Greenhouse Gas Emissions In The United States Increased In 2025, Dropped In China,

It looks like this guy will ensure coal and oil use 
continue to spew more and more greenhouse gas
emissions into the atmosphere, but at least it looks
like China and India are trying 
to reign in fossil fuel use. 

 Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States went up by 2.4% in 2025, reversing two previous years of decreases, according to a BBC report.  

Part of the reason for the increase was just bad weather luck. January, 2025 was colder than most other recent winters. Homes burned more gas for heating than usual, while coal use rose by 13% to meet rising electricity demands. 

Data centers driven by soaring use of AI, and a raging cryptocurrency fad or industry (depending upon how how you look at it) were a big driver of the greenhouse gas emissions. 

We rightly blame Donald Trump for a bunch of new or looming environmental ills because of his militantly pro oil and coal stance. 

However the damage from Trump was probably minimal in 2025.  It'll almost surely increase starting this year. 

At least China and India seem to be counteracting the U.S. and preventing an enormous boom in emissions. Electricity generated by coal declined in India by 3%. China's coal generation was down 1.6 percent from the previous year. It's the first time since 1973 that coal-based electricity generation fell simultaneously in both countries.

 "The fall in 2025 is a sign of things to come, as both countries added a record amount of new clean-power generation last year, which was more than sufficient to meet rising demand," according to Carbon Brief, which did the analysis on India and China's greenhouse gas emissions. 

It's possible both countries are reaching a historic peak in coal use. Climatologists and other scientists are hoping from now, coal use in China and India continue to decline. 

China managed to reduce coal consumption despite electricity demand growing by 5 percent over the year. India's reduction in coal use might have been partly weather related. The extreme heat waves India has experienced in recent years were not quite as severe in 2025. 

Bottom line: We have a mixed future in further diminishing the global dependence on coal and oil. But the United States, once in a leader in the battle against climate change, has turned into the world's worst enemy. 

That seems to be a trend lately.  

New York Takes Vermont's Lead, Establishes Climate "Superfund" Law

Following Vermont's lead from last year, New York
Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation creating a
"climate superfund" to force fossil fuel polluters
 to help pay for climate related damages in the state.

 Vermont lawmakers made waves last spring when the state adopted a law that requires fossil fuel companies and other big polluters to pay for climate related damage all those emissions have and will cause the state. 

The law faces an uncertain future because, as you might imagine the fossil fuel companies are not happy with this idea and will sue. 

But other states have taken a keen interest in Vermont's law, and it's starting to snowball. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law a bill similar to Vermont's earlier this month. 

Per the Washington Post: 

"The bill...... would allow the state to fine the biggest greenhouse gas emitters a total of $75 billion, to be paid over 25 years into a fund based on their contributions to overall emissions between 2000 and 2018.

That money would be used to pay for the damage already done to homes, roads and bridges - and help cover the cost of preparing for increasingly extreme weather in the years come."

Fossil fuel lobbyists reacted to the New York legislation pretty much the same way they did when Vermont passed their own climate superfund law.  WaPo again:

"New York's law is almost certain to face legal challenges. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry's powerful lobbying group, sent state lawmakers a memo in 2023 saying the proposed bill was unconstitutional. A could would probably strike it down, the group did, because it was preempted by federal law and sought to hold companies responsible for the actions of society at large."

Plus, there's the ever-present problem of the incoming Trump administration. Sigh. 

I think this type of law has merit, but buckle up for a long, long legal fight over this. 

 

California, Maryland and Massachusetts have been considering similar laws, but so far no climate superfund bill has made it to the governors desk in any of those states. 

 

 

Arctic Now Becoming Emitter Of Carbon Dioxide, That Dreaded Greenhouse Gas

In this photo from U.S. Bureau of Land Management,
permafrost, which has been increasingly thawing in
the Arctic, erodes into the Beaufort Sea.

Once upon a time, the Arctic used to be the place where carbon dioxide went to die.  

