Three years ago the United Nations climate science body issued a landmark report warning that the planet was on track to blow past efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a threshold that it warned would bring catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change. But in that same report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasized that many paths remained open for us to limit that damage—so long as we acted immediately.  On Monday, the IPCC published a new document with a far less optimistic frame. In it, the group says that the pathway to limit warming to the 1.5°C mark has narrowed and lays out only one plausible scenario to meet that goal—one that would require an extraordinary level of action, and even then, would offer no guarantee. - Time

It’s a high bar to clear, but this is one of the most depressing facts I’ve read as a climate journalist: the Amazon rainforest—a region known as “the lungs of the world” but battered by decades of deforestation—now emits more carbon than it absorbs. That’s the conclusion of a widely cited study published last week in the journal Nature, for which scientists undertook 590 flights over the Amazon to measure local atmospheric carbon levels over eight years, from 2010 to 2018. - Time

What if someone told you that we have everything we need to decarbonize most of the economy?   We would just need to start electrifying every new car, furnace, water heater, drier, and cookstove, and industrial process starting right now. And yeah, and put solar on every roof that can handle it.  If we are on a wartime footing for decarbonizing the economy, our guest, Saul, could be considered a 5-star general of the “electrify everything” movement. He founded or co-founded around a dozen companies and organizations. And he has a PhD from MIT in materials science and information theory.  Saul is now trying to marshal the world around his “a defensible and believable” pathway for decarbonizing America with clean electricity. - Energy Gang

Since Kenneth McDarment was a kid in the 1980s, he’s seen the foothills of the Sierra Nevada change. As a councilman of the Tule River Tribe, a sovereign nation of around 1,000 members living on 56,000-odd acres in the foothills of the Sierras, McDarment deals with everything water-related on the reservation. Today there’s less rain and less snow than there was even a decade ago, which means that the land in the foothills was dangerously dry during the last fire season, when wildfires were sweeping across the state. “If you don’t got water,” says McDarment, “we don’t got nothing.  In 2014, McDarment began looking into getting ahold of some beavers. McDarment hoped that beaver dams would create soggy areas on tribal lands that wouldn’t dry out during heat waves. “We’re hoping that means our land will be less likely to burn during fire season,” he says. “Beavers were here originally. So why not bring them back and let them do the work they do naturally?  There was just one problem—it is illegal to move beavers without a permit. And a permit to move a beaver isn't easy to come by. - Sierra