Carbon emissions

Friday

Ross Clark

Trump is right about greenhouse gases

Irresponsible Trump, responsible China: that is the message the BBC's climate editor seemed to be sending us by juxtaposing the news that the President had repealed Barack Obama’s "endangerment finding" and that China’s carbon emissions fell slightly last year. Trump’s critics like to portray him as a rogue figure in a world which is otherwise committed to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. But is there any truth in that? The endangerment finding does not appear to have had any obvious impact on US emissions The endangerment finding was a piece of legalese issued in a 2009 ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Tuesday

Helen Barrett

What will the cities of the future look like?

At the Pacific Design Center Gallery in Los Angeles, artists have created an imaginary enormo-conurbation into which humanity’s billions have been herded, surrendering what’s left of the planet to wilderness. Views of Planet City, the resulting temporary exhibition, is all Blade Runner-esque, purple-neon cityscapes in miniature, VR games and costumes melding world cultures into one. The show riffs on Edward O. Wilson’s Half Earth hypothesis, the biologist’s 2016 proposal to remove humanity from half the planet to allow ecosystems to recover. It is an entertaining, clever and provocative exhibition, but it is fiction: it does not offer a set of instructions.

Sunday

Dave Seminara

Don’t let climate activists stop you from traveling

From our US edition

A decade ago, when I first started contributing to the New York Times’s annual “52 Places to Go” list, the top user comments were about the destinations: Why was Calcutta chosen but not Chattanooga? This year, in a sign of the times, the most popular comments suggest that we should all just stay home to save the planet. The climate-obsessed among us are falling out of love with travel, particularly with the idea of exploring far-off places where your carbon footprint is greater. If their movement gains steam they won’t save the world, but they might well wreck the global economy and deprive themselves and others of much-needed perspectives and experiences that make the world a better place.

travel

Tuesday

Henry Olsen

How California’s new trucking regulations threaten standards of living

From our US edition

It’s chic to look down on big trucks and their drivers. Former president Donald Trump’s photo op with truckers in 2017 was immediately lampooned on social media and by liberal journalists. It would be fitting, then, if the trucking industry provides the example that kills the push to rapidly move developed economies to “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions. The fact is that any serious attempt to make Western economies “net zero” will be costly, technologically difficult and extremely disruptive to our way of life. Nothing captures these inconvenient truths better than the effort to force the electrification of the trucking industry. Trucks are to the modern economy what the circulatory system is to the body.

trucking

Tuesday

David Abulafia

Our future life on Earth depends on the state of the ocean

When we observe the ocean we rarely peek beneath its surface. As Helen Czerski shows in her lively and engrossing account of the physics of ocean spaces, we would not see much anyway. Sounds travel well in water, and blue whales talk to one another across thousands of miles; but light soon disappears, apart from the glow emitted by luminous fish. Historians of the oceans (myself included) have looked at how, when and why people have crossed the surface of these spaces, uninhabitable except in the security of a boat or on islands, such as those in Polynesia with which Czerski begins her book. But we need to dive deeper.