Read the full story in Crain’s Chicago Business.
The Chicago-based nonprofit joins Harvard University and the Rockefeller Foundation in shunning oil and gas investments and doubling down on a commitment to fight climate change.
Illinois just won a big green jobs victory
Read the full story at Jacobin.
In Illinois last week, a coalition of unions and environmentalists scored a major victory with a law providing for a miniature Green New Deal: billions invested in clean energy, a commitment to decarbonizing, solid labor standards, and embrace of nuclear power.
Illinois now boasts the ‘most equitable’ climate law in America. What will that mean?
Read the full story in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Besides setting targets for a switchover to clean energy, it comes with promises of equitable job creation and an emphasis on helping communities hit hardest by fossil-fuel pollution.
The European Union wants a universal charger for cell phones and other devices
Read the full story from NPR.
If you live in the European Union, your days of futzing around with a handful of chargers to find one that fits your latest gadget may be numbered.
Under a proposal released Thursday by the E.U., there would be one universal charger for all cell phones and other handheld electronic devices — no matter whether you had an iPhone or Kindle or anything else.
EPA finalizes rule cutting use of potent greenhouse gas used in refrigeration
Read the full story at The Hill.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday is finalizing a rule aimed at significantly cutting the use of a type of greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons that are used in refrigeration.
Hydrofluorocarbons, also known as HFCs, can have up to 14,800 times the climate impact of carbon dioxide.
The new EPA rule, first proposed in May, aims to reduce their use by 85 percent compared to a baseline number over the next 15 years.
High-power wireless vehicle charging technology licensed by HEVO
Read the full story from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has licensed its wireless charging technology for electric vehicles to Brooklyn-based HEVO. The system provides the world’s highest power levels in the smallest package and could one day enable electric vehicles to be charged as they are driven at highway speeds.
20 meat and dairy firms emit more greenhouse gas than Germany, Britain or France
Read the full story in The Guardian.
Twenty livestock companies are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than either Germany, Britain or France – and are receiving billions of dollars in financial backing to do so, according to a new report by environmental campaigners.
App eliminates food waste, supports local businesses and saves users money
Read the full story at Triple Pundit.
Discounted food, supporting local business, eliminating food waste and an element of surprise – the only thing Too Good To Go, a food app committed to ending food waste, is missing is a market in my stomping grounds of Atlanta (reference “heartbroken” in the dictionary for an apt description of how I felt when I realized this).
The app serves as a marketplace for hungry users looking to score “surprise bags” from restaurants dealing with a surplus of food. Instead of a bakery, for example, tossing away its unsold baguettes and croissants at the end of the night, a bread-loving consumer may pop into the app and purchase the goods at a fraction of the market rate. Too Good To Go calls its commitment to reducing food waste, trading otherwise trashed food for profits for business owners and boosting savings for hungry consumers a win-win-win.
In the Amazon, the world’s largest reservoir of biodiversity, two-thirds of species have lost habitat to fire and deforestation
Read the full story at Inside Climate News.
A new report finds that up to 85 percent of threatened animal and plant species have had their habitat damaged by mining, agriculture or logging.
UN: Weather disasters soar in numbers, cost, but deaths fall
Read the full story from the Associated Press.
Weather disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s, the United Nations weather agency reports. But these disasters are killing far fewer people. In the 1970s and 1980s, they killed an average of about 170 people a day worldwide. In the 2010s, that dropped to about 40 per day, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report Wednesday that looks at more than 11,000 weather disasters in the past half-century.
The report comes during a disaster-filled summer globally, including deadly floods in Germany and a heat wave in the Mediterranean, and with the United States simultaneously struck by powerful Hurricane Ida and an onslaught of drought-worsened wildfires.
