By Susan Kaplan

Your child could go to gym class on Monday morning and play soccer on a field that was sprayed over the weekend with 2,4-D, a toxic weedkiller that has been investigated as possibly causing cancer. Alternatively, the school grounds may have been treated with a lower-toxicity weedkiller. Or maybe the grounds were managed with safe, nontoxic products and techniques.

Which of these scenarios applies depends in large part on your states laws and regulations today more so than federal regulations.

For example, Texas requires all school districts to adopt an integrated pest management program for school buildings; IPM prioritizes nonchemical pest control methods and includes some protections regarding spraying of grounds. Massachusetts also restricts pesticide use on school grounds. Illinois requires IPM for school buildings only if economically feasible. States also vary greatly in the education and technical assistance they provide to implement these practices.

Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is involved in some baseline pesticide functions, shortcomings of the main pesticide law, along with industry influence, ca...

One of the greatest environmental challenges of the renewable energy transition is ensuring that the new energy-generating devices themselves from solar panels to wind turbines to lithium batteries are made and disposed of sustainably. 

Thats why its promising that recycled turbine blades are catching wind. Major turbine maker Siemens Gamesa announced Thursday that some of its recycled blades would find a home in the UKs Dogger Bank wind complex, one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world. 

Our industry-leading RecyclableBlade technology is now delivering even greater circularity of resources, CEO of Siemens Gamesas offshore business Marc Becker said in a press release. 

Wind turbine blades are typ...

With 161.5 million views and counting on TikTok alone, the #StopWillow social media campaign has left no question of the groundswell of opposition to the proposed oil development project Willow on Alaskas remote North Slope.

Social media users have been using the hashtag to voice their resistance to President Joe Bidens failure to keep his campaign pledges to reduce oil drilling.

With all of the progress that the U.S. government has made on climate change, it now feels like theyre turning their backs by allowing Willow to go through, said climate activist Hazel Thayer, who posted TikTok videos using the #StopWillow hashtag, as The Associated Press reported. I think a lot of young people are feeling a little bit betrayed by that.

Final approval of the Willow project lies with Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who opposed the Willow project and fought against it as a member of Congress. There is likely to be input on the final decision from top White House climate officials, as well as President Biden himself.

Climate activists have called the Willow project a carbon bomb, and a change.org petition had more than 3.1 million signatures, with a goal of 4.5 million.

According to ConocoPhillips Alaska, the Willow project which would be located on the Indiana-sized National Petroleum Reserve could produce about 1.5 percent of the total oil production in the U.S., or as much as 180,000 barrels of oil per day, reported The Associated Press.

Willow would emit more climate pollution annually than more than 99.7% of all single point sources in the country. Its estimated that the oil from Willow, when burned, would add more than 280 million metric tons of climate pollution to the atmosphere over the next 30 years equivalent to the annual...

Italy has joined the list of countries moving to restrict labels on plant-based meat products. The lawmakers proposing such labeling rules which include banning terms like burger or sausage argue that using traditional meat-related terms for plant-based foods could mislead consumers.

The proposed legislation says that use of terms like tofu steak or veg ham is an unfortunate and widespread phenomenon that misleads consumers by exploiting similarities between the products. The bill was also proposed to protect the livestock production of our country from those who want to offer consumption alternatives.

Further, in the introduction of the proposed bill, lawmakers said that using meat-related terms on plant-based products would lead consumers to incorrectly draw assumptions that the plant-based products had the same nutritional components as meats.

The question does not concern simple information to consumers, who are perfectly aware that there is no meat, for example, in a vegan mortadella, but the danger that they may be led to believe that the plant-based product has an exact nutritional equivalent (and perhaps that it has been processed with the same traditional techniques and care of the art of cured meat) of the meat product, the translated bill reads.

But studies have shown some promise in the nutrient density and potential health benefits of plant-based meat products, even in comparison to meat. One study noted multiple health and environmental benefits of plant-based meat over animal meat, and another study by Stanford Medical scientists found lower cardiovascular risk factors for people who swap red meat for plant-based meat.

In Italy, only about 17% of people in a 2021 study said they werent at all likely to ever consume plant-based meats, according to...

Two new studies highlight the vulnerability of California forests. Climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, has heated the atmosphere faster than conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains can adapt, shifting their ideal elevation 600 feet above where it was nearly a century ago, according to a study published in PNAS Nexus.

That heating has left nearly one-fifth of conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains mismatched to the current climate, including 8% that are severely mismatched. This mismatch makes the so-called zombie forests less, or even completely, unable to recover after wildfires, themselves supercharged by climate change while also releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Those findings come as a study published in PNAS finds climate-supercharged fires are so destructive that forests across 2.2 million acres across the West may be unable to regrow after fires a landmass that could more than triple by midcentury to 7 million acres.

Researchers say improved forest management, including low-intensity burns can help, so long as those actions are taken concurrently with action on climate change. But the longer you wait, the bigger the warming effect gets, study co-author Phil Higuera told Inside Climate News. Importantly, the projections only go through 2050, and that seems a lot closer than it used to.

For a Deeper Dive:

Zombie forests: New York Times, Fire intensity: Inside Climate News,...

Australia made a massive investment in renewable energy towards the end of 2022 channeling $4.3 billion towards large scale carbon-free electricity generation and storage developments. 

This is the highest quarterly investment since 2018,  according to data reported Thursday by the nonprofit renewable industry group the Clean Energy Council. But more is still needed for the country to meet its climate commitments. 

While the uptick is encouraging, one quarter doesnt mean a trend, Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Kane Thornton said in a statement. Australia is deploying new large-scale generation wind and solar farms more slowly than needed to reach the 82 per cent target for renewable energy on the National Electricity Market.

The increase in investments came at the close of the year in which Australia elected a new government that promised increased action on the climate crisis. The government of Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese promised to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050, which means ensuring 82 percent of the nations electricity comes from renewable sources by the end of the current decade.

Thornton said the change in political leadership had clearly incentivized investors. Overall, renewable energy investment in 2022 was up 17 percent from 2021, for a yearly total of $6.2 billion, according to the Clean Energy Councils Renewable Projects Quarterly Report for Q4 2022. 

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