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Coffee Prices Are Soaring, but Growers Aren’t Celebrating

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - 1 hour 46 min ago
Climate change is behind the windfall gains, and growers are worried about whether they can adapt.
Categories: Climate

Trump Administration Unfreezes Funding for Some EPA Programs

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 14:07
The funding, approved by Congress and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, had been blocked since January, when President Trump ordered a pause and review of climate and clean energy programs.
Categories: Climate

Labor hasn’t delivered on more effective nature laws. It’s not just embarrassing, it’s calamitous | Tim Winton

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 09:00

As Ningaloo reef bleaches and an election looms, we must hold to account those who stand in the way of our safety – the small cohort profiting from fossil fuels, and the politicians who protect them

Late last spring, I was part of an expedition to Scott Reef, a magnificent coral atoll nearly 300 kilometres off the Kimberley coast. And while it was a privilege to be in such a remote and wonderful place, watching rare and endemic sea life drifting past, the moment I tipped from the boat in my mask and fins, I knew something was wrong.

The water was too hot. Not tropical warm, but uncomfortably hot.

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Categories: Climate

Profits, Not D.E.I., Are Why Companies Exist

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 08:40
An awkward truth has become evident in the first days of the Trump administration, as many firms mute their commitments to diversity and sustainability.
Categories: Climate

Outcry as Trump withdraws support for research that mentions ‘climate’

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 07:00

US government stripping funds from domestic and overseas research amid warnings for health and public safety

The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”

The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.

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Categories: Climate

As the UK prepares its next carbon budget, what needs to be included?

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 06:02

Expert recommendations will influence plans for energy, housing, transport industry and farming for decades

Labour will next week be confronted with stark policy choices that threaten to expose the fault lines between the Treasury and the government’s green ambitions, as advice for the UK’s next carbon budget is published.

Plans for the energy sector, housing, transport, industry and farming will all be called into question in a sweeping set of recommendations for how the UK can meet the legally binding target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

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Categories: Climate

Hurricane-proof skyscrapers vulnerable to less powerful windstorms, study finds

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 06:00

Tall buildings fare poorly in derechos, say experts, raising questions over their resilience as climate crisis worsens

Skyscrapers built to withstand major hurricanes fare much more poorly in less powerful windstorms known as derechos, researchers have found, raising questions for cities worldwide over the resilience of tall buildings as the climate emergency worsens.

A team from Florida International University’s (FIU) civil and environmental engineering department studied the unexpectedly severe damage caused to buildings in Houston, a city with 50 skyscrapers of 492ft (150 metres) or more, during the 16 May 2024 derecho.

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Categories: Climate

Rolling back on climate actions may spell rise in preventable illness – study

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 04:40

Net zero policies would result in fewer deaths saving UK billions, say researchers

Countries that weaken or stop their net zero and climate actions may be consigning their populations to decades of preventable illness.

Gains from net zero are often presented as global benefits and mainly for future generations. But less fossil fuel use also means less air pollution which results in local health gains right away.

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Categories: Climate

El gobierno de Trump planea recortes en la oficina que financia la recuperación tras catástrofes

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 01:01
El personal de la oficina, una rama del Departamento de Vivienda de EE. UU. y que el Congreso utiliza para hacer frente a las peores catástrofes, se reduciría en un 84 por ciento.
Categories: Climate

‘To say there’s no future is counterproductive’: metal megastars Architects on grief, climate and hope for humanity

The Guardian Climate Change - February 21, 2025 - 00:00

Consumed by anger and still mourning a brother and bandmate, the British quartet have written their masterpiece. They explain how they’re fighting self-loathing and trying to age responsibly

In a world of low royalties and short attention spans, not many bands make it to 11 albums, much less have their 11th be their masterpiece. But over the course of 20 years, the metal quartet Architects have inched towards this milestone. The Sky, the Earth & All Between sets out its scale in its title, where gigantic pop choruses soar over hellish chasms of churning noise, resulting in the most consistently sublime British rock album of this decade. The band are now at their arena-filling, Metallica-supporting peak, adored by millions.

“But it means nothing,” says frontman, Sam Carter. “Because you don’t believe it. If you can’t access that part of you that lets it in, then it’s pointless.” Drummer and lyricist, Dan Searle, is equally downcast. “I punish myself, I loathe myself,” he says evenly, blinking behind his glasses. “I feel like I’m shit at everything.” Across two decades, the band have been buffeted by poor mental health, creative differences and an instance of particularly traumatic grief. While the pair are quick to joke during our long conversation in a London photo studio, and are clearly ravenously ambitious, I have never met a rock band as candid about their frailties.

