🌡️ News
Oxford Names ‘Climate Emergency’ Its 2019 Word of the Year
By Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times (Tweet)
Oxford Dictionaries has named “climate emergency” as its 2019 Word of the Year, choosing it from an all-environmental shortlist that also included “climate action,” “climate denial,” “eco-anxiety,” “extinction” and “flight shame.”
The Word of the Year citation is intended to highlight “a word or expression shown through usage evidence to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have a lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Recent winners have included “toxic,”“youthquake,”“post-truth” and “vape.”
Airline CEOs to climate activists: you’re right, our industry is a big problem
Umair Irfan, Vox (Tweet)
Air France CEO Anne Rigail told the audience of the Fortune Global Forum on Monday that flying shame had taken root in her own household among her husband and children. “It’s very good because I was not at all surprised by this whole thing about ‘flight shaming’,” she said. “I think it’s our biggest challenge.”
Flights account for about 2.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and some travelers, most notably Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who gave up flying, are cutting back on flying to reduce their personal carbon footprint. An October survey of 6,000 travelers in the US, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom found that one in five travelers had reduced the number of flights they took in the past year.
Your state’s air pollution might be coming from another state’s power plants
Miyo McGinn, Grist (Tweet)
Air pollution from power plants caused 16,000 premature deaths in the United States in 2014, according to new research on the sources and destinations of fine particulate matter produced by electricity generation. The state-by-state study had some other troubling findings, too: Exposure to the toxic pollutants varies by race and income, and in many cases fine particulate matter travels beyond the state where it was produced.
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