Newsom Climate Report Card, January 2021 Update
2020 was a record-breaking year for the climate crisis in California. Ongoing drought and elevated temperatures fed an especially long and destructive wildfire season. Californians once again endured dangerous levels of smoke for weeks on end,
[1] only this time they did so in the middle of a dangerous pandemic that attacks the respiratory system. The Covid-19 pandemic worsened the ongoing climate, public health, air pollution, housing, economic, and systemic racism crises, and highlighted the way those crises overlap and bring harm to vulnerable communities across the state.
Governor Gavin Newsom took advantage of the moment to connect the wildfires to the climate crisis and our reliance on fossil fuels. In September 2020, he issued an Executive Order requiring 100% of new passenger cars and trucks to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
Once a best project for cleanup, India program shuts down Screenshot of Vimeo video by National Geographic/AEPW/Renew Oceans
A Renew Oceans community relations workers (standing) talks with two people in a waste sorting facility.
Renew Oceans, one of the founding projects of the industry s $1.5 billion Alliance to End Plastic Waste, has ground to a halt, with organizers saying it is a victim of the pandemic and growing doubts the project could get to the size needed to succeed.
It launched as an effort targeted at cleaning up the Ganges River in India, but from the beginning it was seen by the plastics industry as something more ambitious that they could take worldwide.
The world s top environmental organizations are still predominantly White, a new report finds kvia.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kvia.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The U.S. generates more plastic waste than any country worldwide, having cranked out an estimated 42 million metric tons of it in 2016 alone, according to a recent study published in
Science Advances.
That figure is likely even higher today, says Kara Lavender Law, the lead study author and a professor at the Sea Education Association.
“Our estimate is based on the latest available data [some of which is seven years old], and we were conservative. Meanwhile, we have seen waste generation grow yearly,” Law says.
This newest chapter in the story of U.S. plastic wastes has brought attention to two quandaries. One is the country’s contribution to a global waste problem. The other dilemma is an increasingly inundated domestic waste management system as overseas markets shrink, with some countries who historically received tons of our mixed, dirty bales now refusing them.