Environment Archive

With each successive Earth Day, the scale of the global environmental crisis becomes more disheartening. So too does the collective failure to respond to the planet’s plight. Over the past year, scientists have issued dire warnings about global warming, mass extinction, the extent of plastic pollution and the death of the world’s oceans. Humanity is now deep in the Anthropocene, a new geologic era defined by the human transformation of the natural world, and the lights are blinking red. In a harrowing report last October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, warned that even a 2 […]

The world is losing its battle against climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions rose to record levels last year, as countries lagged in meeting their already inadequate pledges under the Paris Agreement. Based on the current trajectory, the warming Earth will blow well past the 2-degrees Celsius ceiling widely agreed to be the maximum acceptable increase in average global temperatures before catastrophic impacts set in. In the face of this looming threat, climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts are necessary but insufficient. Humanity must also consider a third option it has long resisted: geoengineering, or the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the […]