In a move designed to bolster Beijing’s climate credentials, President Xi Jinping of China said Tuesday that his country would stop building coal-burning power plants overseas, ending its support for construction projects that rely on the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel.  “China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low carbon energy and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad,” Mr. Xi said in prerecorded remarks to the United Nations General Assembly.  Within its own borders, China produces the largest share of global emissions of greenhouse gases. It is by far the biggest producer of coal domestically and the largest financier of coal-fired power plants abroad, with an enormous 40 gigawatts of coal power planned. - NYTimes

Deep in the Oman desert lies one of BP's more lucrative projects, a mass of steel pipes and cooling towers that showcases the British energy giant's pioneering natural gas extraction technology.  The facility earned BPmore than $650 million in profits in 2019, according to financial filings reviewed by Reuters. Yet the oil major agreed to sell a third of its majority stake in the project earlier this year. The deal exemplifies a larger strategy to liquidate fossil-fuel assets to raise cash for investments in renewable-energy projects that BP concedes won't make money for years. - Reuters

Two decades of climate change-induced drought and rising temperatures, combined with ever-growing demand, have put the entire water system — and the flora and fauna and more than 40 million people that rely on it — into serious trouble. Now local, state and federal water managers are being forced to reckon with a frightening reality: the incredible shrinking Colorado River system. - High Country News

Over the last hundred years, gas companies have engaged an all-out campaign to convince Americans that cooking with a gas flame is superior to using electric heat. At the same time, they’ve urged us not to think too hard—if at all—about what it means to combust a fossil fuel in our homes. - Mother Jones

Agriculture already uses almost half of the world’s vegetated land. It consumes 90 percent of all the water used by humanity and generates one-quarter of the annual global emissions that are causing global warming. And yet of the seven billion people living today, 820 million are undernourished because they don’t have access to—or can’t afford—an adequate diet.  “We have to produce 30 percent more food on the same land area, stop deforestation, [and] cut carbon emissions for food production by two-thirds,” says Waite in an interview.  All of that must be done while reducing poverty levels and the loss of natural habitat, preventing freshwater depletion, and cutting pollution as well as other environmental impacts of farming.​- National Geographic

Nobody knows how many wells have dried up in Sunizona, let alone the entire Willcox Basin, which covers 1,911 square miles in Arizona’s southeast corner, near the New Mexico border. But between 2014 and 2019, records from the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) show that around 20 wells in the Sunizona area were deepened after drying up. In the entire basin during that time, records show that 57 wells were deepened, but interviews and anecdotal accounts place the number at more than 100.- High Country News

Right: Thousands of dairy cows crowd the Coronado Dairy’s feedlot in the Kansas Settlement area near Sunizona, Arizona. - Roberto (Bear) Guerra / High Country News

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water and people - High Country News

Right: Uranium processing mill at Monticello, Utah, owned by the government and operated for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission by the National Lead Company, Inc. This is the only government-owned uranium mill. c. 1957 - U.S. Department of Energy  

Trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans, too, ecologist Suzanne Simard says.  Trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain, she explains. In one study, Simard watched as a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect.  "This was a breakthrough," Simard says. The trees were sharing "information that actually is important to the health of the whole forest." - NPR 

Oceanside’s annual harbor dredging and the occasional regional sand replenishment projects are not enough to save the city’s eroding beaches, a new study shows.  A proposal to build rock groins on the beach appears to be the best way to stop or at least slow the steady erosion that has been chewing away the city’s coastline since the 1940s, according to the study prepared for Oceanside by the Long Beach-based consulting firm GHD.  “Sand from this (harbor dredging) program does little to really benefit the city beaches,”  -San Diego Union

If some politicians are to be believed, taking sweeping action to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement would be calamitous for jobs in the energy sector. But a study suggests that honouring the global climate target would, in fact, increase net jobs by about 8 million by 2050. The study – in which researchers created a global dataset of the footprint of energy jobs in 50 countries including major fossil fuel-producing economies – found that currently an estimated 18 million people work in the energy industries, which is likely to increase to 26 million if climate targets are met. - Guardian

