By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
A lot needs to change about how we live on this planet if we’re to pass it on to our kids in good shape. To make that change happen, we have to believe in our hearts and know in our minds that it can happen. That’s what this new newsletter is about: keeping you aware of what’s possible.
The past year has radically expanded our sense of that. Who knew a year ago that so many of us could do our jobs from home, drive and fly so little, or survive so much time with our loved ones? That there’d be a vaccine by the end of 2020 against a virus we hadn’t heard of when the year began? Or, on the other hand, that such a pathogen might kill millions of us—including a lot of essential workers who couldn’t stay home—and devastate the lives of so many more?
When we’ve finally come out of the pandemic, environmental threats like climate change will remain, presenting even deeper dangers. We’ll keep covering those at National Geographic—the rising temperatures and seas, the melting glaciers, the intensifying storms and droughts—but we’re going to be paying more attention now to what can be done about them. There’s a lot being done these days.
A boom in offshore wind energy that has been going on in the North Sea for years is at last coming to American waters, Madeleine Stone writes for us this week. Communities all over the United States are banding together and demanding more renewables, writes my colleague Alejandra Borunda.
By the time you read this, the Biden administration may have announced its near-term goal for U.S. carbon emissions—environmentalists have been urging a commitment to cut them in half by 2030. Would that even be possible? It will be exciting to find out.
(Pictured at top, a loose chain of tropical cyclones lined up across the Western Hemisphere on Sept. 4, 2019.)
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