Celebrity Life

Next week, thousands of ministers and diplomats from across the world will descend on an event campus in Glasgow, Scotland for the most important climate conference in recent years—and perhaps the most significant international meeting of our lifetimes. From Oct. 31 to Nov. 12, they’ll be bringing forward countries’ first updated plans to cut emissions…

John Kerry can feel the heat. It’s a sunny mid-July day in Naples, Italy, and we’re sitting on the roof of his hotel overlooking the Mediterranean. As tourists on the other side of the patio snap photos of Mount Vesuvius looming in the background, Kerry is warning about the fate of human life on earth.…

As the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol oversees research on trends that define energy markets. When Birol speaks, energy companies and policymakers around the world listen, informing decisions that determine how humans power homes, factories and cars. This year, Birol turned the world upside down when he declared the dawn of a…

In the battle to slow down climate change, countries like Barbados are on the “front line,” says Prime Minister Mia Mottley. The island is threatened by rising sea levels and extreme weather events like hurricanes that are increasing in intensity and frequency. But adapting to the impacts of climate change, to build defenses and repair the…

Alongside our thirst for fossil fuels, humans’ destruction of nature has triggered the climate and ecological crises that now threaten our life on this planet. A major goal for delegates at COP26 is to improve humans’ relationship with nature: to restore forests and wetlands to absorb more carbon; slow the loss of animal and insect…

Countries have long agreed that emissions could be cut faster by allowing carbon trading—where one nation or business pays for projects that reduce emissions in another country, and then counts those reductions in their own targets. These carbon markets would funnel funds to the projects that cut emissions most efficiently—potentially reducing costs of meeting targets…

When Linda Zhang became chief engineer for Ford’s F-150 Lightning three years ago, she took on what some might consider an all but impossible job. In relatively short order, she had to roll out a reasonably priced electric version of the most popular vehicle in the U.S., while skirting the sensibilities of F-150 loyalists whose…

Coal is one of the dirtiest energy sources in use, and coal plants still generate 38% of the world’s electricity. One strategy is to stop them from getting built in the first place, and Ghanaian activist Chibeze Ezekiel has had some success there. In 2013, he’d just returned from a climate conference in Istanbul when…

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is almost entirely surrounded by the waters of the Ganges River delta. Highly vulnerable to rising sea levels, Dhaka also faces threats from above: monsoon rains regularly overwhelm drainage systems and flood streets. Paradoxically, Dhaka also lacks clean water; as the population of 24 million sucks wells dry, seawater rushes in…

In October 2019, the Rotary Club of Bugolobi asked me to talk on the environment and climate change. I looked forward to the opportunity. It would be the first time as an activist that I’d be addressing Ugandan professionals, many of whom were my parents’ age (I’m 24). The audience would be civic-minded middle-class men…

COP26, shorthand for the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is in many ways as wonky as it sounds. For two weeks in early November, negotiators from nearly 200 countries will gather in Glasgow to debate the granular details of how best to put the world on…

Around 20% of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies had committed to net-zero targets