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Climate Change
Climate change is already drastically altering our planet and for millions of people around the world, this has meant that they’ve had to flee their homes and seek asylum in other countries.
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Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 which was right before the modern environmental movement became a fully-fledged political force. He had already been dead for 20 years when the first IPCC report was released and broad national consensus around climate change began to form. And now, 50 years after his death, many thought-leaders wonder what Dr. King would say about the current state of our planet. Though in the news we often see mansions catching on fire in Malibu or hear about sea-level rise coming for the vibrant nightlife of Miami Beach, the untold stories are of how much climate change will impact poor, marginalized communities home and abroad. New York Times climate reporter, Kendra Pierre-Louis and Forbes science contributor Dr. Marshall Shepherd have written about how Dr. King would approach environmentalism today based on clues from his writings and political and religious philosophies and the consensus is climate change and environmental injustice would have been deeply troubling to him.
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Environmental risks — extreme weather, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, and natural disasters — are the top three most likely risks according to the 2019 survey of 1,000 experts from government, business, academia, and non-governmental organizations. The survey’s release at the outset of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, contained a jarring assessment of these risks, saying that “the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe.”
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A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications provides a glimmer of hope on meeting the Paris Agreement’s greenhouse gas emissions targets globally. According to the study, if we begin right now, and “carbon-intensive infrastructure is phased out at the end of its design lifetime from the end of 2018, there is a 64% chance that peak global mean temperature rise remains below 1.5 °C.”
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When you think of the most powerful industry lobby that spreads misinformation about climate change and environmental regulations you’d likely think of the fossil fuel industry. Groups like the American Petroleum Institute (API) conjure images of highly-paid federal lobbyists feeding politicians canned lines like “environmental action kills American jobs” but the truth is there’s another powerful industry lobby right up there with API spreading climate denial: the American Farm Bureau Federation. Inside Climate News put out the first of a series called Harvesting Peril that investigates the lengths the Farm Bureau went to in order to stop climate action in America.
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Toxic carbon dioxide emissions (that are an important contributor to global warming) increased by 3.4% in 2018 after three years of declines, according to a new report based on government statistics released today, demonstrating that the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction on cleaning up air pollution and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Why This Matters: The Washington Post reported that the study’s authors concluded that we are now experiencing the impacts of the Trump Administration’s regulatory rollbacks of the clean power plan, the clean car rule, and dozens of other rules designed to protect health and reduce air emissions that cause global warming. And recall that these impacts are not harmless — according to a study by Harvard scientists published last summer in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Trump administration‘s changes to air pollution policies will result in an extra 80,000 deaths per decade. And we no longer are leading the world on battling climate change, despite the best efforts of states, cities, corporations and individuals. This should give greater impetus to the Green New Deal proposals likely to emerge from the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives.
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