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"It might be a good idea for President Biden to call a climate emergency," the New York Democrat told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. "He can do many, many things under the emergency powers ... that he could do without legislation," the Senate leader said. "Trump used this emergency for a stupid wall, which wasn't an emergency. But if there ever was an emergency, climate is one," Schumer added. For the first time in nearly a decade, Democrats control the Senate, House and White House. But most legislation still has to pass the 60-vote hurdle. Schumer -- who hasn’t committed to leaving...

Leonardo DiCaprio has signed an open letter to new US President Joe Biden urging him to tackle the climate crisis. Last week, President Biden returned the US to the Paris Agreement – an international pact determined to combat the climate crisis. In 2017, Donald Trump withdrew America from the agreement. Writing on Instagram, DiCaprio said: “The time for us to confront the #ClimateCrisis is now.” He added: “Today, I join world leaders from business, government, labor and the environmental movement in calling on President @JoeBiden @POTUS to be the climate leader we need and that science demands.” DiCaprio linked the...

Yesterday, The United Nations released its Emissions Gap Report 2020, an annual assessment of contributions to greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. The report has some notable information amid an array of complicated projections that may or may not come true. It claims, for instance, that “despite a brief dip in carbon dioxide emissions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise.” But for the United States, the real value in this report is as an advisory that it need not join the Paris Climate Accord. This report is evidence that, instead, the U.S. should...

The Lavo home hydrogen battery is not a battery, it's an electrolysis system, hydrogen storage array and fuel cell power system rolled into one attractive cabinetLavo VIEW 3 IMAGES To get off the grid with home solar, you need to be able to generate energy when the Sun's out, and store it for when it's not. Normally, people do this with lithium battery systems – Tesla's Powerwall 2 is an example. But Australian company Lavo has built a rather spunky (if chunky) cabinet that can sit on the side of your house and store your excess energy as hydrogen. The...

Amnesty for illegal immigrants is bad for American workers, according to a tweet from GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. “A proposal to gut immigration enforcement and give blanket amnesty? Rough ‘day one’ for American workers,” said the tweet. The failed Paris deal will hurt American families while China and Russia grow emissions. The Keystone cancellation will kill union jobs and hurt U.S. energy security. And a proposal to gut immigration enforcement and give blanket amnesty? Rough "day one" for American workers. — Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) January 21, 2021 The tweet is McConnell’s first mention of immigration on his Twitter account....

A group of Republican senators are taking steps to block President Joe Biden’s executive actions to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and revoke a permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) alongside other senators from central and western states said on Wednesday that they plan to introduce legislation to allow the Keystone XL Pipeline to continue construction. The senators will also put forward a resolution to urge Biden to submit the Paris climate agreement to the Senate for advice and consent before rejoining the treaty. Revoking permits for the Keystone XL Pipeline undercuts a serious infrastructure project,...

...just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world...Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists... While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:a halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago...about 1,300 documented species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded... Read more: What is a 'mass extinction' and are we in one...

World leaders and businesses are not putting enough money into adapting to dangerous changes in the climate and must “urgently step up action,” according to a report published Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Last year was the joint-hottest year on record and disasters struck every continent. Smoke-belching wildfires burned through communities from Australia to the Arctic. Extreme storms battered coastal cities from the Philippines to Nicaragua, while floods put a third of Bangladesh underwater and covered entire villages in Nigeria. Extreme weather and climate-related disasters have killed more than 410,000 people in the past 10 years, almost...

The greenies have a new battle in the "war on climate change." They want to rid the world of sea walls. Sea walls are barriers that property owners put on the waterside of the beach to protect their property from encroaching waves. According to the environmentalists, though, sea walls exacerbate the way anthropogenic climate change and the resulting rise of the sea destroy beachfront property. I'm sure this a fine theory, except for the part about anthropogenic climate change causing the sea to rise.In fact, as this article from Watts Up With That explains with tremendous clarity, any sea level...

The sun has begun a new 11-year cycle, and scientists have very different ideas on just how much energy will be available to fuel its eruptions. The consensus view of an international panel of 12 scientists calls for the new cycle, Solar Cycle 25, to be small to average, much like its predecessor, Solar Cycle 24. Scott McIntosh, foresees the sun going gangbusters. The cycle is already off to a fast start, coinciding with the recent publication of McIntosh's paper in Solar Physics. The study, with contributions from several of his colleagues, forecasts the nascent sunspot cycle to become one...

