By: Jeffrey Prosserman As my wife was discharged from Greenwich Hospital, two days after my daughter was born on June 5, 2023, wildfire smoke tinted the sky an eerie orange. The smoke from the fire burning in Canada had created the worst air quality levels since the United States Environmental Protection Agency began measurements in 1999. As the nurse waved…
By: Chandu Visweswariah In India, a billion people went to the polls over a 6-week period ending on June 1, 2024. Meanwhile, a scorching heat wave raised temperatures in New Delhi, the capital city, to an unbearable 120oF (49oC). Despite this juxtaposition of intense political and climate activity, climate change was not a plank in the platform of any of…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Dear human race, Congratulations on centuries of progress and triumph (albeit bumpy at times). Your intellectual, artistic, medical and scientific progress in the last few centuries has been impressive. You have also made incremental progress on injustice, bigotry, discrimination and exploitation of all kinds, be it slavery, racism, colonialism or elitism. Failure However, it pains me to…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Summary With each passing year of under-achievement in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, our planet’s carbon budget is dwindling. To avoid truly catastrophic and irreversible damage from climate change, this blog argues that the world now has to achieve net zero by 2034, if not sooner. What is a Carbon Budget? A carbon budget is an amount…
By: Chandu Visweswariah August 16 was the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most significant piece of climate legislation ever passed anywhere in the world. And New York State just announced incentives and subsidies from the Environmental Bond Act (EBA) that all of us helped to pass in November 2022. This financial assistance is additive to Federal…
By: Chandu Visweswariah [Author’s note: this blog is adapted from CURE100’s August newsletter’s “opening banter.”] Sitting here in New York, it’s easy to think of climate change as a “faraway” phenomenon. Hurricane Sandy filled our subway stations with water in 2012, and there was much talk of building sea walls and reducing emissions. We did neither and Sandy slowly faded…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Every Town and Village has a potpourri of governmental environmental organizations like a Sustainability Committee, a Conservation Advisory Council and a Climate Smart Community. There’s even a NY State Association of Conservation Commissions. There’s also typically a grab bag of local and national environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). With all this fervor and well-meaning effort, you would think…
By: Chandu Visweswariah The fossil fuel industry has defiantly projected that we will need their products till the end of this century or beyond. They are wrong. And if there’s any chance we will burn fossil fuels for another eight decades, God help our children, grandchildren and generations to come who will inhabit the planet at the turn of the…
By: Chandu Visweswariah There’s a dark and a troubled side of lifeThere’s a bright and a sunny side tooThough we meet with the darkness and strifeThe sunny side we also may view. — From a song by the Carter Family Over the years, many of you have read my blogs pointing out the dire consequences of climate change. I recently…
By: Chandu Visweswariah This short blog should be mandatory reading for all G7 Summit delegates in Japan. With the flurry of recent policy and scientific information, where do we stand on climate change and global warming? What are the most likely outcomes? The chart below outlines the outcomes of global warming with impacts in this century and beyond. The left…
