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Yale Climate Connections

Each winter, Western monarch butterflies migrate to the California coast, where they cluster together in clumps of orange and black to survive the cold months.

But this year, their winter habitat was hit by intense storms.

“We have seen photographs of monarchs that were completely wet and cold, trying to survive, and they were just falling on the ground,” says Rebeca Quiñonez-Piñón of the National Wildlife Federation.

She says the storms were a blow to the Western monarch population, which has declined drastically since the 1980s.

Monarch butterflies are threatened by habitat loss and pesticides, and they’re sensitive to their environment, which makes them vulnerable to climate change.

“We have seen that extreme weather, long droughts, and heavy precipitations … are definitely affecting the monarch butterfly,” she ...

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Yale Climate Connections

In Middleton, Wisconsin, manure is being used to make natural gas.

Waste from more than 4,000 cows is processed in a biodigester. That breaks it down into solids that can be used for fertilizer, water, and methane.

“We run that through a further cleaning process to make renewable natural gas,” says Steve Nieland of EnTech Solutions.

He says this product can help reduce the use of natural gas from fossil fuels. And it uses climate-warming methane that would otherwise be released directly to the atmosphere as the manure decomposed.

And to further reduce climate emissions, the company is working to ensure that the process itself is powered by clean energy.

“Our electricity at the site comes from renewables, so we have about two-and-a-half megawatts worth of solar,” Nieland says.

Soon, EnTech plans to use electric trucks ...

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Yale Climate Connections

In the U.S., a small percentage of drivers produce a disproportionate amount of global warming pollution.

“The top 10% of drivers in terms of their gasoline consumption were using about a third of all the gasoline,” says Janelle London of Coltura, a nonprofit that advocates for electric vehicle adoption.

Her team analyzed nationwide data about people’s driving habits. She says many so-called gasoline superusers drive a lot because they have to.

“They are generally people who are having to commute long distances because they can’t afford to live near where they work,” London says. “Most gasoline superusers are low- to middle-income. And so what that means is they are spending a large percent of their household income on gasoline.”

So London’s group pushes for policies that would increase electric vehicle incentives to ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Rev. Gerald Godette is a pastor and scientist. So he’s in a unique position to talk to people of faith about sea level rise, extreme weather, and other climate change impacts.

“My faith is a driving force that gets me excited about telling people that, 'Look, this Earth is a gift from God, this universe is a gift from God, and we’ve got to take better care of it,’” he says.

For Godette, the issue of climate change is personal. For about a decade, he was a steward and his wife was the pastor at the Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Aurora, North Carolina.

In that time, the church flooded twice: during Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Florence.

Now Godette is the pastor of Reels Chapel in Beaufort, which was also damaged by Florence.

“When I got to Reels Chapel, that church had not been in operation ...

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Yale Climate Connections

A year ago, Juan Wilkins was working temporary jobs in the Boston area, unsure about his future.

“It was hard for me to find something that was permanent,” he says. “I was really undecided what I wanted to do.”

Now he works as a weatherization technician, making schools and commercial buildings more energy efficient. He helps add insulation to attics, air-seal crawl spaces, weatherstrip doors, and caulk windows.

Wilkins is a graduate of Bridges to Green Jobs. It’s a two-week training program offered by the Boston chapter of Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a nonprofit.

Program manager Silvana Bastante Muñoz says jobs in energy efficiency are growing quickly in Massachusetts.

“The employers are in high need of weatherization technicians,” she says.

So this program teaches residents of underserved neighborhoods ...

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Yale Climate Connections

I listen to a lot of climate podcasts and watch a lot of comedy, placing me solidly in the target audience for “Sustainababble,” which is billed as “a weekly comedy podcast about the environment.” But when the show first popped up in my Apple Podcasts recommendations, I was skeptical. I have very strong opinions about comedy (my mediocre-at-best understanding of the form notwithstanding), and environmental podcasters didn’t seem like the most likely candidates to pull it off.

But “Sustainababble” was, in fact, funny. Hosts Oliver Hayes and Dave Powell, who met while working at an environmental nonprofit in London, frequently steered conversations about serious topics into unexpected, and sometimes agreeably puerile, territory. Though the show often featured straightforward interviews with environmental leaders, ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Fossil fuel companies profit from the world’s dependence on coal, oil, and gas.

Some climate activists are concerned that some of these same companies fund university research about climate and energy.

