Climate News Roundup: Week of 5/14
Record breaking temperatures, hypocritical pipeline permits, wildfires, and wild toxins. All in this week's climate news.
Hello and welcome back to The Doomer Dispatch, weekly climate news (and now more!) to spur doomers into doers.
For some exciting updates about the newsletter, check out the bottom of the post after you catch up on this week’s news.
Top climate news this week
The World Meteorological Organization forecast that the next five years will set climate-driven record high temperatures, with a 98% chance to surpass 2016 as the hottest year ever recorded. These scorching temperatures have a high chance of temporarily spiking above the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold of warming outlined in the Paris Agreement and subsequent UN conferences.
The United Nations released a report this week claiming the globe could cut plastic pollution more than 80 percent by 2040 if world leaders took serious steps to implement “reduce, reuse, recycle” policies and tax incentives — critics argue the report doesn’t focus enough on the “reduce” step.
Another new study links the increased rate of forest fires over the past four decades to climate change and claims 20 million acres of burned forest can be attributed directly to fossil fuel companies and the emissions they’ve wrought.
In an ironic twist, the climate-change-driven Canadian forest fires are negatively impacting fossil fuel operations across the Northern nation, disrupting production and sending fuel prices higher.
The Biden administration, yet again forgoing its commitment to mitigating fossil fuel development, approved a crucial permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline — a $6.6 billion project that carries methane gas 300 miles across Virginia and West Virginia.
The Environmental Protection Agency, while enjoying praise for the “forever chemicals” drinking water standards it released earlier this year, is also receiving criticism for not targeting “precursor” chemicals that can transform into PFAS over time — like those in firefighting foam.
The EPA is also moving to close a legal loophole that allows coal ash landfills to seep toxic heavy metals like mercury, lead, and lithium into groundwater.
As climate change stories start to emerge in new shows and movies like Extrapolations and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Hollywood producers and storytellers are starting to seriously consider how to weave climate narratives into a broader range of popular media.
President Biden and other world leaders are discussing how to accelerate the global clean energy economy while relying less on China’s dominant energy tech manufacturing at the G7 Summit this week in Hiroshima, Japan.
Exciting news: based on the feedback I received from last week’s post, from now on, The Doomer Dispatch will be following a different format.
Each Friday I will post ten or more news bullets, which I’m calling the “Climate News Roundup.” Right now, the roundup is just simple bullets, but I plan on experimenting with more visually interesting ways to display the info. On Mondays or Wednesdays (still going to figure out the best time), I will post a mini climate essay which could range from news commentary to personal stories to maybe even fiction, humor, or art.
I’m really excited about this new format, and I can’t wait to share more creative, original content with you all on a weekly basis. I think this will really enrich the experience of Dispatch readers and make for a more engaging, interesting, and fun newsletter worth subscribing to. What do you think? Let me know!
Thank you for joining me for this week’s Dispatch! I hope you enjoyed.
OK doomers, I’ll see you next week.
Joey
This is great 👍