The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding a New Kind of Politics. Greta Thunberg’s protest outside of Sweden’s parliament building has made climate change a topic of that country’s daily conversation. Fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg has been protesting for more than a month. Before the country’s parliamentary election on September 9th, she went on strike and sat on the steps of the parliament building, in Stockholm, every day during school hours for three weeks. She is demanding that the government undertake a radical response to climate change. Thunberg developed her special interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade. She began researching climate change and has stayed on the topic for six years. She has stopped eating meat and buying anything that is not absolutely necessary. In 2015, she stopped flying on airplanes, and a year later, her mother, a famous opera singer, followed her suit, giving up an international performing career – The New Yorker
- Green and inclusive? Paris builds a zero-carbon future with a social conscience – Thomson Reuters Foundation
- Victoria’s renewable energy boom set to create thousands of jobs – The Guardian
- Poland’s power from coal seen down at 50 percent by 2040 – government official – Reuters
- Which cities will sink into the sea first? Maybe not the ones you expect – The Guardian
- Peter Dykstra: Good news and hope on an otherwise gloomy beat – The Daily Climate
- Long road ahead for Asian drivers revving up to go electric – Thomson Reuters Foundation
- Marine microbes: Small but mighty at capturing carbon – Climate Connection
- Brazil’s Good-News Story Is Hiding in the Rainforest – Bloomberg
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Climate scientists consider ‘life changing’ report. It is likely to be the most critical and controversial report on climate change in recent years. Leading scientists are meeting in South Korea this week to see if global temperatures can be kept from rising by more than 1.5C this century. Many low-lying countries say they may disappear under the sea if the 1.5C limit is breached. After a week of deliberations in the city of Incheon, the researchers’ new report is likely to say that keeping below this limit will require urgent and dramatic action from governments and individuals alike. Why is this report so important? The report will be the guiding light for governments as they decide how to develop their economies in the face of rising temperatures over the coming decades – BBC
A Running List of Action on Plastic Pollution. The world is waking up to a crisis of ocean plastic—and we’re tracking the developments and solutions as they happen. THe world has a plastic pollution problem and it’s snowballing—but so is public awareness and action. Each year, an estimated 18 billion pounds of plastic waste enters the world’s ocean from coastal regions. That’s about equivalent to five grocery bags full of plastic trash piled up on every foot of coastline on the planet. All that plastic is causing harm to the creatures that live in the ocean, from coral reefs smothered in bags, to turtles gagging on straws, to whales and seabirds that starve because their bellies are so jammed with bits of plastic that there’s no room for real food. National Geographic magazine devoted a special cover package to plastic in June 2018, and since then, the issue has received more attention from the media, public, and politicians the world over. Here, we are some of the developments around this important issue – National Geographic
New Climate Debate: How to Adapt to the End of the World. Researchers are thinking about social collapse and how to prepare for it. At the end of 2016, before Puerto Rico’s power grid collapsed, wildfires reached the Arctic, and a large swath of North Carolina was submerged under floodwaters, Jonathan Gosling published an academic paper asking what might have seemed like a shrill question: How should we prepare for the consequences of planetary climate catastrophe? Almost two years later, as the U.S. stumbles through a second consecutive season of record hurricanes and fires, more academics are approaching questions once reserved for doomsday cults. Can modern society prepare for a world in which global warming threatens large-scale social, economic, and political upheaval? What are the policy and social implications of rapid, and mostly unpleasant, climate disruption? – Bloomberg