The Download: corporate climate action, and killer asteroids
As thousands of companies trumpet their plans to cut carbon pollution, a small group of sustainability consultants has emerged as the go-to arbiter of corporate climate action.
The Science Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, helps businesses develop a timetable for action to shrink their climate footprint through some combination of cutting greenhouse-gas pollution and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. After years of small-scale sustainability work, SBTi is growing rapidly, and governments are paying attention.
But while the group has earned praise for reeling the private sector into constructive conversations about climate emissions, its rising influence has also attracted scrutiny and raised questions about why a single organization is setting the standards for many of the world’s largest companies. Read the full story.
—Ian Morse
Earth is probably safe from a killer asteroid for 1,000 years
The news: Breathe a sigh of relief—no asteroid larger than a kilometer is going to hit the Earth in the next 1,000 years, a new study has found.
How they did it: A team of researchers modeled when asteroids cataloged by NASA were expected to come near Earth in their orbit, before pushing those estimates up to 1,000 years into the future. By identifying “the fraction of the orbit that can bring the object close to Earth,” the team was able to model impact risks much farther out than has been possible with other methods.
