U.S. Tells International Energy Agency to Drop Its Focus on Climate Change – The New York Times

U.S. Tells International Energy Agency to Drop Its Focus on Climate Change – The New York Times

The Trump administration this week threatened to pull the United States out of the world’s leading energy agency unless it abandoned its focus on tackling climate change.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that the International Energy Agency had become a “climate advocacy organization” and should stop publishing its annual road map for how countries could eliminate their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions by 2050, known as its “net zero scenario.”

“We don’t need a net zero scenario, that’s ridiculous, it’s not going to happen,” Mr. Wright, a former gas executive, said on Tuesday at a side event during the agency’s annual meeting of energy ministers in Paris. He said he wanted the agency to “focus on energy security,” but added that “if they insist that it’s so dominated and infused with climate stuff, then we’re out.”

Rising CO2 limits nitrogen uptake in boreal forests, threatening carbon sink capacity | Chemistry World

Rising CO2 limits nitrogen uptake in boreal forests, threatening carbon sink capacity | Chemistry World

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is limiting the amount of nitrogen boreal forests can make use of, an analysis of archived tree cores from Sweden has shown. This finding suggests that as humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise trees will struggle to compete with microorganisms for nitrogen, slowing the growth of forests and reducing their importance as carbon sinks.