By Marianne Lavelle

President Joe Biden will not attend the climate talks that commence this week in Dubai, but the conflict that has come to define his policy on the planetary crisis will be front and center.

By Bob Berwyn

A decades-long push by small island nations and other developing countries to put fossil fuels squarely at the center of United Nations climate talks got a boost this week as the European Union Parliament passed a resolution calling for a “tangible phase-out of fossil fuels as soon as possible.”

By Nicholas Kusnetz

When Chief Roger Hill speaks about the clean energy project going up along the border of the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, he turns quickly to the past. Hill’s Seneca ancestors once controlled a large territory across the rolling, wooded hills in what is now western New York, but most of their lands were taken through a series of treaties that shrank the reservation to its current size.

By Bob Berwyn

Research released this week raises new questions about how much more Earth may warm, or cool, if and when human carbon dioxide emissions zero out. Best estimates to date suggest that the global surface temperature would stabilize within a few decades, but the new paper in the journal Frontiers in Science examines the uncertainties around that conclusion, including how the planet’s key carbon dioxide-absorbing systems, like forests and oceans, will respond. 

By Bob Berwyn, Phil McKenna and Nicholas Kusnetz

New climate talks between the United States and China could set an encouraging signal for the upcoming United Nations COP28 climate summit, but only if the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters follow up on their words with actions. 

By James Bruggers

Delegates from more than 175 countries are gathered in Nairobi to advance a potential diplomatic solution to a global plastic pollution crisis amid a growing awareness of the effect of plastic on the environment and human health.

By Nicholas Kusnetz

The world’s top fossil-fuel producing nations are still planning to increase their output of oil, gas and coal far beyond what the world’s climate targets would allow, according to a new United Nations report. 

By Bob Berwyn

Climate negotiators from rich, industrialized nations and poor countries devastated by global warming are starting one last make-or-break meeting Friday to finalize plans for a new fund to help developing countries pay for climate-related losses and damages that they have done very little to cause. The stalemate thus far in the negotiations shows there is still a wide gap between the climate aid developed countries have long promised and what they are ready to deliver. 

By Bob Berwyn

During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off anytime soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published today in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.

Interview by Jenni Doering, “Living on Earth”

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Managing Producer Jenni Doering with Bob Berwyn Reid of The Allegheny Front.