Ireland on Thursday moved to pull its public funds out of fossil fuels, a development that marks the most significant advance to date for a divestment campaign pushed by environmentalists worldwide.

The lower house of Parliament passed a bill that requires the country’s sovereign fund, valued at 8.9 billion euros, or about $10.4 billion, to move out of fossil fuels “as soon as practicable.”

From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East to Southern California, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.

Mario Rosales, who farms 365 acres along the Rio Grande, knows the river is in bad shape this year. It has already dried to a dusty ribbon of sand in some parts, and most of the water that does flow is diverted to irrigate crops, including Mr. Rosales’s fields of wheat, oats, alfalfa and New Mexico’s beloved chiles.

CONNECTS THE FUTURE OF THE WEB WITH THE LITTLE-KNOWN STORY OF ITS BIRTH. IN 1989, 33-YEAR-OLD COMPUTER PROGRAMMER TIM BERNERS-LEE INVENTED THE WORLD WIDE WEB AND HIS VISIONARY DECISION TO MAKE IT A FREE AND ACCESSIBLE RESOURCE SPARKED A GLOBAL REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATION.

For five years, opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline and members of the Ponca Indian Tribe have sown native tribal corn in the path of the controversial project as a form of resistance.

Now they’ve planted another potential roadblock.

Last weekend, Art and Helen Tanderup, who farm north of Neligh, Nebraska, deeded the 1.6-acre plot of native corn to the native inhabitants of the land, the Ponca.

UCS visits the EPA’s Midwest Office to investigate how Trump administration policies are hampering the agency and harming Americans’ health.

From the regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency in the tall, modern Ralph Metcalfe Building in downtown Chicago, teams of scientists, investigators, and lawyers enforce the nation’s environmental laws across the EPA’s Region 5: a vast swath of the midwestern United States that includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio as well as the lands of some 35 Native American tribes and the enormous Great Lakes.

If you’re looking for good news on the climate front, don’t look to the Antarctic. Last week’s spate of studies documenting that its melt rates had tripled is precisely the kind of data that underscores the almost impossible urgency of the moment.

And don’t look to Washington DC, where the unlikely survival of the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, continues to prove the political power of the fossil fuel industry. It’s as if he’s on a reality show where the premise is to see how much petty corruption one man can get away with.

Further increasing much needed transparency in the supply chain, a new interactive map shows the connections between international buyers like brands and retailers and their suppliers in China. The Green Supply Chain Map is the brainchild of the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) in China and was announced last week.

A growing number of electric cooperatives and municipal utilities are capturing the economic, grid, and environmental benefits from community-scale solar (CSS) installations as institutional barriers to development are addressed for this emerging technology solution, according to a new report by Rocky Mountain Institute.

Last week, the New Orleans City Council — all Democrats — voted 6-1 to approve a big new gas-fired power plant. Sometime in the coming weeks, in Orange County in upstate New York, another vast new gas power plant is expected to go on line — as soon as it’s hooked up to a new pipeline, one of literally dozens planned across the country. Local opponents — environmentalists, community activists — are fighting hard, but somewhere, almost every day, a new piece of natural gas infrastructure goes up.

For at least 50,000 years, humanity has been on a journey of separation—pulling back from nature and becoming ever more differentiated, individuated, and empowered. In recent decades, we have become so dominant as a species that we are producing Earth-changing trends—global warming, species extinction, unsustainable population, massive famines, waves of migration, and more—that threaten humanity’s future.

They say that a single action cannot change the world. We would like to think that “they” are wrong. Who are we? We are just a group of kids who think that we can do what we were told was impossible - change the world. We’re just your ordinary group of high school kids who believe that living a greener life now means a better life for our future.

More and more these days – and understandably so because of our fast-paced, unpredictable, and threatening times – we are hearing people talk of Mindfulness and Meditation. Sometimes they are used alone in a context and at other times synonymously.

It's a new milestone: Europe got more of its power from solar, wind and biomass than coal last year. But when it comes to investment, the European industry is in decline as China steals the title of renewables pioneer.

For 2017, Europe passed a new landmark in its transition to a renewable energy supply: For the first time, more of its electricity came from the sun, wind and biomass than from coal.

The UK broke 13 renewable energy records in 2017, including some especially notable ones.

The year 2017 has been the greenest ever in how the UK generates its electricity.

Arnold Schwarzenegger says he is going after Big Oil and climate change.

The actor and former governor of California said in a Politico-sponsored podcast at the SXSW festival in Austin that he is in talks with law firms about possibly suing global oil companies “for knowingly killing people all over the world.”

The political fight over global warming has extended to science education in recent years as several states have attempted to weaken or block new teaching standards that included information about climate science. But only in Idaho has the state legislature stripped all mentions of human-caused climate change from statewide science guidelines while leaving the rest of the standards intact.

World’s largest concentrated solar power plant, powered by the Saharan sun, set to help renewables provide almost half the country’s energy by 2020

The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. On the edge of the Sahara desert and the centre of the north African country’s “Ouallywood” film industry it has played host to big-budget location shots in Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, The Living Daylights and even Game of Thrones.

THE U.S. IS GOING FOSSIL FREE
No new coal, oil or gas projects anywhere.
A fast & just transition to 100% renewable energy for all.

Fossil Free is a movement to build a world where everyone can drink safe water, breathe clean air and lead prosperous lives free from the fear of the next climate disaster.

Just after 5:30 a.m. Friday morning, Congress moved to end the blink-and-you-missed-it five-hour government shutdown. The deal sets spending levels for two years, including a massive increase in military spending and a significant boost to domestic programs.

It also includes coveted tax breaks for the energy sector.