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A new report says the U.S. might meet its Paris goal no matter what Trump says or does.

Here's some less-bad-than-it-could-be news for coral reefs, polar bears, and humans in coastal cities who don't want to drown.

It turns out that President Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Accord (you know, that giant agreement that 195 countries signed promising to reduce carbon emissions and limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius) might end up being kind of an empty gesture in the long run.

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.


That's according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, which found that the economic benefit of going all-in on renewable energy is becoming too large to ignore and the U.S. will most likely meet its goals under the agreement after all:

"By our forecasts, in most cases favorable renewables economics rather than government policy will be the primary driver of changes to utilities’ carbon emissions levels. For example, notwithstanding president Trump’s stated intention to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, we expect the US to exceed the Paris commitment of a 26-28% reduction in its 2005-level carbon emissions by 2020."

Basically, it doesn't matter that President Trump agrees with the terms of the Paris Accord or not. As long as building solar and wind plants is better for the bottom line than burning coal, oil, and natural gas, power companies in the U.S. (and around the world) will naturally gravitate toward those clean energy sources anyway.

The analysis predicts that renewables will be the "cheapest form of new power generation by 2020," Business Insider reports.

Solar panel prices fell 50% between 2016 and 2017 thanks to a global oversupply, and wind turbines continue to become more cost effective and efficient to build.

Workers install solar panels in D.C. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Does that mean we can kick back, crack open a beer, and enjoy the deliberate-yet-inevitable march of progress?

No. Climate change is still a huge deal.

Even hitting those Paris targets might not be enough to stop really bad things from happening. Didn't you read that New York Magazine article?

You didn't? Well, here's what the world could look like in a century or two, even if we do meet our Paris goals:

"Cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today."

So ... like, call your senator.

What it does mean is that climate change deniers and skeptics have less power than they used to.

Regardless of how many of the rich and powerful refuse to believe the Earth is warming, as long as the price of clean energy keeps falling, the argument for burning more fossil fuels is weakening.

Meanwhile, 70% of Americans support the Paris Agreement.

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

Back in June, the Trump administration touted its withdrawal from the accord as good for American business.

By following the money, American business might just prove him wrong.

For once, thank goodness, that's what they're good at.

Planet

Easy (and free!) ways to save the ocean

The ocean is the heart of our planet. It needs our help to be healthy.

Ocean Wise

Volunteers at a local shoreline cleanup

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The ocean covers over 71% of the Earth’s surface and serves as our planet’s heart. Ocean currents circulate vital heat, moisture, and nutrients around the globe to influence and regulate our climate, similar to the human circulatory system. Cool, right?

Our ocean systems provide us with everything from fresh oxygen to fresh food. We need it to survive and thrive—and when the ocean struggles to function healthfully, the whole world is affected.

Pollution, overfishing, and climate change are the three biggest challenges preventing the ocean from doing its job, and it needs our help now more than ever. Humans created the problem; now humans are responsible for solving it.

#BeOceanWise is a global rallying cry to do what you can for the ocean, because we need the ocean and the ocean needs us. If you’re wondering how—or if—you can make a difference, the answer is a resounding YES. There are a myriad of ways you can help, even if you don’t live near a body of water. For example, you can focus on reducing the amount of plastic you purchase for yourself or your family.

Another easy way to help clean up our oceans is to be aware of what’s known as the “dirty dozen.” Every year, scientists release an updated list of the most-found litter scattered along shorelines. The biggest culprit? Single-use beverage and food items such as foam cups, straws, bottle caps, and cigarette butts. If you can’t cut single-use plastic out of your life completely, we understand. Just make sure to correctly recycle plastic when you are finished using it. A staggering 3 million tons of plastic ends up in our oceans annually. Imagine the difference we could make if everyone recycled!

The 2022 "Dirty Dozen" ListOcean Wise

If you live near a shoreline, help clean it up! Organize or join an effort to take action and make a positive impact in your community alongside your friends, family, or colleagues. You can also tag @oceanwise on social if you spot a beach that needs some love. The location will be added to Ocean Wise’s system so you can submit data on the litter found during future Shoreline Cleanups. This data helps Ocean Wise work with businesses and governments to stop plastic pollution at its source. In Canada, Ocean Wise data helped inform a federal ban on unnecessary single-use plastics. Small but important actions like these greatly help reduce the litter that ends up in our ocean.

