Chubb will no longer underwrite the construction of new coal-fired power plants, according to the policy. It will also stop investing in companies that generate more than 30% of their revenues from coal mining or production, as well as phase out existing coverage for mining and utility companies that exceed the 30% threshold.
“Chubb recognizes the reality of climate change and the substantial impact of human activity on our planet,” Evan […]
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Jessica Corbett, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: Here is a simple, uncomplicated way for humanity to remediate climate change, one trillion trees planted. If you have ever driven across the United States, or even if you have had a window seat on an airplane flying across the country, you know that most of America is empty of humans. I mean that literally, there is nobody there. Wyoming, for instance, in the last census had a population of 572,381 people in 97,914 square miles, less than the population of Milwaukee. We have plenty of places where we could plant trees. Why aren't we doing this? As this article points out there could hardly be a simpler easier remedy.
Credit: Getty
Amid record-setting temperatures worldwide and predictions by experts that this year will be among the hottest humanity has ever seen, researchers behind a new study say a rapid global effort to plant billions of trees and the restoration of forests would be the “most effective” strategy for battling the planetary climate emergency.
“It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible, and every one of us can get involved.”
—Tom Crowther, lead researcher
Based on a model of the potential for restoring trees worldwide to capture atmospheric carbon that is heating the planet, a Europe-based research team found that currently “there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares (2.22 billion acres) of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests.”
Lead researcher Tom Crowther, a professor at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, explained to Metro that “if we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25 percent to levels last seen almost a century ago.” A worldwide […]
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BRIAN ECKHOUSE, ARI NATTER and CHRISTOPHER MARTIN, - Time/Bloomberg
Stephan: Donald Trump's latest move which further sabotages America's ability to exit the carbon energy era and prepare for climate change. Why hasn't this thug been impeached, I would like to know?
In the biggest blow he’s dealt to the renewable energy industry yet, President Donald Trump decided on Monday to slap tariffs on imported solar panels.
The U.S. will impose duties of as much as 30 percent on solar equipment made abroad, a move that threatens to handicap a $28 billion industry that relies on parts made abroad for 80 percent of its supply. Just the mere threat of tariffs has shaken solar developers in recent months, with some hoarding panels and others stalling projects in anticipation of higher costs. The Solar Energy Industries Association has projected tens of thousands of job losses in a sector that employed 260,000.
The tariffs are just the latest action Trump has taken that undermine the economics of renewable energy. The administration has already decided to pull the U.S. out of the international Paris climate agreement, rolled back Obama-era regulations on power plant-emissions and passed sweeping tax reforms that constrained financing for solar and wind. The import taxes, however, will prove to be the most targeted strike on the industry yet.
“Developers may have to walk away from their projects,” Hugh Bromley, a New York-based analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in an interview before Trump’s decision. […]
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Stephan: Yet more evidence of the world's rivers drying up. When do you think we might wake up to what is before our eyes? Remember by 2030 one in seven people on Earth will not have access to sufficient potable water. Let the migrations begin...
Nearly dry Euphrates River in Iraq
Credit: National Geographic
Iraq is in a fragile state. The country is trying to rebuild itself after thirty years of near constant war. But a new crisis has emerged that could undermine its recovery – Iraq is running out of water.
Iraq gets the vast majority of its water from two rivers; the Euphrates and the Tigris. Both run down the length of the country supplying drinking water, irrigation, and hydroelectricity to a booming population. It’s hard to imagine Iraq existing without these rivers. But today, they are in peril.
The Euphrates in Iraq is down to a quarter of its normal flow. In 2018, the Tigris sunk so low that people in Baghdad could wade across it. Where these rivers combine, called the Shatt al-Arab, became so poisonous last summer that 100,000 people were hospitalized; sparking riots in the city of Basra.
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J.C. PAN, - The New Republic
Stephan: I have been encountering in conversations more and more about conspiracy theories, and have thought about why that is happening. Here is a good answer to that question.
At the end of 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, The Oxford English Dictionary made “post-truth” its word of the year, Merriam-Webster picked “surreal,” and Dictionary.com chose “xenophobia.” Loath to put too fine a point on it, the American Dialect Society went with “dumpster fire.” At least in recent times, official words of the year have tried to capture the political and social anxieties of their moment, and the ascent of Trump—a onetime birther who espoused noxious falsehoods about immigrants, appeared brazenly unconcerned with ethical boundaries, and openly associated with the notorious conspiracist and Infowars founder Alex Jones—seemed to portend the entry of once-fringe ideologies into the mainstream.
Much like their candidate, many of Trump’s most visible and fervent supporters, drawn largely from the nativist right wing, were disposed to wild conspiracy theories. The election year saw the explosion of Pizzagate, the theory that Democratic Party officials (along with the artist Marina Abramovic) were operating a child sex trafficking ring out of an unassuming pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. From Pizzagate developed QAnon, whose […]
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