At least it seemed that way. It would get stored in the permafrost, seemingly locked in that icy prison never to bother us in the atmosphere again. never to bother us in the atmosphere again. 

Back in the day, that didn't matter much anyway.  There wasn't so much carbon dioxide in the air, so no real climate change. At least that's the way it was a century or more ago.

Now, just when we don't need more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Arctic is starting to belch it out, according to new information from NOAA. 

 The world has warmed up enough through climate change to alter the ecosystems of the Arctic, and that is prompting that stored carbon in the permafrost to come out of hiding to join the world's hot and getting hotter party. 

The news comes the 2024 Arctic Report Card, researched and written by 97 scientists from 11 countries.

NOAA says

"After storing carbon dioxide in frozen soil for millennia, the Arctic tundra is being transformed by frequent wildfires into an overall source of carbon to the atmosphere, which is already absorbing record levels of heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution."

Wildfires in the areas of North America with permafrost have increased in the past couple decades. The report says that since 2003, emissions from polar wildfires averaged 207 million tons of carbon each year. That's more than the annual carbon emissions from nations like Argentina and Austria. 

Arctic wildfires are only a relatively small piece of the problem.  The permafrost is melting more and more, releasing carbon into the air instead of storing it. That's why, for the first time, the Arctic is making the climate change problem worse, not better.

I found a good explanation of this at NPR:

"Twila Moon, lead editor of the Arctic Report Card and  scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, likened permafrost to chicken in the freezer: As long as it stays frozen, microbes stay away.

'Once you have that chicken out of your freezer, it's thawing and all those microbes are getting to work, breaking down the chicken, making it rot,' she said. 'The permafrost is really doing the same thing.'"

There was the tiniest glimmer of good news from Greenland, but it was definitely nothing to get the Champagne and confetti out to party. 

The Greenland Ice sheet mass loss was the lowest since 2013, mostly because it snowed more than usual up there. Still, the ice shoot lost somewhere in the broad range of 22 and 77 billion tons of ice last year. 

That was enough to raise the global sea levels by 0.15 millimeters. Which is too small for anybody to notice. But if you add in all the other sources of sea level rise, and compound them year after year, it starts to make a big difference. 

This report demonstrates that the Arctic has changed much in just a few decades. There's no way it's going to stay as it is  now, either. It's going to get worse.

The Arctic is the fastest warming region of the world.  There's no signs, and no reasons for that warming to slow down as fossil fuel emissions keep cranking.  Since the Arctic is also adding those emissions, if anything, the pace at which the Arctic deteriorates will also increase.  

Report: Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases Continue To Zoom Upward

All kinds of greenhouse gases are continuing to increase,
so the pace of global warming shows no sign of slowing. 

 If you think the world is starting to find success at reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we belch into the atmosphere, think again. 

Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - three of the main greenhouse gases, rose even faster than in 2022, according to the World Meteorological Organization

 As the Washington Post reports: 

 Concentrations of carbon dioxide - the most important driver of global warming - are now growing faster than at any time since our species evolved, according to the World Meteorological Organizations' annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. The increase can be traced back to stubbornly high rates of fossil fuel consumption, the report said, as well as ecosystems that are becoming more likely to produce emissions and potentially less capable of absorbing excess carbon."

The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year was a little over 420 parts per million, a level Earth hasn't experienced since the Pliocene Epoch, which was more than three million years ago. You missed that era because human beings didn't exist yet. But at that time, scientists estimate the world was about five degrees warmer than it is now and sea levels were 30 to 60 feet higher than they are now. 

Most of the extra carbon dioxide that accumulated in the atmosphere last year is from us burning coal, oil and gas, like we have since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Carbon dioxide started to increase with that Industrial Revolution and has accelerated since. 

But there might be something called a positive feedback loop increasingly adding to the equation. That's when a trend - climate change in this instance - gets reinforced and boosted by that very same phenomenon. 

Wildfires boosted by climate change also added extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The amount of this gas increased by 2.3 parts per million in 2023 the twelfth year in a row that CO2 went up by more than two parts per million.

