crisis

Pollution is the forgotten global crisis and we need to tackle it now

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By Graham Lawton Leon Werdinger/Alamy Stock Photo IN THE lead-up to Christmas, my household began to feel like a badly managed waste-processing facility. We planned to spend time with vulnerable relatives, so were keeping a close eye on our covid-19 status. Each lateral flow test generated seven items of non-recyclable waste, which piled up in … Read more

UK energy crisis: Why renewable subsidies will help avoid price shocks

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Rising energy costs have seen wind farms substantially refund environmental levies for the first time, showing they are likely to be the solution, not the problem, to soaring bills Environment | Analysis 14 January 2022 By Adam Vaughan Clyde Wind Farm in South Lanarkshire, UK Simon Butterworth/Alamy Amid the UK’s increasingly heated debate about what … Read more

Biodiversity crisis: Animal decline is hurting plants’ ability to adapt to climate change

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Declines in bird and mammal species are making plant seed dispersal more difficult, which means plants can’t adapt as effectively to climate change Environment 13 January 2022 By Adam Vaughan An American robin eats a winterberry Paul Vitucci Losses in the number of birds and mammals are limiting the capacity of plants worldwide to adapt … Read more

Energy bills: What can the UK government do to avoid a cost of living crisis?

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By Adam Vaughan Protesters demand action on fuel poverty in London in November 2021 Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images The shock of rising energy bills due to sky-high wholesale gas prices has already squeezed UK household budgets, disrupted industrial plants and triggered the collapse of 28 energy suppliers including Bulb. Now the issue is … Read more

Eating Less Red Meat Is Something Individuals Can Do to Help the Climate Crisis

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When I give public lectures about the climate crisis, the most common question people pose is: “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” My answer is yes. California has achieved dramatic emissions reductions in a thriving economy, which makes me hopeful, yet in general the fossil-fuel industry is determined not to change. The second most … Read more

E. O. Wilson: The extraordinary ant researcher and sociobiologist who warned of biodiversity crisis

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By Doug Tallamy, University of Delaware Edward O. Wilson in his office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, in 2014. Credit: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department … Read more

Leonardo DiCaprio: How comet-themed ‘Don’t Look Up’ shows climate crisis as an emergency

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Leonardo DiCaprio’s longstanding passion for climate change, which even brought him to NASA a few years back, is now on screen in a new movie. The Oscar-winning actor (“The Revenant”, “Inception”) is the lead for the cast of “Don’t Look Up” (Netflix, Dec. 10), a dark satire about a deadly comet heading for Earth. Director … Read more