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What’s the Future of This Car Feature That ‘Everyone Hates’?

For the last decade, car companies have received credits as an incentive to provide start-stop technology, which shuts off a stopped car’s engine, to reduce emissions. The new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, says “everyone hates” the feature and has vowed to eliminate the credit. Ben Blatt, who writes about regulatory conundrums, looks at the history and the future of the credit.

By Ben Blatt, Gabriel Blanco, Karen Hanley and David Jouppi

As sea levels rise, Australia said it would offer a special, first-of-its-kind “climate visa” to citizens of Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation of atolls and sandbars where waters are eating away at the land.

The visa lottery opened last week, and already nearly half of Tuvalu’s population has applied.

By any measure, Tuvalu is one of the smallest countries in the world. It’s home to just 10,000 or so people scattered across nine small coral islands that add up to less than 10 square miles.

It has been losing land to rising seas and further losses could make it one of the first countries to become uninhabitable because of climate change.

Seawater is increasingly seeping into the country’s few drinking-water wells. Within a century, some scientists predict, the twice-daily high tide alone will inundate more than 90 percent of the country’s capital, the island of Funafuti, as well as Tuvalu’s only airport.

AI can predict the weather more accurately than can standard tools, and it can do so from a desktop computer. Plus: the world’s first climate-change visa is agreed.

Hello Nature readers,

Welcome to the Nature Briefing: Anthropocene, a weekly round-up of news and features about the human impact on Earth, and how Earth is responding to that impact. Sign up here.

The United States and China together account for 38% of the world’s emissions. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty)

The world’s two largest polluters, the United States and China, have signed a pact to address global warming jointly, by increasing their renewable-energy capacity enough to potentially replace fossil fuels. China also said that it would set reduction targets for all greenhouse-gas emissions — an improvement on its current goals, which cover only carbon dioxide. The agreement signals a shared willingness to address the issue, but only time will tell how and when the countries will act. “This sends a powerful message of cooperation on the existential challenge of our time,” says Manish Bapna, president of an environmental advocacy group. “What’s important now is that both countries make good on today’s pledge.”

The New York Times | 5 min read

The world’s top greenhouse-gas-producing countries plan to increase their emissions enough to surpass the 1.5 °C warming limit, despite having made net-zero pledges. The peer-reviewed research report analyzed governments’ emissions plans from 19 of the 20 biggest emitters. Governments project that they will burn 460% more coal than 1.5 °C warming would allow. Oil production will exceed the limit by 30%, and gas by 80%. With green-energy technology advancing, there is a risk that these nations will waste millions on resources that will soon be unnecessary.

Inside Climate News | 7 min read

Reference: United Nations Environment Programme Production Gap report

The first ever climate-change visa will allow citizens of the Pacific island Tuvalu to move to Australia so that they can avoid the worst impacts of global warming. Tuvalu, which is made up of a series of low-lying islands and atolls, is home to 11,000 people. The treaty allows 280 individuals to apply for the visa every year. Australia will provide US$220 million for climate infrastructure in the region. Kausea Natano, Tuvalu’s Prime Minister, called the treaty “a beacon of hope, signifying not just a milestone, but a giant leap forward in our joint mission to ensure regional stability, sustainability and prosperity.”

Financial Times | 5 min read

Artificial intelligence (AI) can predict the weather more accurately than can standard tools, and it can do so from a desktop computer. GraphCast — developed by Google’s AI company, DeepMind — can run through past and current weather data 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than conventional models. The technology is also proving useful in predicting the paths of severe weather events, such as tropical cyclones.

Nature | 5 min read

Features & opinion

Oil companies that are likely to attend the United Nations annual climate conference, COP28, in Dubai at the end of the month are making little to no contributions toward the green-energy transition, according to an Associated Press analysis of reports from 36 such firms. Most of them have few to no investments in solar or wind energy, and many are putting billions into extraction and oil refining. Although most companies are making some effort to reduce emissions in their operations, they are not addressing the biggest share of their emissions, and the hardest ones to solve: those that result when customers use their products to heat homes, power cars and fly planes. Some oil companies emit as much as entire nations. At least six of them each emit more than 38 small island nations combined.

