Liberty, a North American oilfield company, released a video on Thursday slamming North Face for its hypocrisy.

The outdoor clothing company often boasts that it is an environmentally friendly company that recycles and reuses textile materials to create its gear. North Face even went so far as to deny a different oil and gas company its order in the name of committing to be more “green,” but Liberty CEO Chris Wright says the popular company is mostly talk.

“I went through North Face’s website of wide-ranging products, and I failed to find a single product that wasn’t made out of oil and gas,” he said.

Summary.
A growing number of insurance companies are cutting ties with the fossil fuel companies they used to cover. New insight from data analytics firm Verisk finds that over 30 years, insurers sustained roughly $60 billion in onshore and offshore large risk losses from fossil fuel companies, with only another $30 million or so coming from other companies. The author urges a push toward renewables, examining the obstacles leading to industry hesitancy and how it might overcome them. //

Late last year, Lloyd’s of London announced plans to stop selling insurance for some types of fossil fuel companies by 2030. In the world of insurance, it was a huge move: the centuries-old institution not only took a clear stand in the industry’s debate on climate change, it also cast doubt on the value of the business it intends to give up. And Lloyd’s isn’t the only one with concerns about the future of fossil fuel. Insurers and reinsurers around the world are grappling with issues related to both climate change and the impact of energy transition on their portfolios. Some have made the same commitment that Lloyd’s did, and others are likely to follow.

A heroic rat named Magawa has been working for five years in Cambodia, sniffing out dozens of land mines. He is believed to have saved lives.

Now, the animal is about to embark on a well-deserved retirement.

"Although still in good health, he has reached a retirement age and is clearly starting to slow down," the nonprofit APOPO said Thursday. "It is time."

Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who was trained by APOPO to sniff out explosives. With careful training, he and his rat colleagues learn to identify land mines and alert their human handlers, so the mines can be safely removed.

Even among his skilled cohorts working in Cambodia, Magawa is a standout sniffer: In four years he has helped to clear more than 2.4 million square feet of land. In the process, he has found 71 land mines and 38 items of unexploded ordnance. //

Christophe Cox, APOPO's CEO and co-founder, said the organization began exploring new explosive-detection techniques after an analysis found that land mine detection was "the most expensive and tedious part of the problem."

"That's why we came up with the idea of using rats, because rats are fast. They can screen an area of 200 square meters in half an hour – something which would take a manual deminer four days," Cox said at the virtual ceremony. //

Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their size – they are too light to trigger the mines. When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found.

The fireworks display at the RNC last August caused more than $42,000 in damage to federal property.
The RNC has reimbursed the federal government for damage on the Washington Monument's grounds.
Trump's unprecedented use of the White House and National Mall for the convention drew criticism from ethics experts.

The controversial fireworks display celebrating former President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention last August caused more than $42,000 in damage to the National Mall, according to Department of Interior documents obtained by the Democratic group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.

The National Park Service wrote in a February letter to the Republican National Committee that turf on the grounds of the Washington Monument was damaged by a forklift operator "who drove at a high rate of speed" and scorched by fireworks, while "extensive compaction damage" was caused by "improper setup and security/setup/takedown vehicles." A water fountain was also damaged by a dumpster truck.

The RNC has reimbursed the federal government for the damages related to the show, which included fireworks spelling out "TRUMP 2020." The RNC also paid the government more than $177,000 in labor costs for almost 4,000 hours of work by NPS employees on the fireworks show.

Emissions of the greenhouse gas commonly known as laughing gas are soaring. Can we cut emissions from its greatest anthropogenic source? //

In the world's effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the source of our food is coming into the spotlight. There's good reason for that: Agriculture accounts for 16 to 27% of human-caused climate-warming emissions. But much of these emissions are not from carbon dioxide, that familiar climate change villain. They're from another gas altogether: nitrous oxide (N2O).

Also known as laughing gas, N2O does not get nearly the attention it deserves, says David Kanter, a nutrient pollution researcher at New York University and vice-chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, an organisation focused on nitrogen pollution research and policy making. "It's a forgotten greenhouse gas," he says.

Yet molecule for molecule, N2O is about 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide at heating the atmosphere. And like CO2, it is long-lived, spending an average of 114 years in the sky before disintegrating. It also depletes the ozone layer. In all, the climate impact of laughing gas is no joke. Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have estimated that nitrous oxide comprises roughly 6% of greenhouse gas emissions, and about three-quarters of those N2O emissions come from agriculture.