Burning gas and propane for cooking, water heating and space heating in California homes and businesses creates 10% of the state's greenhouse gas emissions. It also releases pollutants indoors.
At a young age, I learned quickly how oil wealth and power could burn the land while people struggled. I saw heat rise off the streets, the Nile strained, and the air thickened with injustice. In my teenage years, through Aotearoa, being on the edge of the Pacific, I felt the ocean breathing heavy, swallowing the shores of islands that have done the least to cause this harm.
The overarching message of The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review was that failing to invest in mitigating climate change would exact an alarmingly high price, estimated between 5% and 20% of global GDP per year.
Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacentres, the analysis of 154 statements found.
Because the past three years have shattered temperature records, researchers have been exploring whether global warming is accelerating, and if so, why. Many scientists agree that the rate at which it is increasing has picked up. This is mainly because of a reduction in air pollution following the introduction of fuel regulations for international shipping (which has resulted in fewer pollutant particles that reflect sunlight into space and seed insulating clouds).
The UN-run market allows companies and countries to offset their excess emissions by financing projects that cut greenhouse gases in other nations. The new initiative involves a clean cooking project in Myanmar, which distributes efficient cookstoves that reduce pressure on local forests. Implemented in partnership with a South Korean company, the project will generate credits that will count towards the climate targets of South Korea and Myanmar.
Last year, the nonprofit Climate Central launched an online database to track the most costly weather- and climate-related disasters across the country. The effort was led by the same lead scientist who tracked those costs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-until the Trump administration axed the project in May. In 2025, the US experienced 23 such disasters with costs totaling at least $1 billion, for a total of $115 billion, Climate Central concluded.
The world spends 30 times more money destroying nature than protecting it. That's according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that exposes a massive gulf between so-called "harmful investments" and financing that promotes nature preservation. The global environment agency's latest "State of Finance for Nature" (SNF) report is calling to phase out the US$7.3 trillion (6.2 trillion) in global investments that damage nature including into high-emissions energy infrastructure and manufacturing, for example.
