Welcome to the third week of the 2023 season of EcoRight Speaks! I am so pleased that I got to have this conversation with Chris Neidl from the Open Air Collective. By Chelsea Henderson EcoRight News/ RepublicEN As you will hear, Chris is passionate about carbon dioxide removal (CDR), a critical component of the battle to solve […]
Vinyl chloride – the chemical in several of the train cars that derailed and burned in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023 – can wreak havoc on the human liver. Juliane I. Beier, University of Pittsburgh The Conversation It has been shown to cause liver cancer, as well as a nonmalignant liver disease known as […]
Deep below the ocean surface, the light fades into a twilight zone where whales and fish migrate and dead algae and zooplankton rain down from above. This is the heart of the ocean’s carbon pump, part of the natural ocean processes that capture about a third of all human-produced carbon dioxide and sink it into […]
The race to decarbonize passenger cars and light-duty trucks in the U.S. is accelerating. Battery electric vehicles accounted for almost 6% of all new vehicle sales in 2022, up from close to 3% in 2021, and demand is outstripping supply, even as manufacturers roll out new models and designs. The Biden administration is spending billions […]
The planet continued its warming trend in 2022, with last year ranking as the sixth-warmest year on record since 1880, according to an analysis by scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). By NOAA Below are highlights from NOAA’s 2022 annual global climate report: Climate by the numbers Earth’s average land and ocean […]
Hydrogen is expected to become one of the building blocks for reaching global climate goals, yet current production is almost exclusively from high-carbon sources. By Adrian Odenweller and Dr Falko Ueckerdt Carbon Brief In a recent study, we looked at how quickly the world would need to scale “green” hydrogen – made by splitting water with low-carbon […]
By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country. Caroline Wagner, The Ohio State University The Conversation I am a policy expert and analyst […]
Nuclear fusion holds huge promise as a source of clean, abundant energy that could power the world. Now, fusion researchers at a national laboratory in the US have achieved something physicists have been working towards for decades, a process known as “ignition”. This step involves getting more energy out from fusion reactions than is put in […]
There’s a lot to be jolly about this Christmas. COVID has been significantly, although not completely, “defanged”, thanks to vaccines and treatments. Christmas dos, nativity plays and New Years Eve parties are all back on the festive calendar. Simon Nicholas Williams, Swansea University The Conversation However, the return to “normal” brings with it the return […]
At the United Nations biodiversity conference that opened in Montreal on Dec. 7, 2022, nations came together to create a new global framework for transforming humanity’s relationship with nature. The conference logo features a human reaching to embrace a panda – but from an ecological perspective, a weasel or badger would be a more appropriate […]
Black and Latino students who start out majoring in STEM – or science, technology, engineering or mathematics – are more likely than their white peers to switch fields or leave without a degree. Esohe G. Irabor, Howard University and Brandyn White, Howard University The Conversation Some students leave because they feel isolated on campus. Others […]
American scientists have announced what they have called a major breakthrough in a long-elusive goal of creating energy from nuclear fusion. The U.S. Department of Energy said on Dec. 13, 2022, that for the first time – and after several decades of trying – scientists have managed to get more energy out of the process than […]
In the Arctic, the freedom to travel, hunt and make day-to-day decisions is profoundly tied to cold and frozen conditions for much of the year. These conditions are rapidly changing as the Arctic warms. Matthew L. Druckenmiller, University of Colorado Boulder; Rick Thoman, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Twila Moon, University of Colorado Boulder The […]
Tropical cyclones have been growing stronger worldwide over the past 30 years, and not just the big ones that you hear about. Our new research finds that weak tropical cyclones have gotten at least 15% more intense in ocean basins where they occur around the world. That means storms that might have caused minimal damage […]
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement have increased by 1.0% in 2022, new estimates suggest, hitting a new record high of 36.6bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2). By Dr Zeke Hausfather and Prof Pierre Friedlingstein Carbon Brief The estimates come from the 2022 Global Carbon Budget report by the Global Carbon Project. It finds that the […]