Climate Change

Kelly Levin, a senior research associate at the World Resources Institute in Washington, who has researched the implications of the IPCC’s carbon budget, told Mashable that Shell’s decision, along with the other companies that signed the [Trillion Tonne Communiqué], is a positive sign.

Amy Rogers has launched a crowdfunding campaign to support Forest for a Living, which seeks to pilot the first cost-efficient solution to deforestation and farmer exploitation in the tropics.

David Quist (2003) is now with the European Environment Agency, an agency of the European Union, working on natural resource use and emerging technologies for the EU's transition to a greener economy. Visit David Quist's LinkedIn profile or Twitter feed for more information

Even though renewables (not counting small hydro) averaged 12 percent of the in-state power mix between 2001 and 2012, compared to hydropower that generation did not vary unpredictably from year to year. That predictability is very valuable to your electric utility, which needs to plan ahead and unfortunately can’t forecast the water year. Read more

The Obama administration on Friday announced a strategy to start slashing emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas released by landfills, cattle, and leaks from oil and natural gas production.

In a phone interview with The Huffington Post, Dennis Takahashi-Kelso, the Ocean Conservancy's executive vice president, said both Exxon and BP were reminders that plans for dealing with spills are meaningless if companies can't actually execute cleanup. Takahashi-Kelso was the Alaska Commissioner of Environmental Conservation during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and says that the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was a "very substantial improvement." But companies still struggle with execution of the response plans when a spill does happen.

A combination of rising costs, shrinking supplies, and concerns about global climate change are spurring the development of alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels to meet our transportation energy needs. Scientific studies have shown the most promising of possible alternatives to be liquid fuels derived from cellulosic biomass. These advanced new biofuels have the potential to be clean-burning, carbon-neutral and renewable.

In 1995, a severe heat wave struck Chicago, killing more than 700 people. The disaster hit some neighborhoods much harder than others. For the most part, its devastation closely traced the city's economic and ethnic segregation. More people died in places like Englewood, a South Side neighborhood with a history of poverty and crime, and a largely African-American population; yet some neighborhoods with this same demographic fared remarkably well.

"A policy narrative that continues to frame this target as the sole metric of success or failure to constrain climate change risk is now itself becoming dangerous," wrote Todd Sanford and Peter Frumhoff of UCS in the commentary published Wednesday in Nature Climate Change. "[It] ill-prepares society to confront and manage the risks of a world that is increasingly likely to experience warming well in excess of 2°C this century," said the piece, co-authored by Amy Luers of the San Francisco-based Skoll Global Threats Fund, and Jay Gulledge, of the U.S.