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A new Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seeks to keep the earth from becoming “a giant, raging fire ball floating atop a bubbling hot ocean of acid,” writes Gwendolyn Knapp for Houstonia magazine. Knapp praised the city of Houston for launching a Climate Action Plan, along with hundreds of other U.S. cities with “like-minded, science-backed, and community-driven strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” just in time for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. “The city intends to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, and lead the global energy transition,” Knapp declares. “It will...

Former President Barack Obama warned the world Wednesday climate change would be worse than the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. “We’ve all had to adapt to cope with a pandemic,” Obama wrote on Twitter. “Climate change will force far harsher changes on our kids.” The president shared a story about young people who continue protesting the world’s failure to enact dramatic policies to reduce carbon emissions and shut down an oil-based economy in favor of one fueled by windmills and solar panels. “All of us should follow the young people who’ve led the efforts to protect our planet for generations, and demand...

We have learned the hard way that the scientists who produce mathematical models predicting disaster are not to be granted the presumption of infallibility. Nor are their demands that we impoverish ourselves in order to avert a disaster a matter of "settled science." The coronavirus doom that the Cassandras of prestigious scientific organs predicted is nowhere to be found, and it turns out that models are based on assumptions and can be spectacularly wrong. Americans have sacrificed trillions of dollars and turned our lives upside-down based on predictions of millions of deaths if we didn't follow radically change our way...

Finally, some good Coronavirus news: the pandemic has caused the collapse of Europe’s carbon trading market. According to Recharge News: The Covid-19 pandemic has turned Europe’s carbon price upside down, with prices dropping by 40% since early March when they were still trading at about €24 ($26) per metric ton, analyst IHS Markit said. The current trading levels of between €16-18 per metric ton are roughly two thirds of the level of the high of 2019 of €29 per metric ton. “This is a perfect storm for Europe’s carbon market, and it may well lead to some challenging questions about...

The conservative Heartland Institute released a report on Tuesday in which it criticized leading politicians, activists, and media outlets for using the coronavirus to push their environmental agenda. "Not surprisingly coronavirus alarm has pushed most other issues and concerns out of the news ⎯ much to the dismay of climate alarmists," said Steve Milloy of the Heartland Institute. "But the alarmists aren’t taking displacement by coronavirus lying down. In fact, many climate alarmists are trying to use coronavirus as a means of advancing their agenda. They are trying to surf it." The report, published on ClimateRealism.com and Heartland.org, comes amid...

A statement widely attributed to the great British thinker G. K. Chesterton describes the modern period as perfectly as any single idea can: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything." One of these substitute gods has been nature. Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. Every religion prior to the Bible had nature-gods – the sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain and so on. That is why the further Western society gets from biblical, i.e., Judeo-Christian, religions, the...

While the media agitators continue to rage and ruthlessly attack the president for not acting in a timely manner to forestall or perhaps even prevent the coronavirus from arriving in the United States, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: the chance of contracting the virus is exponentially higher if you reside in or in the vicinity of a crowded, congested American city. Your chances are greater if you use the subway, city bus, or light rail system. There is an undeniable correlation between population density and the odds of contracting COVID-19, yet the Green New Deal mandates herding small-town and...

Petrol pumps in Britain should carry climate change warning labels akin to the legally-mandated health warnings on cigarette packages, a group of scientists have said. In a blog post for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), British, American, and Indian professionals from within healthcare and environmental studies have claimed that petrol pumps, airline tickets, and even energy bills should come with “warning labels” which “state clearly that continuing to burn fossil fuels worsens the climate emergency”. The opinion piece, published on Tuesday, draws parallels to the gory pictures of blackened lungs or rotten teeth now displayed on cigarette packages, implying that...

On the Today show Wednesday morning, NBC weatherman Al Roker joined some of his other liberal media colleagues in trying to find a “silver lining” amid the coronavirus pandemic, namely that the deadly disease was improving the climate by forcing people to stay home. “And an interesting correlation to the coronavirus, if there is any, any silver lining, pollution levels way, way down,” Roker declared during his weather report in the 7:30 a.m. ET half hour. A graphic appeared on screen with the headline “Vanishing Pollution,” as he explained: This is what it looked like, our pollution looked like a...

The coronavirus pandemic could take away the momentum that has built in the past few years for new federal policies to counter climate change. “What I fear is everyone is so focused on the problem at hand that I don't think climate issues are on the front burner again,” said Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida, a Republican who supports a carbon tax. “All the eggs are scrambled until these things are solved and steady. I hope we don't lose the momentum we've gained among Republicans," Rooney said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. Polls over recent years have shown...

