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Plans follow French commitment to take polluting vehicles off the road owing to effect of poor air quality on people’s health

Ministers believe poor air quality poses largest environmental risk to public health in UK. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

theguardian.com - Anushka Asthana and Matthew Taylor - July 25, 2017

Britain is to ban all new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2040 amid fears that rising levels of nitrogen oxide pose a major risk to public health.

The commitment, which follows a similar pledge in France, is part of the government’s much-anticipated clean air plan, which has been at the heart of a protracted high court legal battle. 

The government warned that the move, which will also take in hybrid vehicles, was needed because of the unnecessary and avoidable impact that poor air quality was having on people’s health.

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ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Electric cars win? Britain to ban new petrol and diesel cars from 2040

A Volkswagen e-Golf electric car being charged in Dresden, Germany, in March. Volkswagen and Tesla each have plans to produce more than 1 million electric vehicles per year by 2025. Credit Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

CLICK HERE - Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) - Electric Vehicle Outlook 2017

nytimes.com - by Brad Plumer - July 8, 2017

As the world’s automakers place larger bets on electric vehicle technology, many industry analysts are debating a key question: How quickly can plug-in cars become mainstream?

The conventional view holds that electric cars will remain a niche product for many years, plagued by high sticker prices and heavily dependent on government subsidies.

But a growing number of analysts now argue that this pessimism is becoming outdated. A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research group, suggests that the price of plug-in cars is falling much faster than expected, spurred by cheaper batteries and aggressive policies promoting zero-emission vehicles in China and Europe.

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weather.com - by Pam Wright - June 28, 2017

CLICK HERE - VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Impediments to inland resettlement under conditions of accelerated sea level rise

An estimated 2 billion people will be displaced from their homes by 2100 due to climate-driven rising seas, a new study says.

Roughly one-fifth of the world's population may become climate change refugees, according to Cornell University. The majority of those will be people who live on coastlines around the world, including about 2 million in Florida alone.

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ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Cornell University - Rising seas could result in 2 billion refugees by 2100

An iceberg lies in the Ross Sea with Mount Erebus in the background near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, in November 2016. (AFP/Getty Images)

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Nature Communications - January 2016 extensive summer melt in West Antarctica favoured by strong El Niño

washingtonpost.com - by Chris Mooney - June 15, 2017

Scientists have documented a recent, massive melt event on the surface of highly vulnerable West Antarctica that, they fear, could be a harbinger of future events as the planet continues to warm.

In the Antarctic summer of 2016, the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest floating ice platform on Earth, developed a sheet of meltwater that lasted for as long as 15 days in some places. The total area affected by melt was 300,000 square miles, or larger than the state of Texas, the scientists report.

That’s bad news because surface meltin g could work hand in hand with an already documented trend of ocean-driven melting to compromise West Antarctica, which contains over 10 feet of potential sea level rise.