Where we’ll end up living as the planet burns

From 2022:

While nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is no way to adapt. People will have to move to survive.

Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. This migration has already begun…

Link (3,200 words): https://time.com/6209432/climate-change-where-we-will-live/.

And good news from Fix the News (more details for this week at https://fixthenews.com/p/ftn-309-colours-of-the-moon-wash):

Billions of people have gained clean water, sanitation and hygiene in the last nine years. That’s not a typo – that’s billions, with a B. An astonishing new data dump from the WHO and UNICEF showing that between 2015 and 2024 humanity recorded one of the fastest expansions of basic welfare of all time: 961 million people gained safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation, and 1.5 billion gained access to basic hygiene services, while the number of unserved fell by nearly 900 million. Coverage has risen to 74%, 58% and 80% respectively, while open defecation has dropped by 429 million people. Together, these figures represent an historic advance in human health and dignity.

Plus a pic from my collection:

Dino-killing ourselves

I found this description of how much energy we’re putting into our planet from fossil fuels:

Our addition of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the long lever that can move the world. Between 1970 and 2020, 381±61 zetta joules (10^21 joules) of additional energy was absorbed into the system (i.e. the Earth).

This estimate was prepared using satellite data, which is public source, https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/

How much energy is this? It’s roughly 80% of the estimated energy of the Chicxulub impactor. Albeit spread over a significantly longer period of time.

The strongest explosion humanity has ever created is in the order of 10^17 joules, or a hundred quadrillion joules.

We’ve managed to add 1.5 million times that number in this 50 years. We’ve been essentially adding one Tsar Bomba’s worth of energy ((approx 50 megatons)) every fifteen to twenty minutes for the past five decades.

The Chicxulub meteor impact blew away roughly half a continent, and the resulting climate change wiped out all the dinosaurs except for birds. We’re doing the same thing to ourselves, spread out a bit but… that’s a lot of energy to be not thinking about. Yeesh.

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42676838.

And good news from Fix the News:

Major wins for U.S. rape kit reform. In 2016, the Joyful Heart Foundation developed an actionable nationwide campaign to end the backlog of untested rape kits across the United States. As of January 2025, 21 states and Washington D.C. have achieved full rape kit reform, benefitting 163.4 million people. Two recent, big wins occurred in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which both implemented a rape kit tracking system in 2024. End The Backlog

Truckers love EVs

While trucks are only 4 percent of the vehicles on the road (in the US), they make up almost a quarter of the country’s transportation emissions. Around 10,000 of those trucks were just put on the road in 2023, up from 2,000 the year before.

Amazon, for example, has ordered and deployed thousands of electric delivery vans made by Rivian; the company says it has electric trucks operating in 1,800 cities in the United States. FedEx has electric trucks rolling through the streets of Los Angeles. The logistics company Schneider has dozens of Class 8 electric semi-trucks delivering loads throughout Southern California.

And the drivers operating them say they love driving electric. Marty Boots, a 66-year-old driver for Schneider in South El Monte, Calif., appreciates the lightness and the smoothness of his Freightliner eCascadia semi-truck. “Diesel was like a college wrestler,” he said. “And the electric is like a ballet dancer.”… Some drivers were hesitant when first trying out the technology. But once they try it, he said, most are sold. “You get back into diesel and it’s like, ‘What’s wrong with this thing?’” he said. “Why is it making so much noise? Why is it so hard to steer?”

Many drivers have reported that the new vehicles are easier on their bodies — thanks to both less rocking off the cab, assisted steering and the quiet motor. “We’re seeing people who would retire driving a diesel truck now working more years with an electric truck.”

Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/01/18/electric-truck-drivers-vehicles/ (1,200 words). Let me know if you can’t access that.

UK closes last coal power plant

Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, around 1780, and a major reason was that coal was plentiful and accessible. On September 30 2024, its last coal-powered electrical generating plant closed, replaced by natural gas, nuclear, and renewables:

This was a country powered by coal — dug by a million miners, used to make cheap energy, to generate heat, then steam, then electricity. Coal heated the homes, ran the trains and made the steel and cement.

