On a Sunday in November, a hundred and seventy students filed into the Vermont Statehouse, using the legislature’s chambers to talk about the climate crisis and solutions for their state. Participants in the Youth Climate Congress, who ranged from middle school to college, with law students joining the committees to answer legal questions that came […]
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On a Sunday in November, a hundred and seventy students filed into the Vermont Statehouse, using the legislature’s chambers to talk about the climate crisis and solutions for their state. Participants in the Youth Climate Congress, who ranged from middle school to college, with law students joining the committees to answer legal questions that came […]
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Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, captured global attention with her emotional speech at the United Nations in September. Her relentless advocacy for an international focus on climate-change has raised awareness as few prior activists have managed to. Critics see her youth as evidence Thunberg isn’t serious, or is being manipulated by the adults […]
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The United States’ climate movement emerged unexpectedly. Following a decade of Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko singing the praises of the free market, climate catastrophe joined the national conversation in the early 1990s. While warnings about global warming had emerged a generation earlier, the oil and gas industry had spent decades burying the data. As […]
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Wildfires blazing across North America and Australia, heatwaves scorching Europe and Asia, cyclones ravaging Africa and the Caribbean. Climate change is already here, and it’s only going to get worse. But it isn’t just hurting the planet. It’s hurting us. Climate change is already affecting our health, a new report from The Lancet confirms, and […]
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Greta Thunberg is stuck in the United States. The 16-year-old climate activist sailed across the Atlantic on a carbon-free yacht this summer for the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City. Now that December’s UN Climate Change Conference has been relocated from Chile to Spain, she needs a lift back to Europe, but […]
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In August, Miguel Medina Cabrera, a Spanish farmer on the island of Gran Canaria in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, watched the land around his farm start to burn. “The fire was burning for four days, but afterward there were tree trunks that continued burning for fifteen days,” Cabrera told me. “It looked like […]
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To wake up in the Northeastern United States—as California blazes and Japan digs itself out of typhoon damage—is to experience an uneasy gratitude for all that is not burning, battered or underwater. Seven years out from Superstorm Sandy, we know not to get cocky, but there’s a relief in being able to worry about work […]
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Two weeks ago, Super Typhoon Hagibis barrelled into Japan, unleashing “unprecedented” rain that caused floods and landslides. At least 80 are dead, thousands of homes in Japan’s main island were flooded, damaged or without power. What’s worse, Japan was drenched by further back-to-back storms last week. The country has spent billions of dollars on infrastructure […]
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When Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City in 2012, water poured into Bellevue Hospital’s basement, where the fuel pumps were stored. The elevators stopped working. At a time when its services were sorely needed, the oldest hospital in the United States was forced to close its doors, unequipped for storms of the climate change […]
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When Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City in 2012, water poured into Bellevue Hospital’s basement, where the fuel pumps were stored. The elevators stopped working. At a time when its services were sorely needed, the oldest hospital in the United States was forced to close its doors, unequipped for storms of the climate change […]
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For three weeks, swaths of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil have been engulfed in flames—2.5 million acres to be exact. Another 1.8 million acres are burning in neighboring Bolivia, and thousands of fires are raging in the forests of Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Central Africa. This has frightening implications for the […]
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When billionaire libertarian David Koch died this week following a decades-long battle with prostate cancer, the Arctic was rapidly melting. The Amazon rainforest was on fire. And the Earth had just experienced its hottest month in recorded human history. These planetary conditions mimicked closely what scientists had tried to warn the public about 30 years […]
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Last month, Republican pollster and messaging guru Frank Luntz sat down in front of a small committee of Senate Democrats and told a personal story about how wildfire almost consumed his California home. “The courageous firefighters of Los Angeles, they saved my home,” he said. “But others aren’t so lucky. Rising sea levels, melting ice […]
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In many respects, the second round of Democratic presidential debates represented a step forward in the fight against climate change. The issue was not directly mentioned at all during the 2012 and 2016 debates, but the CNN journalists who moderated Tuesday and Wednesday night’s events devoted a combined 20 minutes to questions and answers about […]
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In many respects, the second round of Democratic presidential debates represented a step forward in the fight against climate change. The issue was not directly mentioned at all during the 2012 and 2016 debates, but the CNN journalists who moderated Tuesday and Wednesday night’s events devoted a combined 20 minutes to questions and answers about […]
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The urgency of climate change is finally dawning on the public. Two-thirds of Democrats now say they view global warming as a “critical threat,” and most call it the most important issue to discuss in presidential debates. The Democratic presidential candidates are paying attention, too. Many have released detailed climate plans; most have promised to […]
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The urgency of climate change is finally dawning on the public. Two-thirds of Democrats now say they view global warming as a “critical threat,” and most call it the most important issue to discuss in presidential debates. The Democratic presidential candidates are paying attention, too. Many have released detailed climate plans; most have promised to […]
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It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: The first round of Democratic presidential debates failed the planet. In a combined 240 minutes of discussion—at an event held in city poised to sink into the ocean—the moderators devoted a combined 15 minutes of airtime to the biggest existential threat humanity faces. We were hardly surprised. […]
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When Harold Jones first bought his home in Canarsie in 1991, he was struck most by the tall trees lining the street. Today, he’s more struck by the “For Sale” signs standing in their place. The trees went first, and quickly. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the waters of the Jamaica Bay inlet that borders […]
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The 2019 hurricane season has barely begun, and a troubling storm is already brewing. Heavy rains paralyzed New Orleans on Wednesday, with as much as ten inches falling in just a few hours, and the National Weather Service declared a “flash flood emergency.” This is just the beginning of what could be a truly awful […]
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In October 2015, a fragile well casing ruptured at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in Los Angeles, California—and no one could figure out how to stop it. For 118 days, 100,000 metric tons of methane and other hazardous pollutants seeped into the atmosphere. The worst single natural gas leak in American history was […]
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I didn’t want to be a climber. My dream since I was young was to become a doctor. But I had to make a choice between my dream and my family. I chose my family. I was born in Thame, Nepal, around 1960. I’m not exactly sure what year. When I was 12 years old, […]
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