By: Chandu Visweswariah The oil giant Saudi Aramco recently published an article on Carbon Capture which got my attention. Is Carbon Capture the holy grail to solve the climate crisis? The fossil fuel industry is pushing carbon capture as a panacea to our greenhouse gas emission problems. Fossil fuels are wonderful and essential to our way of life, they say….
By: Chandu Visweswariah [Mount Rushmore image acknowledgment: By Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90107110] Dear Mr. President, If this letter gets to you, I hope you read it because it describes the single most important thing you can do to boost your legacy. More on this a bit later in this letter. Earlier today, I received a renewal notice…
By Bob DeAngelis, Yorktown100 As the earth circles the sun, and a new year begins, it’s a great time for renewing our commitments towards something better. This year, how about committing to learning more about our impacts on the environment and taking action to reduce them? There are many areas that each one of our households impacts: water pollution, air…
By Susan Buck & Laura KosbarPublished in Yorktown News, February 2024 Has your child or a young friend asked why the skies were orange last June, why it doesn’t snow like it used to, or even queried “What is climate change?” Have you been able to answer their questions or have you found yourself just trying to allay their fears…
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…
