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Researchers in the BOTTLE Consortium, including from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of Portsmouth, have identified using enzymes as a more sustainable approach for recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic in single-use beverage bottles, clothing, and food packaging that are becoming increasingly relevant in addressing the environmental challenge of plastic pollution. An analysis shows enzyme-recycled PET has potential improvement over conventional, fossil-based methods of PET production across a broad spectrum of energy, carbon, and socioeconomic impacts.

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This report, prepared by IEA Bioenergy Task 39, provides an extensive analysis of the current and potential technologies for production of biomass based sustainable aviation fuels (Biojet/SAF).

Sustainable Aviation Fuels will have to play a major role if the aviation sector is to significantly reduce its carbon footprint. However, to date, commercialization has been slow and current policies have proved inadequate to accelerate commercialization and widespread deployment of the various technologies described in the report.

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Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis.

The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming.

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In 2021, Earth reached a bleak milestone: The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere hit 150% of its value in preindustrial times, according to the U.K. Met Office. To prevent the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to decrease net emissions of carbon dioxide to zero by 2050.

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An international team of weather and climate experts known as the “World Weather Attribution” project has analyzed the late June heatwave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and come to a preliminary conclusion that the event was a roughly 1-in-1,000-year event in today’s climate. (The results are preliminary because, while the methods the experts used have been applied to many other published studies like this, this specific analysis has not yet been formally reviewed by other experts.) If they are correct, it would have been at least 150 times rarer before global warming. Theoretically, a 1-in-150,000-year event—so rare, they concluded, that it’s fair to say it would have been “virtually impossible” in pre-industrial times. Taken at face value, it would also mean that events like that aren’t about to become common any time soon.

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The Little Rocky Mountains in Montana form an island range in a sea of prairie. As a result of their isolation, they are home to plant and wildlife species that are not found anywhere nearby, leaving them especially vulnerable to climate change impacts. In the shadow of the Little Rockies, the Aaniiih and Nakoda peoples of the Fort Belknap Indian Community are taking a bold stand to protect this mountain ecosystem to help preserve their traditional ways of life. The Center is supporting this effort by assisting them in restoring forest health and planning for a rapidly changing climate.

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“A picture is worth a thousand words,” so the saying goes. Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Southwest Watershed Research Center in Tucson, AZ, took that saying to heart when they embarked on a project a decade ago to photograph the effectiveness of an ancient erosion-control technique.

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Greenhouse gases from human activities are the most significant driver of observed climate change since the mid-20th century.1 The indicators in this chapter characterize emissions of the major greenhouse gases resulting from human activities, the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere, and how emissions and concentrations have changed over time. When comparing emissions of different gases, these indicators use a concept called “global warming potential” to convert amounts of other gases into carbon dioxide equivalents.

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In the mid-2030s, every U.S. coast will experience rapidly increasing high-tide floods, when a lunar cycle will amplify rising sea levels caused by climate change.

High-tide floods – also called nuisance floods or sunny day floods – are already a familiar problem in many cities on the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported a total of more than 600 such floods in 2019. Starting in the mid-2030s, however, the alignment of rising sea levels with a lunar cycle will cause coastal cities all around the U.S. to begin a decade of dramatic increases in flood numbers, according to the first study that takes into account all known oceanic and astronomical causes for floods.

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If the melting power cables in Portland, Oregon, weren't enough of an indication, new satellite data confirms what many sweat-drenched Americans could have guessed: June 2021 was the single hottest June on record in North America.

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