This feedback loop also involved other greenhouse gases as well 

The WMO said atmospheric levels of carbon monoxide and methane both went up sharply last year. 

The spike in carbon monoxide was the largest yet observed. Most of that comes from wildfires, as burning trees release this chemical into the air. Global carbon emissions from forest fires were 16 percent above average during the 2023-24 fire season. 

A large share of that probably came from Canada, which had by far its worst fire season on record in 2023 with 37 million acres burned. 

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane emissions are also increasing, too.

Those surging methane levels are partly due to bacteria living in landfills and from cows.  A lot of methane comes from wetlands.  It turns out this is a feedback loop. Methane helps warm the atmosphere. Then, a toastier atmosphere allows wetland to increase their methane emissions.

And on and on it goes. 

Thawing Arctic permafrost might well be adding extra methane to the atmosphere. Another example of global warming creating even more global warming. 

The only vague bright spot regarding methane is that 2023 emissions were a wee bit smaller than 2022.

The environment also takes up carbon, removing it from the atmosphere, so that's a good thing. However, there's bad news on this one, too. Per the Washington Post:

"Meanwhile the net amount of carbon taken up by ecosystems last year was about 28 percent lower than in 2021 and 2022, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Global Monitoring Laboratory. This decline may be in part because of 2023's record high temperatures, which are known to stress plants and cut into ecosystems' ability to serve as a carbon sink."

Since 2024 is virtually guaranteed to be even hotter than 2023, this trend will likely continue.  

Given the political climate, I don't see any slowing of greenhouse emissions anytime soon. So the world will keep getting hotter and hotter. 

Environmental Group Sues State Of Vermont Over Greenhouse Emissions

The Conservation Law Foundation is suing Vermont
over its greenhouse emissions targets.

 An issue as wide ranging and ever present as climate change inevitably leads to one staple of American life: The lawsuit.  

Such as it is in Green Mountain State, where last week the environmental group Conservation Law Foundation last week sued Vermont because they said the state isn't doing enough to reduce carbon emissions. 

According to Seven Days: 

"The Conservation Law Foundation accuses the Agency of Natural Resources of not taking the steps necessary to ensure that Vermont is on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions as required under the state's 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act."

Basically, the CLF doesn't really believe Vermont Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore, who says the state is likely to meet its 2025 emissions target, which is 26 percent below the 2005 level.

Seven Days goes on to explain:

"The environmental group argues that this claim is based on modeling that is 'technically and mathematically insufficient.' Honest modeling 'shows that Vermont is not, and by a significant margin, on track to achieve the 2025 Reduction Requirement, the group claimed it its sued, filed on Tuesday in Washington County Superior Court."

CLF announced its intent to sue back in July, but the state didn't participate in settlement discussions. 

As is always the case when there's lawsuits, the state's response was terse. "We received notice of CLF's lawsuit and will review it. We intend to defend the Agency of Natural Resources," said Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark in a statement released shortly after the suit was announced.

The lawsuit by CLF says that Vermont should increase rules and incentives for people to install heat pumps and buy electric vehicles.

As it stands now, Vermont does have rules that require an increasing share of new cars and light trucks sold in Vermont need to be electric. By 2035 all new vehicles of this type must be EVs. 

Even Moore agrees that Vermont won't hit its 2030 targets for emissions reductions, with the regulations now in place. One tricky thing:  A LOT of Vermont homes are heated by fuel oil or wood, both of which of course release greenhouse gases. So how do you fix that?

That topic looks like it will come up in the next Vermont legislative session, which starts in January. 

Vermont - and pretty much everybody - should probably get used to climate related lawsuits, as I imagine they will be a dime a dozen. If they aren't already.

The big Vermont lawsuits will probably come as a result of a new law enacted this past spring. It's a climate "superfund" law. The first in the nation law would make fossil fuel and other industries pay for climate-related disasters that are costing the state Big Bucks.

