John Galgiani has been waiting for this call. The 79-year-old physician is sitting on a chair in a side office at a health clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, long legs crammed under the table in front of him, hands folded at his stomach, when his cell phone rings. “There’s my guy,”...
E-bikes could cut carbon, congestion, and costs — if cities take them seriously
Last year, San Francisco voters did something exceedingly rare in car-crazy America: They closed two miles of a coastal highway to vehicles, creating a sprawling park for pedestrians, joggers, and cyclists. Of course, furious residents in the neighborhood bordering the erstwhile highway voted last month to recall their representative at...
An absurdist theater artist prepares New Yorkers for climate disasters
Edgemere Farm was born out of a climate catastrophe and community resilience. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, volunteers transformed an abandoned, flood-damaged, city-owned plot into a lush organic garden. One day in mid-September, the half-acre site in Far Rockaway, New York, underwent another makeover: For an hour, it became...
10 years after the Paris Agreement, countries are still missing climate deadlines
When the 2015 Paris Agreement was inked nearly a decade ago, it marked a consensus, agreed to by nearly all the countries in the world, that global temperature rise should be limited to well below 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. But the treaty hinges on those almost 200 countries...
In Alaska, a graphite mine races toward approval without the required tribal consent
The Kigluaik Mountains stretch across the Seward Peninsula of western Alaska like a spine, their jagged ridges keeping a record of time. The Inupiaq have long read these ridges and valleys as a living story: Fire and fracture have marked the rock, and glaciers’ slow grind polished it. The talus...
So many climate solutions, so few emissions reductions. A new book explains why.
In 2022, a small group of researchers came up with a bright idea: What if we were to install a network of lamps above tropical forests, flooding them with light at night in order to boost photosynthesis? Doing this in the Amazon alone, they argued, would increase plants’ uptake of...
California extends cap-and-trade, as Indigenous nations grapple with the trade-offs
In 2013, California launched its cap-and-trade program, a carbon credit market that allows companies and governments to engage with offset projects that incentivize investments in planting trees, preserving forests, or even supporting solar farms. The idea is to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing credits for nature-based projects. ...
Texas floods showed why many rural communities feel abandoned in a crisis
Rain was already coursing through the usually dry creek near Abraham Stallins’ home in the Texas Hill Country when a flash flood warning lit up his phone. It was just after midnight on July 5, and many neighbors were sleeping, but Stallins, who tends to stay up late anyway, decided...
La Cumplida shows how coffee can restore ecosystems and economies
In the lush highlands of northern Nicaragua, nestled between two natural reserves, La Cumplida isn’t your average coffee farm. Over two decades, massive reforestation and innovative agriculture practices have allowed it to transform the region, showing how a different approach to coffee farming can help restore ecosystems and shore up...
Utilities are doing even worse on climate than they were 5 years ago
Since 2021, the Sierra Club has been grading U.S. utilities on their commitment to a clean-energy transition. While most utilities have not earned high marks on the group’s annual scorecards, as a whole they had been showing some progress. That’s over now. The latest edition of the Sierra Club’s “The Dirty Truth” report finds that...