Ocean Wise, a conservation organization on a mission to restore and protect our oceans, is focused on empowering and educating everyone from individuals to governments on how to protect our waters. They are making conservation happen through five big initiatives: monitoring and protecting whales, fighting climate change and restoring biodiversity, innovating for a plastic-free ocean, protecting and restoring fish stocks, and finally, educating and empowering youth. The non-profit believes that in order to rebuild a resilient and vibrant ocean within the next ten years, everyone needs to take action.

Become an Ocean Wise ally and share your knowledge with others. The more people who know how badly the ocean needs our help, the better! Now is a great time to commit to being a part of something bigger and get our oceans healthy again.

Family

Mom reacts perfectly to daughter who disinvited a friend from a trip because of her weight

She didn’t want the girl to “ruin” her photos of the trip.

A mother confronts her daughter for judging her friend's weight.

A 42-year-old mother wondered whether she did the right thing by disciplining her 18-year-old daughter, Abby, who disinvited a friend from vacation because of her weight. The mother asked people on Reddit for their opinion.

For some background, Abby had struggled with her weight for many years, so she went to her mother for help. The two set up a program where Abby was given a reward for every milestone she achieved.

“Four months ago, she asked that I don't get her any more rewards and add it up to her birthday gift, and for her gift she wants a vacation I will pay for, for her and her friends instead of the huge party I had promised for her 18th. I said OK,” the mother wrote.

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Pregnant.

There it was, clear as day, two blue lines staring back at me from the small pregnancy test I had just purchased.

I double-checked...

One line = not pregnant.

Two lines = pregnant.

Photo via iStock.


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Mariandrea Villegas has talent and showmanship beyond her years.

Dance is a unique art form in that the medium it utilizes is the human body itself. Simply through purposeful and graceful control of movement, dancers can express and evoke joy, sadness, fear, confusion—the whole range of human emotion. And when dancing is done well, it's utterly mesmerizing.

Such is the case with Mariandrea, a 14-year-old from Mexico who auditioned for America's Got Talent in July of 2023 and wowed both the judges and the audience with her dance performance. She has been dancing since she was 5, and as Simon Cowell pointed out, it's clear that she was born to do this.

After showing off her sparkling personality during the pre-performance interview, Mariandrea danced to a cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World," personifying the song in her performance. But it wasn't just her intentional movement that reflected the emotional complexity of the ever-popular hit. Her facial expressions, ranging from subtle fear to a clown-like smile to genuine sorrow to angry defiance, change on a dime, adding an acting element to her routine that takes it to the next level.

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Innovation

A student accidentally created a rechargeable battery that could last 400 years

"This thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going." ⚡️⚡️

There's an old saying that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

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Science

A juice company dumped orange peels in a national park. Here's what it looks like now.

12,000 tons of food waste and 21 years later, this forest looks totally different.


In 1997, ecologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs approached an orange juice company in Costa Rica with an off-the-wall idea.

In exchange for donating a portion of unspoiled, forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste — a nature preserve in the country's northwest — the park would allow the company to dump its discarded orange peels and pulp, free of charge, in a heavily grazed, largely deforested area nearby.

One year later, one thousand trucks poured into the national park, offloading over 12,000 metric tons of sticky, mealy, orange compost onto the worn-out plot.

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Lane Fontana shares her Ancestry DNA story.

Lake Fontana, A Brooklyn-based TikTokker, received a text message from a stranger in January of 2022, and it completely upended what she knew about her family. But it also taught her an important lesson about the relationships that matter in life.

“About a year ago now, on January 9, I got a text message telling me to get a DNA test from Ancestry, and I think it’s fake,” she shared on TikTok. “I FaceTime my friend, and I’m like, ‘Listen to this.’ And she’s like, ‘I swear my gut is telling me this is real. You need to respond.’”

The mystery person who reached out to Lane also made a burner Facebook account and reached out to her on that platform as well. “You have other family you might not be aware of,’” the mystery person texted her.

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