The fossil fuel industry and others are guaranteed to sue to try and stop the law, lest other states follow suit. (Other states ARE looking at similar legislation).

If your career goal is to be an environmental lawyer, you're going to have a busy life.  

Working From Home Helps Battle Climate Change

Working from home instead of commuting to work
can help combat climate change, but
you have to do it right. 

 Your boss might not like you working from home. But you might, since you don't have to hassle with the annoying commute every day.  

If you want to press your case to work remotely instead in the office, try this really good argument, courtesy of the Washington Post: 

"Fully remote workers could produce less than half the climate-warming emissions of people who spend their days in offices according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Switching from working onsite to working from home full time could reduce a person's emissions by 50 percent. Hybrid schedules, where people work from home two to four days a week can cut emissions buy 11 to 29 percent. 

It does seem like a large proportion of employers are gravitating toward the hybrid model, but that won't  reduce fossil fuel consumption as much as working exclusively from home could. 

Many employers have really gravitated to a hybrid model, but that might have that much effect in battling climate change.

The climate benefits of working from home only work if you do it right. Which can get complicated. 

As Scientific American reports, the analysis regarding the environmental effects of working at home looked at five factors: Commuting, non-commute travel, information technology devices and residential energy use. 

If at least part of  your motivation for working at home is to fight climate change, you still have to be smart about it. Sure, eliminating your commute will prevent fossil fuel emissions. But the analysis indicates some people who work from home end up taking several short car trips during the work day, which cancels out the positive effects of avoiding a commute.  

Working from  home might also tempt you to crank up the air conditioning in your home on hot summer days, or blasting the heat in the winter. That also offsets the climate change fighting power of working at your home office instead of commuting in to the cubicle farm.

(OK, as I write this from home, I just now realized an unnecessary light was on.  This story inspired a tiny, tiny bit of good: I just shut off the light. Perfectly bright enough in here).

If your boss insists on making you come to the office, you can greatly offset your carbon footprint by taking public transportation or riding your bike.  In many places, including here in Vermont, public transportation is woefully inadequate in getting people to and from their jobs with a decent level of efficiency.  

 

  

Climate "Tipping Points" Loom To Make World Dangerous, Depress You. Sorry.

A study released this month suggests irreversible climate
change "tipping points' are looming even if the world
warms just a little bit more. 

 The news most of this year, especially over the summer, would naturally make us even more nervous about the ongoing climate crisis. 

Heat wave after heat wave were punctuated by repeated unprecedented floods from Kentucky to Italy to Pakistan. 

 Earlier this month, scientists piled on with a new study on climate tipping points. 

A tipping point is when a threshold is reached in which something big will happen. Once you get to the tipping point, a substantial change is inevitable. Carbonbrief.org, I think, explains tipping points with this little relatable example:

"Imagine a child pushing themselves from the top of a playground slide. There is a point beyond which it is too late for the child to stop themselves from sliding down. Pass the threshold and the child continues inevitably towards a different state - at the bottom of the slide rather than the top."

So, the scientists in the new study tell us we're very close to five tipping points that would make the march of climate change much worse. 

Climate tipping points create changes that do happen much slower than the kid on the playground slide. But they're fast enough go have big implications for us, or your children or grandchildren. 

As Science.org explains, in the dry language that scientists use that still scare the bejeezus out of us.:

"Climate tipping points are conditions beyond which changes in part of the climate system become self-perpetuating. These changes may lead to abrupt, irreversible and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity."

According to the Paris climate agreement, we need to limit the world to a 1.5 degree Celsius or less of global warming. We're already close, as temperatures since the Industrial Age began have gone up by 1.1 degrees. 

As this new scientific report suggests, going past that 1.5 degrees would bring us to those nasty tipping points. 

Looking at this report, let's start with the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Climate change is already causing a lot of melt from those ice sheets. The melt water flows into the oceans, which makes sea levels rise and increasing coastal flooding across the globe. 