“I don’t think there should be a space in climate research in which the fossil fuel industry is involved,” says Bella Kumar, a student at George Washington University and an organizer with a campaign called Fossil Free Research.

Kumar is the lead author of a recent report by the think tank Data for Progress. Her team looked at 27 universities and found that the fossil fuel industry donated or pledged more than $600 million to the schools over a 10-year period.

Kumar says funders can influence which topics are studied. And in some cases, they influence how results are framed, for example downplaying the negative impacts of ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Like in many cities, wealthy neighborhoods in Baltimore have lots of trees that provide shade and help cool the neighborhood on hot days. But other parts of Baltimore have few trees.

“Specifically, minority neighborhoods, neighborhoods that have been historically disenfranchised and disinvested in, those are the neighborhoods, unfortunately, that have a very low tree canopy cover,” says Ryan Alston of the Baltimore Tree Trust.

The group hires Baltimore residents and trains them to become neighborhood forestry technicians. These technicians plant new trees in the city and help maintain the urban forest.

“And so we’re looking to these residents that are in these Black and Brown neighborhoods, that are longtime residents of Baltimore city, that have seen kind of the disparities that have happened between neighborhoods and really ...

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Yale Climate Connections

At Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, visitors explore a 19th-century sea captain’s home, a Victorian mansion, a World War II-era grocery store, and other buildings that have stood for generations.

“Our root mission is historic preservation and teaching the evolution of this historic neighborhood,” says Rodney Rowland, the museum’s director of facilities and environmental sustainability.

But he says that as the climate warms, some of this history is at risk.

More extreme storms cause surface flooding on the low-lying property. And rising seas are pushing the underground water table higher. So some of the buildings’ basements flood with groundwater during seasonal high tides.

“We’ve already seen history lost,” Rowland says. “We’ve already spent quite a bit of money from damage caused by ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Every year, millions of people watch the Triple Crown races, awed by the speed and agility of thoroughbred horses on the track.

These animals are powerful. But they can also be vulnerable, especially when it’s hot.

“Exertional heat illness essentially refers to when horses become too hot while they’re exercising, and their internal temperature gets too high, and then they become ill,” says Leah Trigg of the University of Bristol Veterinary School in the UK.

She reviewed hundreds of cases of heat illness in horses to identify the main risk factors.

She found that longer races are more likely to cause heat stress. Horses that have suffered from a bout of heat illness in the past are far more likely to exhibit symptoms again.

And racing in hot, humid conditions - especially when a horse is not accustomed to it - significantly ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Kids today will face a future with more severe droughts, stronger storms, and rising sea levels.

Yet many schools are not preparing students for the climate of tomorrow.

“Of course there are exceptions … but overall, we’re just not doing enough,” says Judy Braus, the executive director of the North American Association for Environmental Education.

Her group recently surveyed hundreds of teachers and school administrators across the country.

The surveys showed that most teachers want to cover climate topics but many feel unprepared to do so. And they worry about resistance from some parents.

“They don’t feel confident or informed, and that makes it really hard for them to be able to integrate climate change into what they’re doing,” Braus says.

So she says it’s important for administrators to make ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Wisconsin aims to fully transition its electrical grid to clean, carbon-free energy sources by 2050.

But Andrew Kell of the nonprofit Renew Wisconsin says there’s an opportunity to do more.

“If you focus only on the electric grid, you are ignoring all the emissions that still happen at the transportation sector,” he says. “And same thing with natural gas and other petroleum products being burned in homes and businesses for heating.”

His group partnered on research about the costs and benefits of eliminating carbon pollution from those sectors, too.

It would require fully transitioning to electric vehicles and electrical HVAC systems and developing renewable energy projects to power them all with clean electricity.

Those changes would take large investments. But Kell says the climate, people’s health, and the economy would ...

Under the new framework, put together by Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube, Treasury will be entitled to 50% of any revenue from the credits while foreign investors can earn as much as 30% and local investors must get at least 20%.

Zimbabwe’s most notable carbon credit project is the 785,000 hectare (1.94 million acre) Kariba forestry project owned by South Pole, the world’s leading seller of offsets. The company is reviewing the Zimbabwe government’s announcement and “assessing the implications” for the Kariba project, a spokesperson said. 

Other companies have applied to set up forestry programs to generate the credits and Zimbabwe’s state-owned Forestry Commission has plans to set up three programs, Stephene Zingwena, is acting director general, said.

