Climate Change & Environment
Latest stories
Swedish cyclist pedals to Egypt to raise climate awareness

She has pedaled thousands of miles from Sweden to Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to deliver a simple message: Stop climate change.

The trip took 72-year-old activist Dorothee Hildebrandt and her pink e-bike — which she fondly calls Miss Piggy, after the temperamental character from The Muppet Show — more than four months. She crisscrossed Europe and the Middle East until she arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh, at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula.

W140 Full Story
Israel rushes to protect marine life as Mediterranean warms

Between the cliffs and crags of Israel's submerged prehistoric coastline, a Mediterranean ecosystem is surging back to life.

Giant groupers flourish among the rocks, a psychedelic purple nudibranch sea slug clings to an outcrop, and a pair of rays skate along the undisturbed sandy bottom.

W140 Full Story
In Egypt, host of COP27, a small step toward green energy

From a distance, the endless landscape of solar panels stretching toward the horizon can easily be mistaken for crops nearing harvest. But here in the desert in southern Egypt, workers have been cultivating another precious commodity: electricity.

After the sun strikes the photovoltaic solar panels, a thermal charge generates electricity that runs to four government-owned power stations distributing power across Egypt's national grid.

W140 Full Story
Biden off to climate talks, 1st leg of round-the-world trip

U.S. President Joe Biden has left Washington for a global climate meeting with a giant domestic investment in tow — and likely to face questions about how far the U.S. will go to pull other large greenhouse gas emitters along.

His attendance Friday at the U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, is the first stop on an around-the-world trip that will also take him to a meeting of Southeast Asian leaders in Cambodia and a Group of 20 summit meeting for leaders of the world's largest economies in Bali, Indonesia.

W140 Full Story
Nicole weakens to tropical storm over east-central Florida

Shortly after Hurricane Nicole made landfall early Thursday along the east coast of Florida, it was downgraded to a tropical storm but it was still battering a large area of the storm-weary state with strong winds, damaging storm surge and heavy rain.

The rare November hurricane prompted officials to shut down airports and theme parks and order evacuations in areas that included former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club.

W140 Full Story
Fed up young climate activists: 'Adults aren't listening'

The climate change generation is saying officials are talking too much, listening too little and acting even less. And they are fed up.

"Instead of talking about how to solve the climate crisis, they negotiate about how to continue polluting," said Mitzy Violeta, a 23-year old indigenous activist from Mexico. "Youth movements are realizing the solution isn't going to be in international gatherings," like the one taking place in Egypt.

W140 Full Story
USAID head announces 22 new solar-powered projects in Lebanon

Samantha Power, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), on Wednesday announced $8.5 million in funding for Lebanon that will support 22 new solar-powered water pumping projects in Lebanon. These projects, which will be completed over the next two years, will serve more than 150 towns and villages and benefit over half a million Lebanese citizens and refugees by providing reliable access to water and decreasing operating costs and dependence on fuel to those who desperately need it.

"USAID has supported 41 solar energy projects to date benefiting 460,000 residents in 70 Lebanese towns and villages. In addition to providing a much-needed source of electricity, solar-powered water pumping projects also refurbish the stations’ chlorination equipment. Pumping chlorinated water to towns is particularly critical as the country addresses an unprecedented cholera outbreak," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

W140 Full Story
Tropical Storm Nicole bears down on the Bahamas, Florida

Many people evacuated from vulnerable locations in the northwestern Bahamas as Tropical Storm Nicole approached Wednesday and residents of Florida braced for the storm, which could strengthen to a hurricane.

Nicole was expected to be the first storm to make landfall in the Bahamas since Hurricane Dorian, a devastating Category 5 storm that hit the archipelago in 2019, before hitting storm-weary Florida on Wednesday night and moving into Georgia on Thursday.

W140 Full Story
US to climate summit: American big steps won't be repealed

U.S. President Joe Biden is coming to international climate talks in Egypt this week with a message that historic American action to fight climate change won't shift into reverse, as happened twice before when Democrats lost power.

Current and former Biden top climate officials said the vast majority of the summer's incentive-laden $375 billion climate-and-health spending package — by far the biggest law passed by Congress to fight global warming — was crafted in such a way that will make it hard and unpalatable for future Republican Congresses or presidents to reverse it.

W140 Full Story
UAE, Egypt ink major wind energy deal on COP27 sidelines

The United Arab Emirates and Egypt agreed Tuesday to develop one of the world's largest wind farms in a deal struck on the sidelines of the UN's COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. 

W140 Full Story