US Cities Are Falling Out of Love With the Parking Lot

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

They are gray and rectangular, and if you laid all 2 billion of them together they would cover an area roughly the size Connecticut, about 5,500 square miles. Parking lots have a monotonous ubiquity in US life, but a growing band of cities and states are now refusing to force more on people, arguing that they harm communities and inflame the climate crisis.

For many years, local governments have required the construction of parking lots as part of any development. These measures, along with expansive highways that cut through largely minority neighborhoods and endless suburban sprawl, have cemented cars as the default transportation option for most Americans.

Starting in January, though, California will become the first US state to enact a ban on parking minimums, halting their use in areas with public transport in a

Europe’s Plan to Become the First Climate-Neutral Continent

The European Union is sick of talking about climate change; now it wants to act. The world’s second-largest economy is attempting to become the first climate neutral continent by 2050 while slashing its emissions 55 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. To reach these milestones, the bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, unveiled the Green Deal in 2019—a proposal to radically redesign Europe’s energy, food, and transport systems. “This is Europe’s man on the moon moment,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. 

Crucially, the Green Deal is still a proposal, not a concrete plan. Large parts have yet to be passed into law, and some member states need convincing that the associated costs will be worth it. The Commission has said the plan will require around €1 trillion ($1.05 trillion) in sustainable investments. Even targets already agreed upon aren’t binding. One EU official, Thierry Breton, suggested that

Climate Enforcers Need Hard Evidence. Friederike Otto Has It

But attribution science can do a lot more than tell us how climate change influences the weather. Otto wants to use her attribution reports to hold polluters to account for extreme weather events. “We have started to do a lot of work with lawyers, to basically bridge this knowledge gap between what we can say scientifically and what has so far been used in terms of evidence,” she says. With legal cases underway in Germany and Brazil, attribution science is moving into the courtroom.

OTTO COFOUNDED World Weather Attribution in 2014 with the oceanographer Heidi Cullen and climatologist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. At first, Otto—who has degrees in physics and philosophy—thought that the main role of weather attribution was to untangle the complexity of weather systems to quantify how much climate change was influencing extreme weather. Other scientists had established how to use climate models to attribute weather events to

A Mass Extinction Is Taking Place in the Human Gut

In November 2022, Swiss scientists opened an eagerly awaited package from rural Ethiopia. It was full of shit.

For two months, public health researcher Abdifatah Muhummed had been collecting stool samples from children in a remote, pastoralist community in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, as part of a global effort to catalog and preserve the diversity of human gut bacteria. He split each sample into four tubes, froze them at –80 degrees Celsius, and shipped two of them to Europe. 

Trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes live in the digestive tract. Many of them are beneficial to human health—influencing our metabolism and immune system, for example. But their diversity is under threat from industrialization, urbanization, and environmental changes.

When Muhummed analyzed some of the samples he’d collected—culturing them in petri dishes and adding a dye to make them visible under a microscope—he was astounded to find signs of antibiotic resistance, even

Florida Is Fighting to Feed Starving Manatees This Winter

Few vignettes show how much human activity has affected wildlife more than the scene at Florida Power & Light’s plant in Cape Canaveral. Hundreds of manatees bask in an intake canal on its southeast edge, drawn by the warm waters. These manatees are hungry. Pollution has decimated their usual menu of seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon. Many have starved: 1,101 died in Florida in 2021, and as of December, 2022’s official estimate was nearly 800 deaths. So along the canal, members of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are tossing them lettuce.

“It’s just emblematic of how dire the situation is,” says Rachel Silverstein, the executive director of environmental nonprofit Miami Waterkeeper. “The point where we would need to artificially feed a wild animal because their ecosystem is so destroyed that they cannot find food for themselves is pretty extreme.”

The supplemental feeding program began in early

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