The first coal-fired electric plant in the world was built in England in 1882. The term “smog” was coined here, too.

Now Britain is the first in the global club of wealthy countries to quit coal — relying instead on natural gas, nuclear power and a combination of renewable energy sources.

We’re moving into the future. Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/29/uk-last-coal-power-plant/ (about 1,400 words). Also see https://xkcd.com/2992/ (remember to hover over the pic for an extra joke).

And just one good news item from this week’s Fix the News:

A lead-free future
Lead poisoning kills more people than HIV and malaria combined. Now the first-ever global public-private partnership has committed $150 million to end lead poisoning in children in developing countries once and for all. Over the past few years Bangladesh, Malawi and Madagascar have all achieved outsized impact in fighting lead expose with low-cost and effective approaches.

Swiss women win major climate court case

A group of 2,000+ senior women in Switzerland have won a court case that may force European governments to do more about climate change:

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled Tuesday that Switzerland had not acted urgently to achieve climate targets, leading victims, who are mostly in their 70s, to suffer physically and emotionally while potentially placed at risk of dying.

The women, part of a group called KlimaSeniorinnen (Senior Women for Climate Protection), filed the lawsuit nine years ago.

The court’s judgment is binding, cannot be appealed, and could “influence the law in 46 countries in Europe including the UK,” the BBC reported.

I found this in Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/2000-senior-women-win-biggest-victory-possible-in-landmark-climate-case/. More information on senior women fighting climate change at https://19thnews.org/2024/01/climate-grandmothers-environmental-activism/:

These are the climate grannies. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect their grandchildren.

And more good news from FutureCrunch (bolding mine):

FBI confirms huge decline in crime in the United States
New data from over 13,000 agencies, covering all of 2023, have shown that there was a 13% decline in murder last year (the largest one-year decline ever recorded); a 6% decline in violent crime, likely the lowest rate since the late 1960s; and a 4% decline in property crime. Fox News has been strangely silent.

Global warming 2023 / 2024

We’re shattering heat records: https://wapo.st/49b3HcF (Washington Post free link, from June 2023, approx 1,100 words):

New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data.

And then, on Monday, came Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years. Tuesday was hotter.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

But it’s not hopeless. EV sales are rising rapidly (almost all new cars in Norway, 25% of all new cars in Europe, from 2% in the US in 2020 to almost 10% in 2023); renewable energy is going up (see chart below); CO2 emissions are actually dropping in the EU and the US: https://wapo.st/3J3jRtX (Washington Post free link), approx 700 words. One chart:

The note in the upper-right corner is amazing: “China increased its renewable energy by almost 400% since 2015.”

40% of US electricity now emissions-free

((2023)) Wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production.

Overall electricity production year-to-date is down by just over one percent from 2022, though demand was higher this October compared to last year. This is in keeping with a general trend of flat-to-declining electricity use as greater efficiency is offsetting factors like population growth and expanding electrification.

That’s important because it means that any newly added capacity will displace the use of existing facilities. And, at the moment, that displacement is happening to coal.

Excellent progress! Of course, electricity generation is not the only source of global warming gases, but it’s an important part. Details at https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/40-of-us-electricity-is-now-emissions-free/.

And from FutureCrunch (my bolding):

For the first time in a decade, the EPA has tightened regulations on air pollution, lowering the allowable limit for annual PM2.5 levels from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to 9. The reduction is predicted to reap $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032, including prevention of up to 800,000 asthma attacks and 4,500 premature deaths. NPR

Good news from 2023

Yes, the US and the world have serious problems. Yes, we are looking at an uncertain future. And yes, lots of things have gotten better and better:

Cancer? “European cancer mortality for 2023 was estimated to be 6.5% lower for men and 3.7% lower for women than in 2018, the United States reported cancer death rates have fallen by a third in the last three decades, Australia reported significant reductions in skin cancer in under 40s, there were major breakthroughs in treatments for colon, skin, bladder and cervical cancer…”

AIDS? “Two decades ago, the disease seemed unstoppable, killing two million people a year, but today, it’s a very different story. In July, the United Nations revealed that in 2022, deaths fell to 630,000, there were an estimated 1.3 million new infections, the lowest since the early 1990s, and only 130,000 new infections in children, the lowest since the 1980s.”

