Health Trotter

October 06, 2021 at 01:07AM A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here . Anyone who has followed U.S. climate policy is familiar with the cycle of bold attempts to enact climate rules that eventually sputter, followed by years of inaction. President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax before backing away under industry pressure. President Barack Obama pursued cap-and-trade legislation before it stalled in Congress. Obama tried again using regulatory authority, but much of his moves were undone by a combination of the courts and the Trump administration. In short, every time the U.S. has tried to get its domestic house in order on climate in recent years, the world has instead been left waiting for the next opportunity: a new term, a new president or a new Congress. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Now, it’s President Joe Biden’s turn to go big. At the core of his c...

August 13, 2021 at 01:07AM In the 1850s, an American scientist named Eunice Foote deduced, based on experiments she’d conducted, that if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were higher, the planet would be warmer. And in the 1890s, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius calculated, by hand, exactly how much the earth would warm as carbon dioxide levels. By the 1990s, the influence of human activities on the planet was obvious. The first United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report not only tracked the observed increase in carbon dioxide and its impact on global temperatures, melting ice and sea level rise; it also quantified a range of potential future scenarios that depended on human choices. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] This past Monday, the IPCC published the first volume of its latest Assessment Report . It’s the sixth in a series of assessments that have each been more exhaustive and comprehensive than the last. This ne...