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Climate Fwd:

How to Tune Up Your Heating System This Winter, and Other Climate News

John SchwartzBrad Plumer and

Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Hey there, everybody! It’s been another busy week. Our colleague Brad Plumer reported on the latest round of climate talks from Katowice, Poland, where negotiators pulled an all-nighter to deliver an agreement. It provides a detailed set of rules to implement the 2015 Paris climate accord, calls on countries to step up their plans to cut emissions and builds a process to help countries that are struggling to meet their goals.

The United States, by the way, agreed to this new deal even though President Trump has pledged to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. You can read more about Brad’s impressions from his trip a little farther down in this newsletter.

About the Paris Agreement: Three years later, how are we doing?

Somini Sengupta took a look at how things stand. Spoiler alert: not great. Over all, the world is not meeting its commitment to keep the increase in global temperatures “well below” two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, over preindustrial levels. Emissions are rising in the United States and China, and other countries are backsliding on their pledges.

In the United States, cities are taking a hard look at what they need to do to deal with the effects of climate change. I investigated what officials in storm-struck cities have learned about resilience. The short version: “Nature wins.”

In the continuing story of leadership changes in the Trump administration, Coral Davenport introduced us to a likely successor to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke: the former oil lobbyist David Bernhardt, who was a guiding force behind Mr. Zinke’s efforts to roll back environmental regulations and shrink national monuments.

Whatever the federal government does, and however nations fail to meet emissions goals, California is still in the fight: Hiroko Tabuchi wrote about the state’s plan to make all buses electric by 2040, a move that would reduce emissions by the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road.

Speaking of Hiroko, in case you missed it (and the special edition of the newsletter we sent out to let everybody know about it), please take a look at her blockbuster report on the hidden effort to roll back car fuel efficiency standards. Automakers themselves said that the Trump administration’s proposal went too far, so who wanted it? If you guessed oil companies, you win.

We sent out another special edition of the newsletter just today to let folks know about our new look at the effects of climate change on the Galápagos Islands. In a warming world, the species from the archipelago that helped Charles Darwin come up with his theory of natural selection are under pressure. Read the story by Nicholas Casey, and take in the amazing images from Josh Haner.

Here’s your bonus reading: One of the problems facing anyone trying to take on climate change is denial, including the oft-cited notion that climate change took a pause in the last 20 years. Two new scientific papers add weight to the conclusion that no such pause existed.


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Many in the area where the United Nations climate talks took place heat their homes with coal.Credit...Karolina Jonderko for The New York Times

The backdrop for this year’s big United Nations climate talks seemed, at first, a bizarre choice. Diplomats from across the globe converged on Katowice, a city in the heart of Poland’s southwestern coal-mining region, to discuss how the world’s nations could accelerate their efforts to shift away from fossil fuels.

But when I traveled to Poland last week to cover those climate talks, I discovered that the setting was fairly apt.

Lately, climate-policy makers around the world have been grappling with the fact that even the best-laid plans to tackle global warming will falter if they don’t take into account people who might lose out from a shift to cleaner energy. And Poland offered a sharp illustration of just how difficult that can be in practice.

Organizers of the climate conference had hoped that Katowice, home to some 300,000 people, could showcase how a place could edge away from fossil fuels and still thrive. The region, which had been mining coal since the 18th century, has in recent years been shuttering its local coal mines and diversifying into other industries such as automobile manufacturing.

Signs of this transformation were everywhere. In the city center, a 131-foot-high former mine shaft tower now offers sightseers panoramic views of the city center. On the site of a former mining waste dump, the city had built a saucer-shaped arena complex that hosted all the United Nations delegates arriving to debate new details of the Paris climate agreement. Dozens of electric buses prowled the streets.

I traveled with a local photographer, Karolina Jonderko, to the Nikiszowiec neighborhood of Katowice, which was built in 1908 to house local coal miners. After the fall of Communism in the 1990s, many of the nearby mines went out of business. The neighborhood was soon racked by joblessness and crime.

But local leaders banded together to revitalize the area. Today, we found, Nikiszowiec’s charming cobbled streets have become a popular tourist stop; its brick buildings now house artist workshops and young families.

“There’s a strong community here,” said Grzegorz Chudy, 46, a local artist who moved here ten years ago.

Inside the United Nations climate conference a few miles away, politicians and climate experts were talking of the need for a “just transition” away from polluting energy sources, in which workers who lost their jobs were able to find new livelihoods. Nikiszowiec seemed like a plausible demonstration of how that might work in practice.

Yet there was still more to the story. Read more here.


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Credit...Tyler Varsell

Friday is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, so we’re thinking about cold weather, and home heating.

According to the Energy Department, most homes in the United States are heated with either furnaces or boilers that burn natural gas or oil. These systems often waste a lot of energy because they tend to be old and poorly maintained.

Tuning up your heating system so that it runs more efficiently will help slash both your carbon dioxide emissions and your energy bills. This can make a big difference, since heating accounts for about 45 percent of the average American family’s energy bills, according to the agency.

Experts recommend that you hire a technician to tune up your heating system. The contractor will clean the burner so it burns fuel properly; replace parts, if necessary; and test to ensure that the flue and chimney are not blocked.

“This is important for the safety of your family because you could have an issue with incomplete combustion that could be leading to carbon monoxide in your home,” said Jennifer Thorne Amann, the buildings program director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit advocacy group.

A complete tuneup will set you back at least $100, but it can reduce your heating bill by up to 10 percent, according to the group.

Also, if you have a furnace, changing the system’s filter regularly will help you save energy and reduce the level of particulate matter, which can be detrimental to your health.

If you have a boiler system that relies on radiators to distribute heat through the house, you could consider installing an outdoor reset control, a device that modulates the temperature of the hot water in the radiators based on the temperature outdoors.

Beyond tuning up or upgrading your system, the most important thing you can do is to make sure you’re not overheating your home.

Experts recommend programming your thermostat to around 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) when you are at home, and slightly lower when you are out. This alone can help you reduce your heating bill.

“If you’re at home and you feel slightly cold, wear a sweater and appropriate clothes for the season,” Ms. Amann said. “Overnight, most people are comfortable at 63 to 65, with a nice comforter on. Just pile on the covers and keep warm that way!”

For more tips on how to reduce energy usage during the winter, check the SmarterHouse website produced by Ms. Amann’s group, or this infographic from the Energy Department.


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John Schwartz is a reporter on the climate desk. In nearly two decades at The Times, he has also covered science, law and technology. More about John Schwartz

Brad Plumer is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At The Times, he has also covered international climate talks and the changing energy landscape in the United States. More about Brad Plumer

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