Actress Ellen Page said President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are guilty of “environmental racism. She accused Trump of “destroying the world” with his climate change policy. Page, who makes her directorial debut with the Netflix documentary There’s Something in the Water, told Variety how she was inspired to make the film by Dalhousie University professor Ingrid R. G. Waldron’s book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities. “Environmental racism is essentially the disproportionate placement of landfills, hazardous industry, et cetera, put next to indigenous and black and other marginalized communities,” Ellen...

Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg said Tuesday it’s “extremely likely” that she contracted the Chinese coronavirus and has “basically recovered” from it. The 17-year-old said she and father recently exhibited coronavirus-like symptoms and have self-quantified for two weeks following a trip through western Europe.

Actor Idris Elba recently tested positive for the new Chinese coronavirus. But if you thought he'd be saddened by that, I have news for you. Elba believes it's perfectly alright. You see, the COVID-19 virus is simply earth taking revenge for climate change. "It is incredible. One of the upsides of this whole drama is that we are forced to think together as a race," Elba told Oprah Winfrey via video chat for her new "Oprah Talks" show on Apple TV+. "Our world has been taking a kicking. We damaged our world, and it’s no surprise that our world is...

On Sunday's Velshi show, one day after MSNBC host Ali Velshi recommended using the coronavirus pandemic to push for more welfare programs in the U.S. to fix capitalism, he devoted a segment to talking up the possibility of also using the deadly pandemic to pressure the airline and fossil fuel industries to adhere to more regulations to effect climate change. At 9:51 a.m. Eastern, Velshi took the time to note "silver linings" in the epidemic: ALI VELSHI: It's been a hard couple of hours of TV to watch on a weekend morning. With this ongoing national crisis, it can be...

“The dam has been broken,” author and nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager warns. “Maybe it was necessary. But when dams break, flooding follows.” In a Tuesday piece for American Greatness, “Why the Remedy May Be Worse Than the Disease,” Prager issues a dire warning for a country reeling from a self-imposed shutdown. In the scramble to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Americans must be vigilant against the kind of cure some may prescribe. Prager issues a prediction: “If the government can order society to cease functioning, from restaurants and other businesses to schools, due to a possible health disaster,...

Do Electric Vehicles really give off zero emissions? While Electric Vehicles (EVs) do not emit CO2 like traditional combustion engine cars, they actually do still have particulate emissions which pose a substantial threat to clean air. Batteries required to power cars with no assistance from a traditional engine are quite heavy and place a much larger burden on tires than traditional cars. As the EVs rack up miles, particulates from tires, break dust, and re-agitated roadway pollutants are all mixed into the environment, creating potentially harmful air quality. As the increased workload on braking systems of EVs became a known...

Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists, increasingly overshadowed by the coronavirus, have been discussing new and ever more desperate ways to grab attention for their next big publicity stunt. Mooted tactics include: committing suicide in public (perhaps at the UN’s next climate summit in Glasgow later this year); hunger strike to the death; painting parliament green; spraying traffic lights black; blocking every station, airport, and motorway in Britain; and “scare the f**k out of people”.

London’s leafy streets and gardens have long been prized for their beauty — and more recently their ability to counteract carbon emissions and improve air quality. But the value of urban trees can also be measured with money. A new report from Britain’s Office of National Statistics estimates tree cover saved the capital more than 5 billion pounds ($6.56 billion) from 2014 to 2018 through air cooling alone. Additionally, by keeping summer temperatures bearable for workers, trees prevented productivity losses of almost 11 billion pounds. The estimates underline just how vital the role trees play is in making cities comfortable...

Fluctuating solar and wind power require lots of energy storage, and lithium-ion batteries seem like the obvious choice—but they are far too expensive to play a major role. A pair of 500-foot smokestacks rise from a natural-gas power plant on the harbor of Moss Landing, California, casting an industrial pall over the pretty seaside town. If state regulators sign off, however, it could be the site of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery project by late 2020, helping to balance fluctuating wind and solar energy on the California grid. The 300-megawatt facility is one of four giant lithium-ion storage projects that...

In 2014, Joe Duggan started reaching out to climate scientists to ask them a question: how did climate change make them feel? “I was just blown away when I started getting the letters back,” he says. Duggan, a science communicator at Australian National University, set up a website and starting publishing the mostly handwritten responses. “[Professor] Katrin Meissner was one of the first, and her letter really hit me. It was so ... unscience-y. Almost poetic.” “It makes me feel sad. And it scares me,” Meissner wrote. “It scares me more than anything else. I see a group of people...