Clean energy? “Humanity will install an astonishing 413 GW of solar this year, 58% more than in 2022, which itself marked an almost 42% increase from 2021. That means the world’s solar capacity has doubled in the last 18 months, and that solar is now the fastest-growing energy technology in history. …If solar maintains this kind of growth, it will become the world’s dominant source of energy before the end of this decade.”

Electric vehicles? “Global electric vehicle sales increased by 36% this year, bringing the world’s total to 41 million electric vehicles. The shift is remarkable: just two years ago, one in 25 cars sold globally was an electric vehicle. This year it will be one in five, and by 2025, one in two. The IEA now says that electric vehicle sales, like solar installations, are tracking ahead of its net zero scenarios. In the United States, where the media spent much of the year insisting there’s been a slowdown, sales were up 50%…”

Suicide? “Over the past three decades, global suicide rates have fallen by more than a third, thanks primarily to rising living standards in the two most populous countries in the world.”

Women’s rights? “Uzbekistan passed a law giving women greater legal protection against gender-based violence, the Netherlands and Switzerland amended their laws to introduce a consent-based definition of rape, Sierra Leone passed landmark legislation advancing women’s rights, Oman passed a law prohibiting the termination of employment due to pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding. In China, a new law protecting women against discrimination and sexual harassment came into effect…”

And dozens more! https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/. Sign up for their free weekly good-news email.

Lawsuits against fossil fuel industry

In 2005, I was the lead counsel on behalf of the US in one of the biggest corporate accountability legal actions ever filed. That trial proved that the tobacco industry knew it was selling and marketing a harmful product, that it had funded denial of public health science, and had used deceptive advertising and PR to protect assets instead of protecting consumers.

Today, the fossil fuel industry finds itself in the same precarious legal position as the tobacco industry did in the late 1990s. The behaviour and goals of the tobacco and petroleum industries are pretty similar – and there are many similarities in their liabilities.

Both industries lied to the public and regulators about what they knew about the harms of their products. Both lied about when they knew it. And like the tobacco industry while I was in public service, the deceptive advertising and PR of the fossil fuel industry is now under intense legal scrutiny.

And the tide is beginning to turn. More than 1,800 lawsuits have been filed over climate liability worldwide.

Full article (890 words): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/05/us-lawsuit-big-tobacco-big-oil-fossil-fuel-companies

Renewables cheaper than coal plants

This article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/30/new-york-might-take-second-swing-electrification/) covers several environmental issues, but the part that really caught my eye was:

99% of U.S. coal plants pricier to run than renewables, analysis finds

A coal plant in Delta, Utah, in June. (Rick Bowmer/AP)

Nearly all coal plants in the United States are more expensive to operate than renewable energy projects that could replace them, according to an analysis.

The report by Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy firm, looked at the cost of running the country’s remaining 210 coal plants in 2021.

For 99 percent of the coal plants, it would be cheaper to build and operate a new wind or solar project, the analysis found. That marks a major increase from 2019, when the firm first conducted the analysis and found that 62 percent of existing coal capacity was uneconomic compared to new renewables.

Replacing the 210 coal plants with wind and solar would create cost savings large enough to finance the addition of nearly 150 gigawatts of battery storage, increasing the reliability of the new renewables, the analysis concluded.

The report’s authors acknowledged that many communities depend on coal plants for jobs and tax revenue. But they noted that clean energy projects would also create jobs and economic growth, and that the Inflation Reduction Act offers additional tax credits to developers of clean energy projects in communities historically reliant on fossil fuels.