The financial tale of the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada is one of epic levels of government incompetence and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars. The Crescent Dunes solar plant received $737 million in guaranteed loans from the Obama administration as part of the 2009 economic stimulus, which included a settlement with the Department of Energy that left the American taxpayers liable for nearly $235 million in outstanding debt. The plant received an additional $275.6 million from the Treasury Department in 2017 as part of the Treasury Department's 1603 program, which allows payments to made for specified energy properties in lieu...

Melting glacier sheds light upon hidden Viking era artifacts in Norway dated back to 300 AD The tremendous melting of the glaciers resulted in some recent archaeological discoveries revealing several well preserved historical objects, and one of these remarkable finds is the discoveries of artifacts from the Viking era on the hills that were once used for transportation purposes dated back to 300 A.D. as per the study. More glacial melt, although a disturbing factor of a much larger global warming effect, has provided ample shreds of evidence and remains of the age-old objects for today’s generation advantageously. Artifacts from...

This year's economic shutdowns have done little to reduce the world's carbon emissions. While pollution has dipped, greenhouse gases keep accumulating in the atmosphere, locking in future decades of climate disruption and extreme weather. A recent United Nations report says the so-called emissions gap - the "difference between where we are likely to be and where we need to be" on climate policy - is as big as ever. As for who's chiefly responsible for the gap, it's the global rich, the report says. Just 10% of the world's population emits nearly half of the world's carbon pollution. The top...

World leaders should declare a “climate emergency” in their countries to spur action to avoid catastrophic global warming, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in opening remarks at a climate summit on Saturday. On the fifth anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement, more than 70 world leaders are due to address the one-day virtual meeting in the hope of galvanizing countries into stricter actions on global warming emissions. Guterres said that current commitments across the globe did not go “far from enough” to limit temperature rises. “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?” Guterres said. “That is...

Pugmarks of a Royal Bengal Tiger have been found in the snow at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the Himalayas near Jelepla in eastern Sikkim after a gap of nearly 18 years, officials said. Officials called it a rare discovery, since tigers are usually found in the plains and almost never above 6,000 feet. The latest pugmarks were photographed March 27 in the Ganek-Lungto area in eastern Sikkim, Divisional Forest Officer (Wildlife) Karma Legshey said. Tiger pugmarks were last officially recorded at this altitude in Sikkim some 18 years ago, by then divisional forest officer Tshesum Lachungpa. Legshey said...

WASHINGTON — The architects of a newly unveiled 10-year, $600 billion climate plan to revitalize Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley region are moving forward with a difficult task of building political willpower in Washington while gaining the trust of rural communities tied to the coal and natural gas industries, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto told a group of sustainable development advocates Tuesday. That coalition-building — a communications strategy to be forged over the next six weeks among academic institutions in Pittsburgh and seven other cities — is a critical step toward executing the plan Mr. Peduto described as both idealistic...

Paris (AFP) - Last month was the hottest November on record as Europe basked in its highest Autumn temperatures in history, the European Union's satellite monitoring service said Monday. The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) analysis of surface and air temperatures found that November 2020 was 0.8C warmer than the 30-year average of 1981-2010 -- more than 0.1C hotter than the previous record. "These records are consistent with the long-term warming trend of the global climate," said C3S director Carlo Buontempo. "All policy-makers who prioritise mitigating climate risks should see these records as alarm bells and consider more seriously than...

There’s another global disaster we also need to try to prevent: climate change. We have only some of the tools we need to eliminate the world’s greenhouse gases. We need breakthroughs in the way we generate and store clean electricity, grow food, make things, move around, and heat and cool our buildings, so we can do all these things without adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We need to revolutionize the world’s physical economy—and that will take, among other things, a dramatic infusion of ingenuity, funding, and focus from the federal government. No one else has the resources to...

In February Random House will publish Gates' book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster."

Geneva (AFP) - Climate change has become the biggest threat to UN-listed natural world heritage sites like glaciers and wetlands, and has pushed Australia's Great Barrier Reef into "critical" condition, conservationists said Wednesday. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) revealed in a new report that shifts due to the changing climate now imperil a full third of the 252 UNESCO-listed natural sites around the globe. Overall, 94 of the sites are facing significant or critical risk from a wide range of factors -- including tourism, hunting, fire and water pollution -- marking an increase from the 62 listed...