Climate Change

Why it matters: Google announced this week that it will stop permitting ads to run alongside content that denies climate change, and will stop monetizing such content. The change seems to have come after Google received pressure from advertisers. Google made the announcement in the help section of its Google…

The plummeting costs of renewables, the growing strength of the clean energy sector, and the rising influence of activists have begun to shift the politics of climate action in the US, panelists argued during MIT Technology Review’s annual EmTech conference last week. Those forces allowed President Joe Biden to put…

Google said it will prohibit ads and monetization of YouTube videos and publisher content that deny climate change or contradict “well-established scientific consensus” about the causes of climate change. YouTube will still allow videos with falsehoods about climate change on its platform — but will demonetize videos or channels that…

Google has decided not to run any ads alongside content that "contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change". The decision impacts YouTube, advertisers, and publishers. It appears to be primarily a matter of commerce, rather than conscience: the adtech strangler vine has framed the decision…

While climate change denial videos can remain on YouTube, they’ll no longer rake in advertisement dollars. The company has announced plans to strip ads from climate change denial videos amid a larger crackdown on misinformation. The decision appears to have been largely driven by YouTube’s partners that don’t want their…

WASHINGTON, October 7, 2021 – Today, as part of President Biden’s whole-of-government approach to confronting the climate crisis, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its climate adaptation and resilience plan (PDF, 813 KB) describing how USDA will prepare for current and future impacts of climate change. The plan is…

Madagascar, my home, is experiencing the world’s first-ever climate change-induced famine, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.  The Amazon rainforest, once one of the world’s largest and most important carbon sinks, now produces more CO2 than it removes.  For the first time in recorded history, it rained at…

Japanese-born American Syukuro Manabe, German Klaus Hasselmann and Italian Giorgio Parisi won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics for work that helps understand complex physical systems such as Earth's changing climate. Read More

A study by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network shows that corals are under siege from global warming. Fourteen percent of the world's corals were lost between 2009 and 2018. Global warming has killed 14% of the world’s coral reefs in a decade and more will be wiped out if oceans keep…

McDonald’s wants to achieve net zero emissions globally by 2050. The plans are vague, but the fast-food giant said it aims to reduce its emissions across restaurants, offices, and supply chains, according to a company press release today (Oct. 4). The details on how it will update targets will be released…