Climate

LONDON (AP) — Environmental activists who have repeatedly blocked Britain’s busiest highway face possible imprisonment after a judge granted an injunction against the protesters, Britain’s transport secretary said Wednesday.

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — The European Central Bank's first climate stress test shows higher risks of loan defaults for banks in fire-plagued southern Europe and argues that an earlier and orderly shift to greener energy may have costs — but pay off for the economy over the long run.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Racism, climate change and worsening divisions among nations and cultures topped the agenda Wednesday as leaders from China to Costa Rica, from Finland to Turkey to the United Nations itself outlined reasons why the world isn't working as it should — and what must be done quickly to fix it.

The two biggest economies and largest carbon polluters in the world announced separate financial attacks on climate change Tuesday.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country will no longer fund coal-fired power plants abroad, surprising the world on climate for the second straight year at the U.N.

NEW YORK (AP) — Presaging “hundreds of millions” of climate change refugees, Turkey's president said Tuesday at the U.N. General Assembly that the world needs to find a way to contend with its existing refugees who are fleeing conflict.

Opening pocketbooks wider to fight climate change? That’s looking slightly more doable. Closing more smokestacks for the same goal? Not yet sold.

World leaders made “faint signs of progress” on the financial end of fighting climate change in a special United Nations feet-to-the-fire meeting Monday, but they didn't commit to more crucial cuts in emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause global warming.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Warning of a potential new Cold War, the head of the United Nations implored China and the United States to repair their “completely dysfunctional” relationship before problems between the two large and deeply influential countries spill over even further into the rest of the planet.

BERLIN (AP) — Youth activists are hoping to turn up the heat on governments Friday with the first large-scale international protest against climate change in six months.

Greta Thunberg and fellow activists said Monday they plan to stage demonstrations in cities around the world, weeks before leaders gather for a U.N.

BERLIN (AP) — Computer-maker HP, consumer goods business Procter & Gamble and coffee capsule company Nespresso have joined a corporate pledge to sharply cut their greenhouse gas emissions over nearly two decades.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Last year, no leaders came at all. This year will be quite different — sort of.

With the coronavirus pandemic still raging in many parts of the world, leaders from more than 100 nations are heading to New York this week for the United Nations' annual high-level gathering — a COVID-inflected, semi-locked down affair that takes place in one of the pandemic's hardest-hit cities of all.

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was travelling to the United States on Sunday with senior Cabinet officials to urge world leaders attending the U.N. General Assembly to take urgent action on climate change ahead of this fall's COP26 climate summit in Scotland.

ABIQUIU, N.M. (AP) — At the edge of a sandstone outcropping, Teresa Leger Fernández looks out on the Rio Chama. The river tracks a diverse landscape from the southern edge of the Rocky Mountains through rugged basalt hillsides, layers of volcanic tuff, and the red and yellow cliffs made famous by painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Revamp the tax code and important federal health care and environment programs. Spend $3.5 trillion over 10 years, but maybe a lot less. Ensure that no more than three Democrats in all of Congress vote “no” because Republicans will be unanimously opposed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden tried on Friday to hammer out the world's next steps against rapidly worsening climate change with a small group of other global leaders and announced a new U.S.-European pledge to cut climate-wrecking methane leaks.

BERLIN (AP) — A new report shows the world is on a “catastrophic pathway” toward a hotter future unless governments make more ambitious pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the head of the United Nations said Friday.

BERLIN (AP) — The world is on a “catastrophic pathway” toward a hotter future unless governments make more ambitious pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the head of the United Nations said Friday.

LONDON (AP) — 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.

BERLIN (AP) — Environmental campaigners pressed Friday for Germany's next chancellor to take strong action against climate change, including by bringing forward the country's coal phase-out and banning new gasoline vehicles from 2025.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s “build back better” agenda is poised to be the most far-reaching federal investment since FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society — a prodigious effort to tax the rich and shift money into projects and programs touching the lives of nearly every American.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional Democrats are calling top executives at ExxonMobil and other oil giants to testify at a House hearing as lawmakers investigate what they say is a long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.

