2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, and 2024 may be even hotter. The New York Times notes that July 21 and 22 were likely the hottest days in our history. “Another key sign of global warming was that the 10 years with the highest daily average temperatures are the last 10 years, 2015 to 2024.” The Guardian visits with an emergency-room physician dealing with heat-related medical problems in Phoenix, while describing how deadly heat waves in the U.S. are impacting public health. Jeff Goodell examines the “false sense of security” provided by air conditioning, which is essential for survival in modern buildings but is inoperable during power outages.

Scientists note that the extreme weather we’re experiencing now is what we can expect even if we somehow meet the ambitious 1.5°C target for limiting global average temperature. The Atlantic notes we are just “dipping our toe” in that warmer world, which will be like the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago when seas were 20 feet higher, hippos lived in Great Britain and there were no humans. While we can’t feel it on a day-to-day basis, we are hurtling towards this climate at breakneck speed. It seems unlikely to me that our civilization will remain intact if we complete that journey.

Of course, if you only listen to Donald Trump and the Republican party, you would not be aware this is happening. I know this is not a surprise to the readers of this blog, but it is important climate news worth documenting. After all, these are the people who could be leading the U.S. next year. The New York Times reports that, at a rally in Virginia in June — the hottest June in recorded history — Trump said, “Global warming is fine. In fact, I heard it was going to be very warm today. It’s fine.” Trump dismissed physics by noting that sea level “may rise one eighth of an inch in the next 497 years.” This is another of his ludicrous improvisations about sea level rise, which I recently documented in There Is Only One Reality. The Republican platform actually states we should “drill, baby, drill,” a plan that will only accelerate climate change and bring us closer to planetary tipping points. Meanwhile, The Washington Post notes that Antarctica is in the midst of another heat wave, with temperatures 50°F above normal for this time of year.

Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, J.D. Vance (R-OH), used to question a future based on fossil fuels, but now is all in. The National Observer has a Canadian perspective on American climate-change denial (and Bernie Sanders [D-VT] describes the problem to Stephen Colbert). Meanwhile, The New York Times summarizes Kamala Harris’ science-based perspective on climate change, and Grist describes her environmental record as an elected official. The New York Times notes that she faces a political challenge from her previous endorsement of The Green New Deal, which has become unpopular in many areas of the country.

The Union of Concerned Scientists reviews the Republican governing plan called Project 2025, noting that the document refers frequently to “climate fanaticism” and is full of misinformation. For example, it calls for “stopping the war on oil and natural gas,” and for rewriting the regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act to “ban the use of cumulative impacts analysis.” Of course, the cumulative impacts of fossil-fuel burning is what is causing climate change, respiratory health problems and so much of observed environmental degradation. Project 2025 also wants to do away with the Social Cost of Carbon, which “is a widely accepted economic metric that puts a dollar value on the damage caused per ton of carbon, allowing us to set policies that take those costs into account.”

The New York Times examines what might happen to the Environmental Protection Agency if Donald Trump is re-elected. In his first term, radical efforts to rewrite or eliminate environmental regulations were stymied “by the courts, by a lack of experience, even by internal resistance from government employees. But if he retakes the White House in November, Mr. Trump would be in a far better position to dismantle environmental and climate rules, aided by more sympathetic judges and conservative allies who are already mapping out ways to bend federal agencies to the president’s will.” Many EPA employees are wondering if they should just leave now, which is precisely what those promoting Project 2025 would want.

A woman serving time in England for breaking the windows of a JP Morgan Chase office to draw attention to the climate crisis explains in The Guardian why she took the action she did. In a less dramatic (and completely legal) form of resistance, EPA employees included in their recently re-negotiated contract a provision that allows them to report political meddling in their work without fear of “retribution, reprisal, or retaliation.” The Washington Post notes that this is one of several ways that government employees are trying to make it harder for a second Trump administration to interfere with scientific decisions by agencies.

I highly recommend an editorial in Scientific American, The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice. The journal’s editors describe how scientifically-flawed some of the Court’s recent decisions are, and how the justices are arrogating to themselves decision-making power that had traditionally been placed in the hands of technical experts in government agencies. With regards to the overturning of the “Chevron deference,” the journal notes that “the decision enthrones the high court — an unelected majority — as a group of technically incompetent, in some cases corrupt, politicos in robes with power over matters that hinge on vital facts about pollution, medicine, employment and much else.” With regards to the Sackett decision that limited the government’s authority over wetlands, the editors note the lack of a scientific basis to limit Clean Water Act protections only to wetlands that possess a “continuous surface connection” with a larger body of water. This “invented requirement is wholly at odds with how water and wetlands actually work.”

An article in Salon calls for the development of a national climate-action plan. The author makes the case that this is the only way to organize and direct the resources of the nation toward the final goal of transitioning away from fossil fuels. He calls attention to how the nation mobilized to build airplanes, tanks and other machines to win World War II, and he states that “a concerted nationwide industrial effort is needed now to upgrade our electrical grid and produce millions of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, carbon-capture machines and zero-emission vehicles.” He notes that, “had a foreign enemy inflicted the kind of damage caused by floods, or the firestorms that swept California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the U.S. would have immediately mobilized for war.”

The Straits Times reports that, according to a new analysis, “China generated 53 per cent of its electricity from coal in May, a record low, while a record high of 44 per cent came from non-fossil fuel sources.” One analyst notes that “if current rapid wind and solar deployment continues, then China’s CO2 output is likely to continue falling, making 2023 the peak year for the country’s emissions.” The New York Times notes that, in 2023, China installed more solar panels than the United States has installed in its entire history. And, unlike the U.S., most of these solar installations were connected to its electricity grid. Analysts think that if China’s greenhouse-gas emissions decline or stop growing, the world will follow suit. “Almost two-thirds of big wind and solar plants under construction globally are in China.”

In another example of how climate change is stressing existing infrastructure, The New York Times describes the problems facing Amtrak under our new climate. An “analysis of Amtrak data found that the rail service’s passengers have faced record delays in recent years caused by inclement weather such as heat waves, storms, floods, high winds, low temperatures, tornadoes, lightning and wildfires… The biggest contributor has been intensifying heat waves. About 30 percent of trains that arrived late in the 2023 fiscal year were delayed for heat reasons.” Heat can generate deformities in steel track, or knock out power to the trains. Other factors that are increasingly delaying trains include high tides and wildfires.

In a clean-energy milestone, The Washington Post reports that Southern California Edison has signed an agreement to buy over 300 MW of power from geothermal start-up Fervo. This company is applying fracking technology to create underground structures in hot rock where water can be pumped in and recovered as steam to drive a turbine. This so-called “enhanced geothermal,” which unlike conventional geothermal does not require a natural steam formation like a geyser, has enormous potential to provide consistent carbon-free power to the grid from almost anywhere.

To read a story of the energy transition in action, Inside Climate News visits Painesville, OH, where an old coal plant is being shut down and replaced by a solar array with a battery storage system. The array will occupy a “brownfield” site where a chemical manufacturing facility once stood, and will include land rehabilitation and a new bike path that will be a key regional connection along the Lake Erie shore.

Newsweek presents a fascinating visualization from NASA of U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions.

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