Associated Press | 7 min read

The United States is looking to small nuclear reactors to accelerate its green-energy transition and meet its goal of reaching net zero by 2050. Small reactors provide a simpler and cheaper alternative to the mega plants of the past. But there are barriers. The small-reactor market is full of innovative designs. Some will, in theory, not be able to melt down; others might be able to be manufactured in factories and assembled on site. But the diversity of designs means that safety approval processes will be slow. “Everyone agrees that reactors need to be safe,” said Adam Stein, director of nuclear innovation at a pro-nuclear-research organization. “But it’s also possible for a regulator to be too conservative and too risk-averse.” Critics are particularly worried about the fact that companies lack plans for how to deal with nuclear waste — but other observers see no future without them.

The New York Times | 9 min read

China’s distant-water fishing operation is the largest in the world, catching more than 2 billion kilograms of seafood each year — one-fifth of international trade. For this powerful interactive feature, reporters threw messages in bottles to captive ship workers, tracked clandestine fishing operations off the shores of South America and followed private investigators through China to reveal the intrinsic relationship between overfishing and human-rights abuses. This investigation tracks the seafood all the way back to US supermarket shelves, dinner tables and university cafeterias.

The New Yorker | 38 min read

Infographic of the week

Climate change is taking a severe toll on the United States, says the fifth US National Climate Assessment. From 2018 to 2022, the country experienced 89 major climate disasters — equivalent to one every three weeks. Until the world stops pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the effects of climate change will continue to increase. However, the authors emphasize the idea that every fraction of a degree of warming matters, which means that every action taken to reduce emissions will lower the risks and impacts of climate change going forward. (Nature | 6 min read). (USGCRP/NOAA/NOS/NASA/NOAA NCEI/CISESS NC)

Which brings us to the next method: simply talking to your child to figure out the root cause. Heather Miller, director of the education firm LePage-Miller and author of “Prime Time Parenting,” recommended using the experience of your own childhood to relate. For example, if your child is refusing to brush her teeth, you might say something like, “I’m asking myself why, every time we get ready to go to school in the morning, you don’t want to brush your teeth. And I’m thinking about when I was your age, and sometimes I didn’t want to brush my teeth, either.”

You can’t, of course, fake this, but reaching for some commonality can establish a bond. “When I re-create my feelings and my ambivalence [from childhood],” Miller said, “I find that the child pays attention and takes the whole thing in. And then I don’t talk, and that’s the key: to just shut up, and the kid often will start saying something.”

Just note, this conversation might not seem useful right away. If you ask your kid how they might help make mornings better, “What I find is that their first suggestion is usually unreasonable,” Kennedy-Moore said with a laugh. If they’re acting out because of sibling conflict, the kid’s opening gambit might be, “‘Well, my sister should move out.’ Don’t pick up the gauntlet, just say ‘Well, that’s one idea. What else can we do?’”

Consult your kids when you can.

Kids aren’t so different from the rest of us: They don’t want to be forced to do something without being consulted first. But often our family’s morning routines are something we impose on our children. Instead, choose a calm time to talk through the routine, and outline it together. “Do it in the daylight when the stakes aren’t so high,” said Ablon, who describes how to successfully collaborate with children in his book, “Changeable.” A lazy weekend morning would be a great time for this activity. “And then at nighttime you can remind each other what you came up with. And if that doesn’t work, that’s O.K. — you can tweak it.” Ask about your child’s favorite and least favorite things to do and consider what might make them more fun (or less painful) — for example, letting your child pick his or her own outfits, whether they match or not.

Make a plan. Execute the plan. With audio/visual help if needed.

Once you’ve talked through a routine, involve your child in creating a schedule, in a format suitable for your child’s age and tastes (words for older kids, pictures for little ones). Then post it somewhere that’s visible throughout the morning. Checklists are a popular format, allowing you to mark off boxes or move a clothespin to track the morning’s progress.