(WASHINGTON) — In what officials call a key step to combat climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency is sharply limiting domestic production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, highly potent greenhouse gases commonly used in refrigerators and air conditioners. The new rule announced Thursday follows through on a law Congress passed last year and is intended to decrease U.S. production...

Tell Vinisha Umashankar that your teen years pale in comparison to hers, and she is quick to remind you that everyone has a different life journey. But the 14-year-old also knows that the future looks very different for her generation if the world doesn’t act to slow global warming and the effects of climate change. Still, she’s optimistic that “collective action” of...

"I think the book holds open the possibility of a more joyous and a more rewarding way of being in the world"

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. After a summer of devastating hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires, Facebook’s new measures to address climate misinformation leave something to be desired. In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking they were a joke. In a blog...

But the tech may not actually be very green

Mars is the solar system’s near-miss world. Earth may have gotten everything right when it came to sustaining life—atmosphere, water, proximity to the sun. Mercury, Venus and the outer planets, with their extreme temperatures and inhospitable chemistry, may have gotten everything wrong. Mars, on the other hand, came so close, yet fell short. Thanks to data from rovers and other...

Odds are you can’t account for where you were on every one of the 200 days that elapsed from November 23, 2014 to June 11, 2015. But Samantha Cristoforetti can, since she spent them all aboard the International Space Station. Cristoforetti, Italy’s first female astronaut, set what was then a record for single-mission duration by a woman in space—and that achievement was just...

The number of green investment funds is skyrocketing, but many are investing in companies that aren’t aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement. That’s according to a report published on Aug. 27 by InfluenceMap. The London-based climate change think tank accused the majority of green funds of falling short. InfluenceMap assessed 723 equity funds—with over $330 billion in...

Developed countries’ pledges to provide $100 billion of annual financing, made over a decade ago and seen as key to unlocking upcoming climate talks, are unlikely to be met even five years after the target, according to a new report. That not only threatens the success at the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow starting in weeks, but also the aim of limiting global warming to 1.5...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Four space tourists safely ended their trailblazing trip to orbit Saturday with a splashdown in the Atlantic off the Florida coast. Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the ocean just before sunset, not far from where their chartered flight began three days earlier. The all-amateur crew was the first to circle the world without a professional astronaut. The...

Prince William announced 15 inaugural finalists Friday for the Earthshot Prize, his ambitious global environmental award that aims to find new ideas and technologies to tackle climate change, air pollution and the Earth’s most pressing challenges. The finalists include a 14-year-old student who proposes using solar energy to replace charcoal to power millions of roadside ironing carts in...

Studies from COVID-19 vaccine makers and public health officials have been suggesting for a while that protection provided by the vaccines wanes over time. In a new study published on Sept. 15 to a preprint server—the study is not yet peer-reviewed—researchers at Moderna, which makes one of the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (the other is from Pfizer-BioNTech), report that people...

In the end, the camping trip up the flank of Mt. Rainier that the Inspiration4 crew made back in April may have done more than anything else to prepare them for tonight’s successful launch into Earth orbit, at 8:02 p.m. ET from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Even the day before the launch, at a T-minus-27-hour press conference, they were still talking about the experience and what it...

Are you ready to go to space? Join TIME and Netflix as we bring you the launch of Inspiration4—the first-ever all-civilian orbital mission—live. The Inspiration4 crew, including mission commander Jared Issacman, mission pilot and geoscience professor Dr. Sian Proctor, payload specialist and Lockheed Martin aerospace engineer Chris Sembroski, and medical officer and St. Jude...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. One of the perks of going out on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker in the Arctic is something called Ice Liberty. Ports are few and far between when you’re north of the Arctic Circle, so instead of shore leave, Coastguardsmen and women...

When Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans in early September, Tonya Freeman-Brown made the difficult decision to stay in the city. The 53 year-old and her family sheltered in an old brick hotel in the downtown area, watching fierce winds of up to 150 mph pelt rainwater at the windows, and remembering the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, 16 years earlier to the day. It was stressful, but...

For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly. This summer, the National Parks Service has been frantically dropping 100 dump-trucks-worth of gravel every week on the top of the Pretty Rocks Landslide in...

At the bottom of the pacific ocean lies a solution to the imminent battery shortage ... at a great potential cost to biodiversity and life on earth

As the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over the northeast Wednesday night, dumping a record-shattering 3.15 inches of rain on New York City in a single hour, water began to pour into the city’s subways. The system flooded in 46 locations and the MTA cut service across all lines overnight. Rescue operations had to be carried out to reach those unlucky enough to be caught in at least 15...

Some two weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Aug. 18 that nursing homes must require their staff to get vaccinated or risk losing their Medicare and Medicaid funding, Genesis HealthCare, which manages about 250 facilities nationwide that offer long-term care and other services, had said its workers would need to be vaccinated. “The growing spread of the Delta variant makes...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. For many climate reporters, myself included, the arrival of Hurricane Ida brought a recognizable pit to the stomach. The details of the stories emerging as the storm barreled toward the Gulf Coast were new—of course—but they...

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in late August 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with building a new flood-defense network. Congress allocated billions of dollars to build pumps, dikes and floodwalls for a system meant to withstand a so-called “100-year storm.” That’s typical. In building flood protection, engineers can’t...

Rising extreme heat will make it increasingly hard for workers to do their jobs, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars off the U.S. economy each year. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank focused on climate adaptation. It’s a stark warning about the...

We are in a planetary emergency. Horrific heat waves and fires blaze across North America, Turkey and Russia. Extreme floods wreak destruction and cause death from Europe to Africa to Asia. Ocean temperatures and the amount of carbon in our atmosphere have reached unprecedented highs. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Our planet, as the United Nations recently warned, is flashing a...