“This policy is a step in the right direction for us,” Zingwena said. “It gives us direction in terms of how we will manage carbon credits as a ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Last fall, when Tyler Colson taught her middle school students about climate change, she had them document environmental injustices in their own community.

After some research, the students learned that their Louisiana neighborhood has suffered more from flooding than many wealthier areas.

“They were angry, rightfully so,” Colson says.

Colson is a social studies teacher at Eva Legard Center for Coastal and Environmental Studies, a public school in East Baton Rouge.

She says most of her students are Black and live in low-income areas that face multiple environmental injustices. But many of their families also work in the fossil fuel industry, so talking about climate change is complicated.

“Like, your dad works offshore, right? You have money, you can afford to eat, but what is it doing to the environment?” she ...

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Yale Climate Connections

As mountain glaciers melt, they create high-altitude lakes, dammed by rocks or ice. If pressure builds or landslides or ice avalanches occur, that natural dam can break.

Water and debris can then rush down the mountainsides - devastating communities.

Tom Robinson is a senior lecturer in disaster risk and resilience at the University of Canterbury. He says global warming is causing glaciers to melt faster.

“And so there’s more and more water going into these lakes,” he says.

And that water can flood communities. In a recent study, Robinson assessed the risks on a global scale.

So Robinson urges communities to prepare. He says engineering solutions, like installing sluicing gates or lowering the lake levels, could help protect people.

And he says everyone can do their part by reducing global warming.

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Yale Climate Connections

Dead fish were everywhere, speckling the beach near town and extending onto the surrounding coastline. The sheer magnitude of the October 2021 die-off, when hundreds, possibly thousands, of herring washed up, is what sticks in the minds of the residents of Kotzebue, Alaska. Fish were “literally all over the beaches,” says Bob Schaeffer, a fisherman and elder from the Qikiqtagru?miut tribe.

Despite the dramatic deaths, there was no apparent culprit. “We have no idea what caused it,” says Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue. He wonders if the die-off was a symptom of a problem he’s had his eye on for the past 15 years: blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, that have become increasingly noticeable in the waters around this remote Alaska town.

Kotzebue sits about 40 ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Going solar can reduce people’s energy costs and their impact on the climate. But not everyone’s home is well-suited for rooftop solar panels, so community solar programs provide another option.

In these programs, multiple community members buy or lease part of a solar farm and then share the benefits.

“Fifty percent of households and 50% of businesses cannot put solar on their rooftops today. And that’s why community solar is so important to really make the benefits of clean energy more accessible to everyone,” says Nicole Steele of the U.S. Department of Energy.

She says the agency set a goal of helping 5 million homes connect to community solar by 2025.

“It’s audacious. It’s a 700% increase over where it was in just a four-year time frame,” Steele says.

But she says the goal is reachable. To achieve ...

BUYING A CAR used to be about two things: style and performance. But as motorists trade in their petrol or diesel cars for electric vehicles, manufacturers are increasingly focusing on experience by adding features like karaoke machines and mood lighting. Those drivers also have a lot more choices. The ditching of internal combustion engines in favour of battery-power has allowed new car makers to enter the market. But rather than thinking like BMW or Ford, they are looking to firms like Apple for their inspiration.

On this week’s podcast, hosts Mike Bird, Alice Fulwood and Tom Lee-Devlin examine the remaking of the auto industry. The Economist’s Simon Wright explains that software, rather than hardware, will define car brands in the future. Henrik Fisker, the founder of one of those new brands, tells them that a history of making petrol-powered cars doesn’t necessarily qualify established car makers to make electric vehicles. And advisor Tu Le explains why Western car ...

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Yale Climate Connections

Each November, Javier Zamora plants more than 20 acres of strawberries on his organic fruit and vegetable farm in Watsonville, California.

“And then four months later, you get to see people enjoy and take a bite out of a red, delicious strawberry,” he says.

Watsonville is in a cool, coastal region that Zamora says is known for its long, productive strawberry seasons.

He can typically harvest berries from April through October.

But as the climate warms, the weather is growing increasingly erratic. Heat waves and drought can reduce yields and damage fruit. And extreme storms can wipe out a harvest.

“We experience three, four, five years of drought. And all of a sudden, we get double the amount of the water that we normally get per year. But we get it in like one month,” Zamora says.

In 2022, heavy spring rains drenched ...