Glenn Scherer

3 weeks ago | southafricatoday.net | Glenn Scherer

Vattenfall, the Netherlands’ third-largest energy producer, has announced it is abandoning plans to build the country’s largest wood pellet burning power plant. Forest advocates, who launched a campaign to derail Vattenfall’s plans in 2019, declared victory. They note that burning wood pellets to make energy produces more carbon emissions per unit of energy than coal, despite industry claims that the technology is carbon neutral.

4 weeks ago | envirolink.org | Glenn Scherer

Sea ice extent is at record, and near record, lows for this time of year in both polar regions, leaving the planet increasingly vulnerable to the cascading effects of global warming. This March, the Arctic sea ice winter maximum reached its lowest extent in the 47-year satellite record, while the Antarctic sea ice summer minimum vied for the second lowest recorded extent in nearly five decades, according to data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

4 weeks ago | envirolink.org | Glenn Scherer

Dutch forest campaigners are claiming a significant victory over one of the Netherlands’ top energy providers, Vattenfall, after the company decided in late February to cancel plans to build the nation’s largest wood pellet burning plant for energy. “This is enormous,” said Fenna Swart, leader of the Clean Air Committee, a Dutch forest advocacy group that has aggressively opposed Vattenfall’s plans since 2019 in the court of law and public opinion.

1 month ago | envirolink.org | Glenn Scherer

In a lab in Türkiye, researcher Sedat Gündoğdu zooms in on the image of a small red fiber. For the first time on film, viewers are witnessing microplastics in the human brain. The moment is emblematic of an emerging environmental and health crisis affecting nearly every corner of life on Earth, from the deepest depths of the ocean to the blood in our veins. Microplastics, it seems, are everywhere.

1 month ago | southafricatoday.net | Glenn Scherer

In 2024, catastrophic floods occurred in the cities of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Valencia, Spain. These two record floods number among the thousands of extreme weather events that saw records for temperature, drought and deluge shattered across the globe. Such horrors have only continued in 2025, with the cataclysmic wildfires in Los Angeles. Scientists have clearly pegged these disasters to carbon emissions and intensifying climate change.