Tesla launched a new program on Sunday to enable customers to rent solar panel systems.
Why it matters: This is Tesla's latest effort to bolster its struggling solar business lines, and it's part of a wider relaunch of Tesla's solar business that CEO Elon Musk announced via Twitter.
The payment tech company Stripe plans to fund direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its long-term storage.
Why it matters: Experts in carbon removal methods, such as direct air capture and large-scale forest creation, call the announcement a milestone in corporate climate initiatives.
Swelling employee protests and consumer boycotts have CEOs at large corporations spooked over how and when to respond to hot-button issues during the Trump administration.
Why it matters: With trust in government at a record low, people are looking to powerful businesses to shape the conversation around topics of national importance — and chief executives are torn over how to proceed without offending customers or shareholders.
Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for aggressive action to reduce heat-trapping emissions, while nations are facing pressure to ramp up commitments ahead of a major United Nations summit next month.
The big picture: Despite that fervor, progress on climate change remains elusive. We have cultivated a deep dependence on fossil fuels that have been driving Earth’s temperature up for more than a century, creating a problem whose mostly negative impacts are unfolding over more centuries.
About 100 people in Iceland trekked 2 hours up a volcano to formally bid farewell to the glacier once known as Okjokull, offering their condolences to the ice mass that disappeared about a decade ago, AP reports.
The big picture: This was the nation's first glacier to formally go extinct, but Icelandic geologist Oddur Sigurðsson says it won't be the last. He predicts all of the nation's glaciers will be gone in 200 years as temperatures continue to rise as a result of man-made climate change, causing global sea-level rise. The glacier had been 6 square miles wide and was a source of clean drinking water.
The world's top 5 warmest years on record have occurred since 2014 — and it's almost certain that 2019 will be added to this list as well.
Why it matters: Such trends are indicative of long-term global warming due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels for energy and transportation, cutting down forests for agriculture and other purposes. Only 1 of the top 20 warmest years on record since instrument data began in 1880 took place before the year 2000. With greenhouse gas concentrations in the air at their highest level in 3 million years, the odds favor more record-shattering years in the future.
Union workers at Royal Dutch Shell's Pennsylvania petrochemical plant were given the option of attending President Trump's address there this week or miss out on wages, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette first reported Saturday.
Details: A contractor relayed to employees that Shell sent union leaders a memo the day before Trump's visit Tuesday to the $6 billion construction site that attendance wasn't mandatory, but "only those who showed up at 7 a.m., scanned their ID cards, and prepared to stand for hours — through lunch but without lunch — would be paid," according to the news outlet.