The Skagit River runs about 150 miles through what is now British Columbia into northwest Washington, from the Cascade Mountains to Puget Sound. Along the way, three major hydroelectric dams owned by the city of Seattle — Ross Dam, Diablo Dam and the Gorge Dam — block the river’s flow. Now, as part of a once-every-few-decades federal relicensing process, the ecological alterations caused by those dams are being re-examined by scientists and regulators. The license renewal is exposing other changes, too, including how Indigenous nations are increasingly asserting their sovereignty and rights. Looked at from one angle, this regulatory process is simply a bureaucratic hoop Seattle must jump through to keep using the Skagit River to generate power. From another, however, it’s a chance to reconsider the value of the river itself. The relicensing process has triggered many different conversations on the Skagit’s future; this is one of a pair of stories that focus on a few of them. - HCN

Portions of the Amazon rainforest are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb — a troubling sign for the fight against climate change, a new study suggests.  Deforestation and an accelerating warming trend have contributed to change in the carbon balance, which is most severe in the southeastern region of the Amazon, where there are both rising temperatures and reduced rainfall in the dry season. The most affected regions have warmed by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit during the dry season in the last 40 years, comparable to the changes seen in the rapidly-warming Arctic. - NYTimes

The collapse of the condominium building in Surfside, Florida, may force what some say is a long overdue conversation about the hard realities of climate change that will transform one of the nation’s most vulnerable regions.  To be sure, no evidence has emerged so far to connect climate change to the middle-of-the-night collapse of the Champlain Towers on June 24, which buried residents in the rubble. Sea level has risen eight inches in South Florida since 1981, when the 12-story condo was built—not enough to be responsible for its collapse, says Hal Wanless, a University of Miami geologist and South Florida’s preeminent voice on sea-level rise.  The investigation so far is more focused on a confluence of events including delays by the homeowners association in carrying out recommended repairs and an environmental danger that’s been known for more than a century: the corrosive effects of salt water on coastal construction. - National Geographic

Last year was hot. NASA declared that it tied 2016 for the hottest year on record, and the Met Office of the United Kingdom said it was the final year in the warmest 10-year period ever recorded. Temperatures were particularly high in Siberia, with some areas experiencing monthly averages more than 10°C above the 1981–2010 average. Overall, Siberia had the warmest January to June since records began; on 20 June, the town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, hit 38°C, the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic Circle.  Scientists showed that the prolonged heat in Siberia would have been almost impossible without human-induced climate change. Global warming made the heat wave at least 600 times more likely than in 1900, they found. - EOS

We want our cheap oil but we don't want the consequences, so we often put refineries in places where people without influence life and then tout all the jobs that are created.  Once again, a fossil fuel-related company walks away with the profits, leaves a mess for the taxpayer to clean up, and then whines about regulations, this time in the USVI.  - Washington Post

Managers of some Arizona golf courses are fighting a plan that would cut water use at a time when the state is being forced to confront shrinking water supplies.  A group representing golf courses has been pushing back against a proposal by state officials that would reduce overall water use on courses, instead offering a plan that would entail less conservation.  Opposition to the state’s proposal for golf courses has emerged over the past several months, aired in sometimes-tense virtual meetings where representatives of courses have said they understand the need to conserve but are concerned the proposed reductions in water allotments would damage their businesses. - AZ Central

President Biden has a rare opportunity to act on climate with maximum political capital from the 2020 election, bipartisan support for a clean energy recovery from the COVID-induced economic crisis, and the imperative of meeting his announced goal of halving the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The upside of acting now is massive - $1.5 trillion in investment across every corner of the country.  Biden campaigned on a 100% clean electricity by 2035 pledge, included this target in his American Jobs Plan, and outlined the job-creation benefits of clean energy in his annual message to Congress in April. Biden can seize this opportunity by working with Congress to pass a clean electricity standard (CES) targeting 80% clean electricity by 2030, which new research shows is possible without increasing customer costs thanks to plummeting wind, solar, and battery costs. - Forbes

While some "news" channels and Facebook "experts" dispute the reality of human made climate change, those changes already are affecting Miami.  - NYTimes

There is perhaps nowhere in the Pacific where the costs of extractive industries are as heartbreakingly clear as Rennell Island. The island, a tiny dot in the vast South Pacific that lies at the southern tip of Solomon Islands, is home to a few thousand people. And it’s starkly divided.  On one side is pristine East Rennell, a Unesco world heritage site, which offers a glimpse of Rennell unspoiled. But in the last decade, West Rennell has suffered the triple assault of logging, bauxite mining, and a devastating oil spill from when a bulk carrier, hired by a mining company, ran aground on a reef. - Guardian