SUMMARY: In an effort to boost production of oil and natural gas, the Trump administration is planning to relax rules regarding the release of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. William Brangham reports and talks to The Wall Street Journal’s Timothy Puko about what higher levels of methane mean for the environment, how technology can prevent leaks of the gas and a "big divide" within the industry.
SUMMARY: Cement has been called the foundation of modern civilization, the stuff of highways, bridges, sidewalks and buildings of all sizes. But its production comes with a huge carbon footprint. Environmental chemist David Stone was seeking a way to keep iron from rusting when he stumbled upon a possible substitute that requires significantly less energy. Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Climate change has prompted scientists to search for new ways to reduce greenhouse gases in all kinds of fields.
Now an Arizona inventor has discovered an alternative to the unlikely cause of fully 5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery has the story, part of our Breakthroughs series on invention and innovation.
DAVID STONE, Inventor: I have here the last surviving bit of an experiment that went wrong.
KATHLEEN MCCLEERY (NewsHour): Thirteen years ago, David Stone was a Ph.D. student studying environmental chemistry.
DAVID STONE: It was the corner lab right up here.
KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: In a lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson, he hunted for a way to keep iron from rusting and hardening up.
DAVID STONE: It got hot. It started to steam. It was bubbling and spitting. And I thought, well, that — that didn’t work. The next day, when I came in and I found it and rescued it from the garbage, I realized, this just didn’t get hard. It got very hard, glassy hard.
This one was cast by hand.
KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Stone — that’s his real name — began to think his discarded rock just might be a substitute for a very common product, cement.
SUMMARY: In an address at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama announced a new climate change plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The president zeroed in on new and existing power plants that burn coal, and called for public lands to generate power via wind and solar energy projects. Gwen Ifill reports.
SUMMARY: President Barack Obama announced a sweeping proposal to curb climate change and cut emissions. Gwen Ifill gets two reactions on the plan and its potential impact from Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council and attorney Scott Segal, who represents companies pushing for the Keystone extension.
'Disastrous Effects' of Global Warming Tipping Points Near, According to New Study
Even "moderate additional" greenhouse emissions are likely to push Earth past "critical tipping points" with "dangerous consequences for the planet," according to research conducted by NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute.
With just 10 more years of "business as usual" emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, says the NASA/Columbia paper, "it becomes impractical" to avoid "disastrous effects."
The study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Its lead author is James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
The forecast effects include "increasingly rapid sea-level rise, increased frequency of droughts and floods, and increased stress on wildlife and plants due to rapidly shifting climate zones," according to the NASA announcement.
