Public Lands
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly in support of a bipartisan public lands bill that safeguards more than 2 million federal acres and permanently reauthorizes the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund, established in 1964 to protect natural areas and water resources.
The measure, which includes more than 100 individual pieces of legislation, is said to be the largest public lands package in a decade. It establishes more than 1.3 million acres of new wilderness, protects hundreds of miles of rivers and trails, and creates four new national monuments.
“This is not only lands. This is water, this is sportsmen, this is conservation. This is about developing local economies,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who co-introduced the bill with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), said during a press conference following the vote. “This is about who we are […]
-
Storm clouds over Miami Credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria
As global temperatures and sea levels rise, some of the world’s major cities could experience unbearable living conditions.
- Cities like Chicago and New Delhi have already endured fatal heat waves, which could get worse in the future.
- While climate scientists don’t anticipate any location will become fully uninhabitable, they worry that some areas will struggle to support human life.
As scientific projections of the effects of climate change become more robust, the threats posed by extreme storms, catastrophic flooding, heat waves, and droughts have gotten clearer and more frightening.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that global temperatures could rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the threshold for severe effects of climate change — by 2040. By the turn of the century, temperatures could climb even higher, spelling disaster in some areas.
In the […]
Land devastated by climate change.
Credit: Getty
In 1962, American playwright James Baldwin wrote that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Today, his words should give us succour. We need more than ever to face the reality of environmental change.
I’m a researcher at IPPR, a think tank. We have been observing warnings of rapid, negative environmental change from the scientific community. So we decided to understand what that means for our work, for policy, and for politics.
In a report released today, we bring together the latest science on human-induced environmental change and seek to understand how politicians should respond. We conclude that when it comes to climate change, political debate has failed us in three different ways.
First, the term “climate change” no longer captures reality. The scale of environmental change that our earth is currently experiencing far exceeds it. We are depleting soil, killing species, damaging oceans. This is happening at a pace that is unprecedented in human history and in some cases […]
A journal funded by US billionaire Peter Thiel has been accused of publishing articles dismissing the science on climate change.
Credit: Getty
Climate change is a direct challenge to the philosophy of neo-liberalism that has made a very small group of people exceedingly rich, writes the University of Auckland’s Dr Neal Curtis. It’s never been about the science – it’s the ideology.
On the 29th January, San Francisco-based political magazine Mother Jones ran an article claiming a journal funded by US billionaire Peter Thiel—a man known in New Zealand for the controversial way he received his citizenship—was publishing articles dismissing the science on climate change.
The only thing new here, though, is the addition of another name to an already long list of very wealthy businessmen who are denying the consensus on scientific facts shared, according to NASA, by 97 percent of the scientific community who are publishing on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. To call the agreement on climate change a consensus, then, seriously underestimates just how in sync so many of the world’s leading […]
Credit: Dan Page
In late June 2017, Texas political mega-donor Doug Deason had a stern message for Republicans seeking campaign donations: The “Dallas piggy bank” was closed until they repealed Obamacare and passed major tax cuts. Deason said he had urged about two dozen of his wealthy Texas friends to do the same. The billionaire Koch brothers Charles and David also hinted at withholding money.
Just weeks later, the GOP effort to repeal Obamacare collapsed. Tax reform, which one Republican senator said would make repealing Obamacare look like a piece of cake, ominously loomed as the next item on the GOP agenda, and time was running out. Panic set in. By November, as Congress struggled to push a massive tax cut bill forward, Rep. Chris Collins from New York summed up the stakes: “My donors are basically saying: ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’”
Lawmakers got it done. Just days before the holiday break, relieved Republicans delivered those wealthy donors what they wanted: one of the biggest tax cuts in […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
