August 2020 - This Month in Environmental News (Green Energy, Wildfires, and More)

Photo by Chelsea

Here’s the best of what we’ve read over the last month.

“Today, as employees and the public expect more of corporations beyond maximizing profits, it is untenable for a company to espouse a public position while giving money to political figures, even indirectly, who seek to undermine it.”
— A Company Backs a Cause. It Funds a Politician Who Doesn’t. What Gives? (The New York Times)

“A green COVID-19 recovery will create jobs and make the country even more resilient against a volatile future. This might sound like an impossible demand to put on the much-needed recovery, but in recent years most states have already shown that this is economically possible. Since 2005, 41 states and Washington, D.C., have increased their GDPs while reducing their carbon emissions, debunking the myth that economic growth can only happen at the expense of our environment.”
— 41 states have reduced their carbon emissions while growing their economies (Fast Company)

“Investors betting that Joe Biden will win the presidential election are buying up clean-energy stocks, sending the share prices of some companies to all-time highs.”
— Green-Energy Shares Rise Along With Joe Biden’s Polling (The Wall Street Journal)

“Prodded by governments and investors to address climate change concerns about their products, Europe’s oil companies are accelerating their production of cleaner energy — usually electricity, sometimes hydrogen — and promoting natural gas, which they argue can be a cleaner transition fuel from coal and oil to renewables.”
— Europe’s Big Oil Companies Are Turning Electric (The New York Times)

“Big Basin Redwoods State Park has been burned through, prompting a conservation group to write, ‘We are devastated to report that Big Basin, as we have known it, loved it, and cherished it for generations, is gone.’ These trees are between 800 and 1,500 years old. Some of them, older than Muhammad, had stood for a thousand years by the time Europeans first set foot in North America. The youngest of them are older than the Black Death, and precede the invention of the printing press by centuries. Reports yesterday had them ‘scorched but still standing.’”
— California Has Australian Problems Now (Intelligencer)

“For much of human history, the way to make money from a tree was to chop it down. Now, with companies rushing to offset their carbon emissions, there is value in leaving them standing. The good news for trees is that the going rate for intact forests has become competitive with what mills pay for logs in corners of Alaska and Appalachia, the Adirondacks and up toward Acadia. That is spurring landowners to make centurylong conservation deals with fossil-fuel companies, which help the latter comply with regulatory demands to reduce their carbon emissions.”
— Preserving Trees Becomes Big Business, Driven by Emissions Rules (The Wall Street Journal)