You will hear that 2015 was the hottest year on record, but it was also a year of important environmental breakthroughs. Here are several signs that things are starting to get better:

1. Americans finally believe climate change is real. A recent poll shows 76% of Americans now know climate change is happening. Even a majority of Republicans, whose party has been in aggressive denial about this issue, now understand it’s a problem. Our politicians have the population’s mandate to act. They must therefore stop throwing roadblocks in the path of important and necessary policies, like the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan, which will set the first nationwide limits of power plant emissions (the U.S.’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions).
2. Other important greenhouse-gas producers, like China, are cutting emissions too. China is a particularly important example — it’s both the world’s largest population center and our largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The Chinese government is experimenting with carbon trading markets in five cities and two provinces, which altogether contain almost a fifth of China’s population and produce a quarter of its gross domestic product (economic output). This is in preparation for launching a Chinese national carbon trading market in 2017. This is a good sign that China is taking its responsibility to act on climate change seriously.
3. The U.S. and Cuba are getting along. I posted recently about how Cuba and the U.S. have agreed to work together to monitor marine life in the oceans between the two nations. Because many important marine species cross the international boundary, monitoring them has been challenging. Now the two nations will share data that will make science-based management of fisheries and other ecosystems possible.
4. Powerful sensors are becoming commercially available. What this means is that realtime data on the presence of toxic chemicals in our day-to-day environment will now be available on a large scale. For example, a large segment of citizens wearing wristband sensors that detect chemical residues could allow for the creation of a large database of chemical abundance. This would allow policymakers to base their decisions regarding the licensing of certain chemicals on real numbers describing how chemicals spread throughout the population. It also means that groups who lobby for tougher chemical safety regulations will have strong data on their side — countering the too-frequent excuse of chemical companies and their lobbyists that “you can’t prove it.”
5. Scientists finally have a handle on methane emissions. Methane, which is many times over a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, is emitted as a byproduct of many processes, particularly those in the oil and gas industries. With new data in hand, states, scientists, and climate activists are now able to push for stronger regulation of methane emissions. Thanks to a series of 16 research projects conducted over the past five years, there is now strong enough data on this pollutant that the federal government has proposed, for the first time, methane-specific regulations for the nation.

Read more details about these issues at the Environmental Defense Fund website. Photo in body of post taken from EDF website.

Header photo from U.S. EPA. View original post here.