Visiting friends or family via airplane this holiday season? Don’t forget to bring Mother Earth a present by offsetting the carbon emissions from your flight.
Carbon offsetting involves financially supporting Earth-friendly projects, such as planting trees or building wind farms, which reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide that your flight generated. Burning jet fuel produces carbon dioxide, one of the harmful greenhouse gases that is causing climate change.
When 195 countries signed the Paris Agreement in December of 2015, it was an unprecedented expression of global solidarity on climate change.
The Administration's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement is a serious blow to that international accord. This is the first time in my memory that the U.S. has become almost universally viewed as a rogue nation.
Solar panels on all 11 public school roofs? Windmills atop Village Hall? A local clean energy network that feeds energy into our grid? Some ideas never see the light of day, but thanks to the efforts of citizens and staff, these clean energy projects, or others like them, may become reality in the coming years.
The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opened in Paris on November 30, in the shadow of the attacks by ISIS on the cultural life of the city. Heads of state or government from more than 140 countries attended the conference over the first two days, addressing plenary sessions and holding private meetings.
The United Nations held its first Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. The outcome of that conference was an Action Plan consisting of 109 recommendations for financial and institutional capacity building to deal with the challenges of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change. That’s right—climate change has been on the international environmental agenda for over 40 years. The delegates at Stockholm also adopted a declaration calling for a second Conference on the Human Environment.
