Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 06.18.2020
Originally published in The Guardian. A prolonged heatwave in Siberia is “undoubtedly alarming”, climate scientists have said. The freak temperatures have been linked to wildfires, a huge oil spill and a plague of tree-eating moths. On a global scale, the Siberian heat is helping push the world towards its hottest year on record in 2020, […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 06.10.2020
By Steve Schaefer, Climate Reality, SF Bay Area Chapter A week ago, Tim Rumage, a planetary ethicist and naturalist and co-founder of This Spaceship Earth, spoke to an attentive online audience from Climate Reality Bay Area Chapter about Climate Change and how we are all complicit in it. He made a point of stressing […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 06.03.2020
On a beach in the Caribbean, a nonprofit called Project Vesta will soon begin testing a radical new way to fight climate change that involves spreading ground-up olivine—a cheap green mineral—over the sand, where ocean waves will break down the mineral, which in turn will pull CO2 from the air. “Our vision is to help reverse […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 05.25.2020
To achieve our climate goals, we’ll need to clean up the power grid while also shifting whole sectors of the economy from dirty fuels to electricity. That two-pronged approach is central to every serious study of decarbonization. A starting place is utilities. To decarbonize, policymakers will need to fundamentally change how utilities make money. Today, […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 05.20.2020
Google is generally considered one of the most environmentally conscious large-scale enterprises in the world today, having remained carbon neutral since 2007. However, following a damning Greenpeace report that details how the three big tech companies (Google, Microsoft and Amazon) aid oil and gas exploration by providing tailored AI and cloud solutions, Google has upped […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 05.14.2020
Despite the abundance of specialty beans available today — familiar coffees include Arabica from Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, and beyond — experts agree the coffee landscape is fundamentally changing. Climate change threatens an existential disruption to the coffee industry with a veritable list of end-times plagues: heat, drought, floods, pests, and disease. As existing coffee breeds struggle […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 04.29.2020
Sweden becomes the third European country to exit coal completely after Belgium closed its last coal power station in 2016, and Austria ended its final coal-fired energy operations earlier this month. The plant at Värtaverket, in Hjorthagen in eastern Stockholm is owned by Stockholm Exergi, a company part owned by the City of Stockholm and which […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 04.22.2020
Today is the 50th annual Earth Day, but a very different one than we’ve ever had, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. So when Mayors Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento and Christopher Cabaldon of West Sacramento issued a draft report of their Commission on Climate Change, they made clear that the crisis is also an opportunity. […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 04.15.2020
Climate change could result in a more abrupt collapse of many animal species than previously thought, starting in the next decade if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, according to a study published this month in Nature. The study predicted that large swaths of ecosystems would falter in waves, creating sudden die-offs that would be catastrophic […]
Bob Leonard - Climate Risk Manager • 03.25.2020
Short-Term Probabilities Now through the end of March is a critical time for the U.S. Currently we are on the trajectory of Italy, the country worst hit by the virus. Given that they are ahead of us with their timeline, it is this week that we will see if the U.S. will continue down […]