understand key language to do with the climate crisis and environmental policy, a new study has found. Only a quarter of Brits responding to a poll said they understood clearly what was meant by ‘green’ and around the same number could not define the term ‘sustainable’. The survey, conducted by insights experts Trajectory and communication agency Fleet Street, shows key terminology for discussing climate change and climate protection is understood by a minority of people in the UK. So what do these words really mean and why are they so hard to comprehend? Three-quarters of Brits don’t understand key climate language The study, published on Wednesday, found that three-quarters of the British public have a...

As reported by Lusa, the environmental association released the results of the new report prepared within the scope of the European project “LIFE Together 1.5” in partnership with Zero. The study showed that adopting a new trajectory compatible with the Paris Agreement, which includes not allowing global warming to exceed 1.5ºC, could save the European Union approximately €1 billion by 2030, the equivalent of around four times the Portuguese GDP (Gross Domestic Product). The same study referred to “a dangerous gap between this initiative and the trajectory in which public policies are placing the EU”, stressing this should be at the center of the political debate in this year’s European elections. Zero and its partner organisations consider protecting “citizens and the planet from the devastating impacts of climate change is not just a moral duty, but a pragmatic choice”. The report quantified th...