BERLIN (AP) — Scientists say the hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere is larger than usual this year and already surpasses the size of Antarctica.

The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said Thursday that the so-called ozone hole, which appears every year during the Southern Hemisphere spring, has grown considerably in the past week following an average start.

GENEVA (AP) — The head of the United Nations called Thursday for “immediate, rapid and large-scale” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming and avert climate disaster.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden plans private climate talks with world leaders Friday to try to spur hard-and-fast commitments to cut climate-damaging pollution globally, following up on his livestreamed summit that saw dozens of leaders make earnest public promises to do so.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday signed into law a pledge to eliminate the state's climate-damaging carbon emissions within a quarter-century, including money to keep clean-power nuclear plants running while shuttering coal-fired plants.

CUSTER CITY, S.D. (AP) — Looking down a hillside dotted with large stumps and nearly devoid of trees, a pair of retired U.S. Forest Service employees lamented logging policies they helped craft to deal with two harbingers of climate change -- pine beetles and wildfires.

Nearly every nation is coming up short — most of them far short — in their efforts to fight climate change, and the world is unlikely to hold warming to the internationally agreed-upon limit, according to a new scientific report.

ARVADA, Colo. (AP) — President Joe Biden tried to advance his domestic spending plans on Colorado on Tuesday by warning about climate change's dangers while highlighting how his clean-energy proposals would also create good-paying jobs.

NEW YORK (AP) — How do you turn a performance space in Brooklyn into a day at the beach?

Answer: Truck in 21 tons of sand from New Jersey in 50-pound bags and dump them out onto the floor — all 840 of them.

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — Vermont on Tuesday became the latest state to sue some of the country's top fossil fuel companies by alleging they misled the public about the impact their products have on climate change.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union's climate czar said Tuesday the 27-nation bloc should ensure that the most vulnerable people won't pay the heaviest price of the green transition, and pledged measures guaranteeing equal burden-sharing across society, amid a global surge of energy prices.

MATHER, Calif. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday used his first Western swing in office to hold out the wildfires burning across the region as an argument for his $3.5 trillion rebuilding plans, calling year-round fires and other extreme weather a climate change reality the nation can no longer ignore.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The center-left bloc headed to a victory in Norway's elections Monday as official projections pointed to the governing Conservatives losing power after a campaign dominated by climate change and the future of the country’s oil and gas exploration industry.

MADRID (AP) — Firefighting crews near southern Spain's Costa del Sol were hoping for much-needed rainfall Monday to help them extinguish a major wildfire that has ravaged 7,700 hectares (19,000 acres) in five days and forced the evacuations of 2,600 people.

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Climate change could push more than 200 million people to leave their homes in the next three decades and create migration hot spots unless urgent action is taken to reduce global emissions and bridge the development gap, a World Bank report has found.

STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — North Sea oil and gas has helped make Norway one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But as Norwegians head to the polls on Monday, fears about climate change have put the future of the industry at the top of the campaign agenda.

HALLE, Germany (AP) — It's a scorching September day and the Green party candidate hoping to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor leaps on stage in front of hundreds of supporters for what should be a home run.

ROME (AP) — The world’s top Christian leaders — Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians — on Tuesday issued a joint appeal for delegates at the upcoming U.N.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California lawmakers on Thursday voted to spend more than $2 billion to prevent wildfires and address a severe drought, closing the book — for now — on a $262.5 billion operating budget that began the year with a record deficit because of the pandemic and ended with a record surplus in spite of it.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats began pushing plans for providing paid family and medical leave, easing climate change and bolstering education through House committees Thursday as they battled Republicans and among themselves over President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion vision for reshaping federal priorities.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Inspired by the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are pushing for a modern counterpart: a Civilian Climate Corps that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs building trails, restoring streams and helping prevent catastrophic wildfires.

MULESHOE, Texas (AP) — Tim Black‘s cell phone dings, signaling the time to reverse sprinklers spitting water across a pie-shaped section of grass that will provide pasture for his cattle.