Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor.
Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago.
Love Branch used to be owned by one of the biggest coal companies in the U.S. Federal law requires companies to clean up the land when they finish mining — and Love Branch hasn't produced any coal in more than a decade. But the former owner, now named Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc., transferred the mine and its cleanup obligations to a smaller company in 2018, the year before Hatfield fell through his floor.
World leaders will begin climate talks in Egypt in a little over a week, and tensions are expected to run high in the negotiations to reduce heat-trapping emissions.
Now, new research shows the world has already fallen drastically behind in adopting the changes needed to avoid a future with even more extreme storms, heat waves and floods.
Collectively, countries have promised to reduce heat-trapping emissions by about 3% by 2030, compared to 2020 levels. That's far from the 45% drop that's needed, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Program.
GENEVA — The three main greenhouse gases hit record high levels in the atmosphere last year, the U.N. weather agency said Wednesday, calling it an "ominous" sign as war in Ukraine, rising costs of food and fuel, and other worries have elbowed in on longtime concerns about global warming in recent months.
"More bad news for the planet," the World Meteorological Organization said in a statement along with its latest annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. It's one of several reports released in recent days looking at several aspects of humanity's struggle with climate change in the run up to the U.N.'s latest climate conference, in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. The U.S. pledged billions to fight climate change. Then came the Ukraine war Goats and Soda The U.S. pledged billions to fight climate change. Then came the Ukraine war
Of the three main types of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — the biggest jump from 2020 to 2021 was in methane, whose concentrations in the air came in with the biggest year-on-year increase since regular measurements began four decades ago, WMO said.
"The continuing rise in concentrations of the main heat-trapping gases, including the record acceleration in methane levels, shows that we are heading in the wrong direction," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
Methane is more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, but doesn't stay in the atmosphere nearly as long as carbon dioxide and there's 200 times more carbon dioxide in the air than methane. Over a 20-year time-period, a molecule of methane traps about 81 times the heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide but over a century it goes down to trapping 28 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
OPEC predicts that oil demand will soften in the next few months, thanks to economic headwinds, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration warns that winter heating bills are likely to rise.
Both closely watched fuel forecasts were released on Wednesday.
OPEC's monthly oil market report sounded a pessimistic note about global economic growth. And because economic growth drives oil demand, the group reduced its projections for growth in global oil consumption by 500,000 barrels per day, or more than 15%.
The OPEC alliance announced a 2 million barrels a day cut in oil production Wednesday — an amount that could drive oil and gas prices back up after weeks on a downward trend.
The meeting of the 24 OPEC oil-producing countries, including Russia, comes at a time when much of the world is already battling soaring energy costs. A supply cut will also exacerbate tensions between Saudi Arabia and the U.S., where President Biden has been trying to rein in prices at the gas pump ahead of the midterm elections.
The White House called the decision "shortsighted" and said in a statement the administration would "deliver another 10 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the market next month, continuing the historic releases the President ordered in March."