climate & energy – Alternative Energies

Kate Yoder
america
award
January 20, 2016
0 Comments

Leo DiCaprio wins award, pledges $15 million to the planet

Nothing makes us swoon like a lionhearted climate change warrior. So today’s climate crush should come as no surprise: Leonardo DiCaprio, the celebrity face of fixing our planet. On Tuesday, DiCaprio received yet another award — where does he keep all 100 million of them, an award room? — and pledged $15 million to environmental groups. The award was for his leadership in confronting the climate crisis and was presented at the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Awards in Davos, Switzerland. Mashable breaks down where his donations are going: $6 million to Oceana and Skytruth for Global Fishing Watch $1 million to the Nature Conservancy for Seychelles debt for nature swap $3.2 million to Rainforest Action Network and Haka to protect Sumatran rainforest $3.4 million to Clearwater…

Ben Adler
climate & energy
democratic
January 10, 2016
0 Comments

Twitter fight! Bernie and Hillary battle it out over who has the better climate plan

When was the last presidential race in which the two leading candidates for a major party’s nomination aggressively competed over who has the best plan to address climate change? Oh, right, never. But 2016 is a new era. This week, the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns talked smack to each other on social media, fighting for the hearts of climate hawks. It started on Wednesday, when Sanders — who last month released a very ambitious, but legislatively focused, climate plan — challenged Clinton to detail her own plans. Over the last few months, Clinton has reacted to the candidacies of Sanders and fellow climate hawk Martin O’Malley, as well as grassroots activist pressure, by moving left on a couple of key climate issues. After years of avoiding…

Clive Thompson
california
climate & energy
January 4, 2016
0 Comments

No parking? Self-driving cars could have a huge effect on our cities

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you drive out to visit Disney’s Epcot center in Orlando, Fla., you will arrive at one of the biggest parking lots in America. With room for 12,000 cars, it sprawls out over 7 million square feet — about the size of 122 football fields. If you look at the lot on Google Maps, you realize that it’s nearly the size of Epcot center itself. Disney built one Epcot to hold the visitors. Then it built another to hold the cars. Disney isn’t alone in its expansive approach to parking. Parking is, after all, what cars do most of the time: The average automobile spends 95 percent of its…

Zoe Schlanger
article
celsius
January 3, 2016
0 Comments

2015 was record-busting hot, scientists say

This story was originally published by Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It’s official: No year on record has ever been as hot as 2015. And it broke the temperature record, just set in 2014, by an unusually large margin. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the news on Wednesday morning, after both agencies separately analyzed global temperature data and came to the same conclusion. 2015 broke temperature records by a wide margin, amid a wave of other more localized climate anomalies around the world.NOAA / NASA The record was set by a full tenth of a degree Celsius (or nearly a fifth of a degree Fahrenheit), a much larger margin than usual, as temperature records are commonly broken by…

Suzanne Jacobs
check-out-this
climate & energy
December 30, 2015
0 Comments

Geoengineering simulation lets us play with the future

Wherever you stand on geoengineering — whether you think it’s our only chance of survival or a fast track to extinction — we should at least consider the idea. As I argued last year, just studying geoengineering could teach us a lot about the climate and just talking about it could ease some lingering political tensions around climate change. So in the spirit of keeping all options on the table when it comes to preventing a climate catastrophe, check out this interactive geoengineering simulation from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project. It lets you look at what global temperatures could look like between 10 and 50 years from now, if we decide to jump down the geoengineering rabbit hole. Here are the specifics from Slate: This interactive shows temperature…