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Categories: Climate

Melbourne activist can’t rely on evidence from climate experts to defend protest charges, court finds

The Guardian Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 22:26

Brad Homewood is charged with four offences after a 2021 Extinction Rebellion protest at the Exxon/Mobil depot in Spotswood

A climate activist cannot rely on evidence from experts in global heating and civil disobedience to beat charges after a protest outside a Melbourne fuel depot, a magistrate has found.

Brad Homewood, 52, was charged with four offences relating to a 2021 Extinction Rebellion protest at an Exxon/Mobil depot in Spotswood.

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Categories: Climate

The $20 Billion Controversy Over E.P.A. Climate Funds, Explained

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 14:06
An attempt by the agency to claw back billions in climate funds has led to confusion and the resignation of a top prosecutor.
Categories: Climate

Trump Team Plans Cuts at HUD Office That Funds Disaster Recovery

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 09:45
Staff at the office, a branch of the U.S. housing department that Congress uses to address the worst catastrophes, would be reduced by 84 percent.
Categories: Climate

‘If not fire, we’ll be killed by hunger’: villagers continue to feel fallout from Bolivia’s worst wildfires

The Guardian Climate Change - February 20, 2025 - 06:00

Residents battle food shortages and health issues after vast areas of forest and farmland burned last year

As she walks away from the house where she raised her family, Isabel Surubí pauses to point at the bed of a stream, now covered with dry leaves, that once supplied her entire community. “The water used to come from here,” she says.

In 2024, wildfires in Bolivia burned more than 10m hectares (about 39,000 sq miles) of forest, farmland and savannah – an area greater than the size of Portugal. After the fires, and the drought that preceded them, the spring feeding Surubí’s village of Los Ángeles in Bolivia’s tropical dry forest ran dry.

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Categories: Climate

The climate crisis is a cost of living issue for Australia. My generation will be the first to pay for it | Anjali Sharma

The Guardian Climate Change - February 19, 2025 - 22:56

Politicians have divorced the issue of global heating from soaring prices – Australians must take bold action at the ballot box

I love chocolate. It’s a staple of my diet. I don’t like that, at the best of times, it takes up maybe a fifth of my grocery budget.

I also don’t like that as a country, we’ve been all too quick to blame rising food prices on inflation. We’ve quickly made inflation a priority for our policymakers, while the cost of living is the key issue of the upcoming election.

Anjali Sharma was the lead litigant in Sharma v environment minister, the landmark court case against the then federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, which called for a duty of care to protect children against the impacts of the climate crisis

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Categories: Climate

Climate advocacy groups file two lawsuits against Trump administration

The Guardian Climate Change - February 19, 2025 - 17:04

Groups from Sierra Club to Greenpeace take aim at Trump’s drilling orders in term’s first environmental legal battles

Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president’s second administration.

Both focus on the Trump administration’s moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which the plaintiffs say are illegal.

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Categories: Climate

What Are You Supposed to Do With Climate Numbers Like These?

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 19, 2025 - 16:44
A provocative new book asks what we owe one another in a heating world.
Categories: Climate

Alaska Lawsuit Aims to Block Trump’s Offshore Drilling Plans

NYT Global Warming Climate Change - February 19, 2025 - 13:46
The suit, filed in Alaska, is likely to be the first of many challenging the administration’s goal of expanding fossil fuel production.
Categories: Climate

Outrage as Trump cites ‘emergency’ to fast-track fossil fuel projects

The Guardian Climate Change - February 19, 2025 - 13:36

Activists warn new designation for projects such as pipelines threatens US wetlands and waters

Environmentalists were outraged on Wednesday after the Trump administration moved to fast-track fossil fuel projects through the permitting process, with activists describing it as an attempt to sidestep environmental laws that could harm waterways and wetlands.

In recent days, the US Army Corps of Engineers created a new designation of “emergency” permits for infrastructure projects, citing a day one executive order signed by Donald Trump which claims the US is facing an “energy emergency” and must “unleash” already booming energy production.

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Categories: Climate

Melting glaciers caused almost 2cm of sea level rise this century, study reveals

The Guardian Climate Change - February 19, 2025 - 12:24

Decades-long research shows world’s glaciers collectively lost 6.542tn tonnes of ice between 2000 and 2023

Melting glaciers have caused almost 2cm of sea level rise this century alone, a decades-long study has revealed.

The research shows the world’s glaciers collectively lost 6.542tn tonnes of ice between 2000 and 2023, causing an 18mm (0.7in) rise in global sea levels.

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Categories: Climate