Environment

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Image by NOAA. The evidence is starting to build that all bets are off on predictions that humanity has a decade, or more, of clear sailing before global warming turns vicious enough to run roughshod over climate change deniers and the mean-spirited anti-climate-change Republican Party. Voters better smarten up by 2024 or suffer the consequences. At least the Democrats enacted a partial baby-sized climate bill. Give’em credit. Recent reports from Copernicus, the EU Earth Observation Programme, and Dr. James Hansen, Earth Institute Columbia University, point to the risks of an earlier than expected upside breakout of the 1.5°C (2.7°F) limit set by the Paris Agreement of 2015 and endorsed by 195 countries. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Agreement but Biden ...

BY STAN COX Image: Priti Gulati Cox. In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote, “Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all ...

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC  In 2019 the climate activist and UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin wrote that oil companies were spending $200 million a year promoting something he termed “climate change denial”. The ‘dark forces’ claim has been in regular use ever since. The Guardian recently reported Big Oil was “wringing humanity dry”, noting once again the annual $200m spent on climate change lobbying. Great story. Shame there is no actual evidence to back it up. That can be concluded from a major new work from the investigative journalist Ben Pile. He traces the Maslin claim to a Forbes article, which in turn was based on the work of InfluenceMap, an international think tank at the “cutting edge of climate and sus...

Not so much an environmental measure as a tax on driving and an effort to keep the car monopolies in profit. Party leaflet Subscribe to our  channel Dozens of numberplate-reading cameras have been vandalised or covered up by people opposed to Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s widening of the (buy a new car) ‘clean air zone’ to the Greater London boundary. Download this leaflet as a pdf. The ‘ultra-low emission zone’ (ULEZ) was introduced in central London in April 2019 by London mayor Sadiq Khan, and expanded in October 2021 to cover central London between the North and South Circular roads. Khan intends to further expand the zone to cover all of London by August 2023. The stated aim was to reduce air pollution in London by penalising vehicles that ...

BY MEL GURTOV Photo by Mika Baumeister The Bomb is Ticking The odds are against us. That is the bottom line in the latest IPCC report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global warming, the most comprehensive scientific report to date. Once again we are told that 2030 is the year of living dangerously—when humanity must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half, and then proceed to stop them altogether by 2050. Otherwise, the planet faces all the climate catastrophes we’re already witnessing evolve. “The climate time bomb is ticking,” said the UN’s secretary-general. “The rate of temperature rise in the last half-century is the highest in 2,000 years. Concentrations of carbon dioxide are at their highest in at least two million years.” T...