Tagglobal warming

A great win for the planet in California

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Even before the tragedy in Fukushima, it’s been clear that America’s aging nuclear power plants are an accident waiting to happen — and desperately need to be taken off line. That’s happened far too slowly, nor has safety been the only issue. When policy makers did decommission some of the nation’s most dangerous plants, such as California’s oceanfront San...

‘We’ve never seen anything like this before’

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Every day, a new reminder of the urgency of the world’s climate crisis — and, by logical extension, the 2016 elections here in the United States — shows up in my inbox or somewhere on the web. The streak of record monthly average world temperatures shows absolutely no sign of letting up. The hurricanes are coming earlier and growing stronger; the floods in places like Texas are...

A President Trump would undo years of environmental progress

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It took a long time, but President Obama finally has many — not all, but many — aspects of U.S. environmental and energy policy moving in the right direction. Even with a U.S. Congress that is led by deniers of climate change, the Obama administration has been able to promulgate new rules to restrict greenhouse-gas pollution from U.S. coal-fired power plants, and recently signed onto...

New Orleans is sinking just as the waters are rising

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When it comes to climate, the latest news for my lifelong hometown of New Orleans is not very good at all. As many people know — and as Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed made quite clear in 2005 — much of the Crescent City sits below sea level, which is why the city’s levees and its other defense mechanisms such as flood pumping stations are so critical. When...

The day climate change came to haunt tar sands country

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The scenes that have been coming from Alberta, Canada, over the past week are truly tragic, and horrifying. Massive wildfires, whipped by high winds, have turned the area around Fort McMurray — heavily populated with energy workers in recent years — into a hellscape of towering flames and smoke. Some 245,000 acres of land have been burned, and firefighters aren’t anywhere close...

Thanks to climate change, the world’s oceans can’t breathe

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Two of my passions in life, when it comes to recreation, are sailing and deep-sea diving. So, as you could imagine, the health of the world’s oceans is very important to me. Unfortunately, the medical report on the planet’s oceans has not been too good lately. Too much garbage has been dumped in our waters for too long — and the stunning result of that has been a massive slick...

Can our legal system stop global warming, for the sake of the children?

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As an environmental attorney, I’ve seen time and time again how the American legal system can bring justice to people — blue-collar workers, private property owners — who had no other real venue for airing their grievances. We’ve seen time and time again that large, profit-minded corporations can’t be trusted to do the right thing, and that too many of our so-called...

A ‘hothouse’ Planet Earth is about to enter uncharted waters

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There’s no doubt, at this point, that something of enormous consequence is happening with the planet and our climate. You could probably feel it in the air, if you lived in one of the parts of the United States that just went through a record-warm winter. Of course, it’s always important to note that weather is not the same thing as climate, but those record highs along the Eastern...

World’s richest oil family is dumping oil because of climate change

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Well, this is rich…literally. The family of the legendary 19th Century titan John D. Rockefeller built its fortune across a sea of crude oil, just when the fossil fuel was starting to take over world markets in the mid-to-late 19th Century. By getting into the oil fields — first in Pennsylvania, then his home state of Ohio and eventually all over the world — before any of his...

How local protests are saving the planet

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There’s an old saying in politics: Think globally, act locally. But when it comes to the major issues facing our environment, that idea has been largely honored in the breach. The rise of large and well intentioned lobbying groups such as the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council led a lot of rank-and-file voters to assume that someone was off in Washington, D.C., or maybe...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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