You'd think if we rein in global warming, we can reduce the amount of melt from these ice sheets and things would be relatively copacetic.

But, as the study suggests, if we go past a certain point. around 1.5  to 2 degrees Celsius of warming, we'd reach a point where nothing can stop the ice sheet from melting, even if we entirely shut off global carbon emissions. 

That could lead to the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets entirely melting. The bad news is that would raise sea levels worldwide by 30 feet. The relatively good news is it would take 500 years or so for that to fully happen. But even a foot of sea level rise in a more short term interim is a big issue.

Many of the world's most populated areas are within a foot of sea level. Or just a few feet above sea level, meaning they're prone to flooding during storms if sea level rises.  

There's other weird things that can happen if we reach tipping points. A key ocean current in the North Atlantic would stop.  The currents have pretty much always kept Europe fairly warm in the winter, given that much of the region is so far north. 

For instance, Paris is just below 49 latitude north. For comparison's sake, the Vermont/Quebec border is at 45 degrees latitude. So Paris is north of Vermont. 

But those ocean currents keep Paris' normal January high temperatures in the mid-40s, compared to the upper 20s in Vermont.  If those warming ocean currents or slow down significantly, Europe could become much colder in the winter despite the overall global warming trend. I think summers would continue to warm in Europe, so the end result would be a much more extreme climate.

Which would put Europe's climate somewhat closer to that of Siberia, where it can be in the 40s and 50s below zero or even colder in the winter, but in the 90s or even near 100 in the summer.  

You can imagine the kinds of disruptions this type of European climate change would cause.

By the way, if we go beyond these tipping points by increasing global temperatures further, we get into even more tipping points. Above two degrees Celsius, we could lose the Amazon rain forest, which helps regulate the global temperature.

Worse, permafrost in the Arctic would really, really melt, releasing more carbon and methane into the atmosphere, which would help accelerate climate change despite humans' attempts to cut back on emissions.

It's not like it's now too late, that we shouldn't even try to reduce emissions. It's not too late, but we ought to act fast. The quicker carbon emissions decline, the better the world will be for many generations to come. 

The Covid Pandemic Is Not Over, But The (Brief) Reduction In Carbon Emissions Sure Is

Carbon emissions are almost back up to where they were
before the pandemic. There was a sharp drop in emissions 
during pandemic lockdowns in 2020, but they weren't 
as extensive as some scientists had anticipated.

 The global Covid-19 pandemic rages on, and we all know it has produced absolutely no good news.

If you were looking for any silver lining with the pandemic, it was that lockdowns meant less carbon emissions, meaning contributions to climate change also declined.  

Carbon emissions dipped by 5.4 percent in 2020.  Not much, but it was a start. And, to state the obvious, the dip in carbon emissions surely wasn't worth the 5.3 million and counting global deaths from Covid 

The dip in emissions was short-lived.  Certainly much shorter than the actual pandemic  This year, we're almost back to pre-pandemic levels. 

According to the journal Nature: 

"After rising steadily for decades, global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4% or 2.3 billion tons in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic squelched economic and social activities worldwide, according to new data on daily fossil fuel emissions. The decline is significant - roughly double Japan's yearly emissions - but smaller than many climate researchers expected given the scale of the pandemic, and is not expected to last once the virus is brought under control."

Estimates from Stanford-led researchers indicate this year's carbon emissions will have risen by 4.9 percent, wiping out most of the emission cuts from 2020.

Nature notes that the United Nations estimates the world needs to cut carbon emissions by 7.6 percent per year over the next 10 years to prevent the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Since we couldn't cut emissions by that much in a year when the world pretty much shut down for part of it means we really have our work cut out for us. 

It's plain that government policy, however well intentioned in some nations, is not enough to stem the tide of rising emissions.

Even if the rate of emissions slows in the coming years, that might not be enough. Think of it this way. If you leave the water running out of the faucet in the bathtub with the drain closed it will overflow.  If you turn the water down but not off, the bathtub will still eventually overflow.

That's kind of the predicament we're in now.