The bill would add a refundable 10-cent deposit to the price of beverage containers sold in D.C. stores and create a system for people to return empty bottles and cans.
Global average surface air temperatures were 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial levels during 2024, new data showed, the first time the threshold was broken for an entire calendar year.
The international 1.5°C Paris Agreement target has not yet been missed, as this refers to a decades-long average — but last year’s record brings the world “teetering on the edge” of doing so, an expert at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts warned.
SIGNALS
The threshold is politically important, but also arbitrary
Sources: BBC, The Guardian
Though legally binding, the 1.5°C degree limit is somewhat arbitrary, a climate scientist told the BBC: “It’s not like 1.49C is fine, and 1.51C is the apocalypse — every tenth of a degree matters and climate impacts get progressively worse the more warming we have.” And although the number has become politically and symbolically significant, it’s similarly arbitrary as a metric for measuring when climate change becomes dangerous, since millions of people have already had their lives devastated by climate-related disasters. What matters is not the precise value of the temperature rise but “the simple fact that it is continuing to rise,” the scientist said.
Costs of climate change are already upon us
Sources: Phys.org, Climate Council, International Chamber of Commerce, World Economic Forum
2024 was a year of climate superlatives: “The broken records in the ocean have become a broken record,” the lead scientist of a recent study on ocean warming remarked. The last 12 months saw “all corners of the globe” endure extreme weather with devastating consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods, from deadly cyclones in Bangladesh to wildfires in Canada, Climate Council wrote. A report by the International Chamber of Commerce found that such events have cost the global economy more than $2 trillion over the past decade, while the World Economic Forum has estimated the global cost of climate change will be between $1.7 trillion and $3.5 trillion a year by the middle of the century.
Effects of LA fires to be felt ‘for years, if not decades’
Sources: BBC, Heatmap, The New York Times
Climate change is a driving force of the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles, the BBC reported. The economic effects of the emergency will be felt “for years, if not decades,” long after the fires have subsided, Heatmap noted, from the long-term health risks of smoke inhalation to the high level of insured losses leading insurers to shed policies. Southern California’s already crippling housing crisis is likely to worsen, The New York Times wrote: The displacement, plus damage to housing stock, means “a positive shock in demand, and a negative shock in supply,” an economist said, driving rental prices up around LA and possibly leading to an increase in homelessness.
Washington Post subscribers quit the paper en masse following owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to withhold its endorsement of outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris. But the Post’s audience problems extend beyond angry former subscribers.
Over the last four years, web traffic has cratered. According to internal data shared with Semafor in recent weeks, the Post’s regular daily traffic last year sunk to less than a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021. That month, the Post briefly reached a high of around 22.5 million daily active users following the attack. But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users.
Last year, Washington City Paper noted that the Post had stopped publicly disclosing its traffic numbers in press releases, after a 60% decline in monthly traffic. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Post’s revenue fell from $190 million in 2023 to $174 million last year.
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.
There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
And it’s such a shame too, cause this was probably the most impotrant scientific effort in human history, it bought us the time to do everything else we do, to go from just trying to get enough calories every day to everything we do now, it game people the freedom to do other things with their lives, human society would not have existed as it is today without this
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