Sunday, October 20

Tag: climate

The Foods the World Will Lose to Climate Change
30Dec By adminNo Comments
Technology

The Foods the World Will Lose to Climate Change

There’s no denying it: Farming had a rough year. Extreme weather spun up storms and floods, unseasonal freezes and baking heat waves, and prolonged parching droughts. In parts of the world in 2023, tomato plants didn’t flower, the peach crop never came in, and the price of olive oil soared.To be a farmer right now—or an agronomist or an agricultural economist—is to recognize how closely those weird weather events are linked to climate change. In fact, when the United Nations Climate Change Summit, known as COP28, ran in Dubai earlier this month, it featured a 134-country pact to integrate planning for sustainable agriculture into countries’ climate road maps.As the agriculture sector looks toward 2024, crop scientists are working to get ahead of ruinously unstable weather. They are envisi...
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Some Good News, for Once, From 2023
21Dec By adminNo Comments
Business

Some Good News, for Once, From 2023

Writing a newspaper column necessarily is a dour exercise most of the time. The point is to highlight things going wrong that ought to be fixed. Occasionally, however, it’s worth noting some things that are going right that one hopes can continue. Here, in the midst of a season that calls for reflection and gratitude, is my list:• The world’s population keeps getting larger. We’re on track to welcome our 8,100,000,000th global neighbor in 2024, after population growth of around 70 million this year.Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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Trump as Dictator Is a Classic Case of Projection
11Dec By adminNo Comments
Business

Trump as Dictator Is a Classic Case of Projection

If you haven’t heard, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are planning a coup. “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” Robert Kagan, an editor at large at the Washington Post, writes in a recent 6,000-word essay that compares America’s fractious democracy with Weimar Germany.Budding opinion writers are instructed not to draw inapt comparisons to Hitler, yet Mr. Trump’s opponents are casting aside such conventions in much the same way they’re jettisoning political and legal ones. Only by convincing themselves that Mr. Trump threatens the existence of the republic can they justify their own weaponization of government to stop him. “When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him—pots, pans, candlesticks—in the hope of slowing him down and tri...
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Climate Cookbooks Are Here to Change How You Eat
3Dec By adminNo Comments
Technology

Climate Cookbooks Are Here to Change How You Eat

Cookbook authors have a few options. They could write a regionally specific cookbook or a mass-market one starring ingredients that grow sustainably in lots of places (as One did). Or they could write a cookbook that samples vast biodiversity at some cost to sourceability—that’s the approach the UN cookbook took.“There are many cookbooks that could … have 90 percent of the recipes be part of your staple at home,” Cruz said. “But that serves a different purpose.” The UN cookbook is instead “almost a launching point into everyone’s own culinary exploration and everyone’s own culinary journey.”That exploratory emphasis—embodied not just in the recipes but in accompanying carbon and nutrition calculations and in principles that offer starting points rather than answers—puts it at one end of t...
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A showdown is brewing over money, oil and carbon
29Nov By adminNo Comments
Money

A showdown is brewing over money, oil and carbon

In this aerial view water vapour and exhaust rise from the steel mill of Salzgitter AG, one Europe's largest steel producers, on November 22, 2023 in Salzgitter, Germany.Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesPolicymakers and business leaders from across the globe are set to arrive in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for the world's biggest and most important annual climate conference.The COP28 summit, which starts on Thursday and is scheduled to run through to Dec. 12, will provide a critical forum for government officials, business leaders and campaign groups to accelerate action to tackle the climate crisis.The pressure to deliver is immense. Global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions continue to break records, with no continent left untouched by more frequent and intense...
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Why I’m (Cautiously) Optimistic About COP28
15Nov By adminNo Comments
Technology

Why I’m (Cautiously) Optimistic About COP28

The most obvious demand is for countries to close the gap between their targets and policies. Empty promises mean nothing. Countries need to put real, tangible policies in place to drive down emissions.Ambitious targets to scale up low-carbon technologies will be a key pillar. In its 2023 “Roadmap to Net Zero by 2050” report, the International Energy Agency called for a tripling of renewable energy capacity by 2030. Nearly all of this will be solar and wind. If the world wants to peak and reduce global coal production, this is essential.This target looks like it will be spearheaded by the European Commission. Earlier this fall, it laid out its COP28 position, and a tripling of renewables was central to its negotiating position. Rapid scale-up of renewables is unlikely to be a point of con...
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