Environment

With all federal and state policies on the books as of June 2024, we estimate the US is on track to reduce its GHG emissions by 38-56% below 2005 levels in 2035, representing at least a doubling—and potentially as much as a four-times increase—from the pace of annual emissions abatement from 2005 to 2023. On the way to 2035, we find the US could reduce its emissions by 32-43% below 2005 levels in 2030. These emissions reductions under current policy are a measurable acceleration in mitigation even compared to our Taking Stock 2022 edition from just before the passage of the IRA, in which we found the US on track for a 24-35% reduction below 2005 levels in 2030. But they are not enough for the US to achieve its 2030 climate commitment under the Paris Agreement of a 50-52% reduction by 2030, or deep decarbonization by mid-century.

Passive homes (a building designed for minimum losses on heating and cooling) are cheaper and easier to construct than you might think. In fact, it's nearly the default code in Massachusetts.

Last month, Extinction Rebellion D.C. scored a major victory for the End Methane, Electrify D.C. campaign: the D.C. Public Service Commission dismissed corporate utility provider Washington Gas’ application for the third phase of their $12 billion fossil fuel pipeline replacement project dubbed Project Pipes. The commission also partially approved a petition to investigate Washington Gas’ leak reduction practices.

This victory is a major milestone in the fight to shut down a fossil fuel project that would lock D.C. into decades of planet-warming emissions while poisoning the city’s residents, especially the communities that are most marginalized and underserved.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/705434

"What makes a transition just is far from a given [...] For an energy transition to be just, injustice must be eliminated, not merely displaced."

"For instance, a major scaling up of solar panel production with exploited labour or outsized damage to particular communities and ecosystems does not represent a just transition."

"Similarly, decarbonising energy systems in the Global North while the Global South remains underdeveloped is not a just transition. Rather, the project of advancing a just transition is transformational – moving from a world built around extraction to one built around regeneration and care, and a future where people can thrive in a world that is more just overall."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/676153

Textile waste is an urgent global problem, with only 12 per cent recycled worldwide, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Even less - only 1 per cent - of castoff clothes are recycled into new garments; the majority is used for low value items like insulation or mattress stuffing.

Nowhere is the problem more pressing than in China, the world’s largest textile producer and consumer, where more than 26 million tons of clothes are thrown away every year year, according to government statistics. Most of it ends up in landfills.

And factories like this one are barely making a dent in a country whose clothing industry is dominated by fast fashion  - cheap clothes made from unrecyclable synthetics, not cotton. Produced from petrochemicals that contribute to climate change, air and water pollution, synthetics account for 70 per cent of domestic clothing sales in China.

China's footprint is worldwide: E-commerce juggernaut brands Shein and Temu make the country one of the world’s largest producers of cheap fashion, selling in more than 150 countries.

The science is clear: the planet is warming at an alarming rate and we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

For decades, effective actions have lagged behind the needs of the moment. The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report suggested that at least part of the reason for this inaction has been “due to misinformation about climate science that has sowed uncertainty.”

The full scale of this misinformation was revealed in May 2024, when the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability completed its three year investigation into how U.S. oil companies sought to avoid accountability for climate change.

The report — tellingly titled Denial, Disinformation and DoubleSpeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change — explores Big Oil’s decades-long campaign of deception and denial finding that:

"Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and [that they] then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science”.

Story by DW Planet A channel