Diplomats from around the world concluded nine days of talks in Geneva — plus a marathon overnight session that lasted into the early hours of Friday — with no agreement on a global plastics treaty. During a closing plenary that started on Friday at 6:30 a.m. — more than 15...
The International Seabed Authority’s war with itself
For the last three decades, the United Nations-affiliated body called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, has been working in relative obscurity on negotiating the regulations that will govern a field of enterprise that remains purely speculative: deep-sea mining, or the harvesting of metal rocks known as polymetallic nodules off...
The tiny ocean organisms that could help the climate in a big way
Some of the littlest organisms in the ocean wield incredible influence, both on their ecosystems and on the planet. Like plants do on land, phytoplankton absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and expel oxygen. They process so much of those two gases, in fact, that they’re responsible for half of the...
Installing heat pumps in factories could save $1.5 trillion and 77,000 lives
For several years now, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the United States. Instead of burning fossil fuels to generate warmth, these appliances use electricity — ideally provided by renewable sources like wind and solar — to transfer heat from even frigid outdoor air into a home. Many states...
For Indigenous communities, AI brings peril — and promise
When the United Nations marked the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples last week, it signaled a growing recognition of a new kind of extraction. Artificial intelligence, or AI, systems are being trained on massive troves of online data, much of it collected without the consent of the communities...
Factory farms don’t just stink — they make it harder to breathe, too
New research out this week underscores what many environmental justice advocates in the U.S. have long known: Animal feeding operations — another term for factory farming — pollute the air, and these environmental impacts are disproportionately felt by nearby communities, who are often people of color. The report, published Tuesday and...
A hidden fuel source beneath the Midwest? Scientists are investigating.
About a billion years ago, the United States was nearly ripped in half. Magma bubbled up as the Earth’s crust stretched thin somewhere around Michigan, nearly creating a new sea. Evidence of that scar, called the Midcontinent Rift, now curls around the upper Midwest, stretching from Ontario all the way...
How climate change endangers mothers and children
This story is a collaboration between Vox and Grist and builds on Expecting worse: Giving birth on a planet in crisis, a project by Vox, Grist, and The 19th that examines how climate change impacts reproductive health — from menstruation to conception to birth. Explore the full series here. Climate change poses unique threats to some of the most...
Plastic pollution is toxic and everywhere. Now, legal experts say it’s a human rights violation.
Plastics don’t just pose a threat to the marine environment and people’s health; they jeopardize basic human rights. This is the framing that a growing number of legal experts, policymakers, and environmental groups are using in conversations about a proposed United Nations treaty to “end plastic pollution,” which is undergoing...
Health was supposed to be central to the UN plastics treaty. Now it’s up for debate.
Since negotiations for a United Nations treaty to address plastic pollution began more than three years ago, protecting human health has risen to the top of many countries’ priority lists. This is partly because the science on the issue has evolved so rapidly. There are now thousands of scientific papers...