Climate Change Archive

Planting too many trees can do more harm than good. The Verge has said this again and again with tree-planting schemes becoming a popular way for brands to paint themselves green. A big part of the problem was an initiative to plant a trillion trees spearheaded by the World Economic Forum and backed by a contested study from the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich. Apparently, the lab’s namesake, Thomas Crowther, took the stage during the recent United Nations climate conference to push countries to protect existing forests instead. “If no one had ever said, ‘Plant a trillion trees,’ I think we’d have been in a lot better space,” Crowther tells Wired.

The group of 18 youth between the ages of 8 and 17 from California say that the EPA “intentionally allows life-threatening climate pollution to be emitted by the fossil fuel sources of greenhouse gases it regulates, harming children’s health and welfare.” The suit follows a major win in Montana, where another group of young people successfully sued the state for violating their right to a clean environment.

The new Office of Critical and Emerging Technology is supposed to track developments in AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and biotech. The DOE also appointed a new Chief Artificial Intelligence, Semafor reports. Joe Biden’s October executive order on AI development established the office.

“There has been an explosion of fossil fuel lobbyists heading to UN talks, with nearly four times more than were granted access last year,” according to a new analysis by a coalition of environmental groups called Kick Big Polluters Out. Lobbyists for coal, oil, and gas got more passes to the conference than the total number of delegates from 10 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change (which includes Somalia, Chad, Tonga, Solomon Islands and Sudan), the Guardian reports.