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Sparks

Greta Thunberg: 2023 Nobel Peace Prize Winner?

If there was ever a time for a climate activist to win, it’s now.

Greta Thunberg.
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It’s Nobel Prize week, which means it is once again time to make a complete fool of yourself by trying to read the minds of the inscrutable Swedish Academy. On Monday, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the first of the week’s prize, for physiology or medicine, for their work on the mRNA vaccines that helped curb the COVID-19 pandemic. Which, good for them, but also the Academy spent two years trolling everyone by awarding the researchers who discovered temperature and touch receptors (2021) and the sequencer of the Neanderthal genome (2022) in the immediate aftermath of the biggest health crisis of our lifetimes. In the medicine category.

So that’s about the level of chaos and unpredictability you can expect from the Nobels, which on Friday will announce the most prestigious and closely watched award of them all: the Peace Prize. Bookmakers currently have Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the favorite, although such a pick would be controversial since he is “a war leader,” even if it’s a defensive one, Reuters explains.

I think there is a simpler reason to discount Zelenskyy (and, by that token, jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, another bookie favorite) from the running: The Nobel committee already checked the “Ukraine war” box by giving the Peace Prize to human rights activists in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus last year. Though the Academy potentially could do so again — I cannot emphasize this enough, never discount Nobel chaos — it seems much more likely to me that we could have a climate-related winner this year.

The Swedish Academy has nodded to the climate crisis before, but it’s been a while: The 2007 Peace Prize was jointly awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore. In the years since, there have been no climate-adjacent winners, but 2023 seems a natural time to acknowledge the work of activists. It was Earth’s hottest summer on record, and possibly in 120,000 years. There have been a number of major climate protests, actions, and marches around the world. In the U.S. alone, it has been the worst year on record for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Canada is experiencing its worst fire season ever, and the EU had its largest wildfire ever. Thousands died in Libya’s floods. And the list goes on.

We also know that both Greta Thunberg and Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate are among the 212 individuals and 93 organizations that were submitted as 2023 candidates (Thunberg in particular has been nominated four times, including last year). Jani Silva, an Indigenous rights and environmental activist working in the Amazon, is also a known nominee and could be a clever way for the Academy to give props to the climate cause while not cutting too close to its 2007 message.

One thing’s for sure: It definitely won’t go to the ruckus-causing Extinction Rebellion or Last Generation, which have been behind some of the year’s most high-profile protests.

... Right?

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Sparks

SCOTUS Says Biden’s Power Plant Rules Can Stay — For Now

They may not survive a full challenge, though.

The Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.

The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

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What Happens to a Landfill in a Hurricane?

The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.

A hurricane and a landfill.
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In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?

No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”

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Blue
Sparks

How Climate Change Is Supercharging Hurricane Milton

And made Helene so much worse, according to new reports from Climate Central and World Weather Attribution.

Helene destruction.
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Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.

A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.

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