March 2023

Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power.

Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)

Carbon dioxide is released when fossil fuels such as oil, coal or natural gas are burned to powers cars, planes, homes and factories. When the gas enters the atmosphere, it traps heat and contributes to the warming of the the climate.

Extreme weather events intensified last year’s carbon dioxide emissions: Droughts reduced the amount of water available for hydropower, which increased the need to burn fossil fuels. And heat waves drove up demand for electricity.

Thursday’s report was described as disconcerting by climate scientists, who warn that energy users around the world must cut emissions dramatically to slow the dire consequences of global warming.

“Any emissions growth — even 1% — is a failure,” said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University and chairman of the Global Carbon Project, an international group. “We can’t afford growth. We can’t afford stasis. It’s cuts or chaos for the planet. Any year with higher coal emissions is a bad year for our health and for the Earth.”

Carbon dioxide emissions from coal grew 1.6% last year. Many communities, primarily in Asia, switched from natural gas to coal to avoid high natural gas prices that were worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the IEA said.

And as global airline traffic increased, carbon dioxide emissions from burning oil grew 2.5%, with about half the surge resulting from the aviation sector.

Global emissions have grown in most years since 1900 and have accelerated over time, according to data from IEA. One exception was the pandemic year of 2020, when travel all but came to a standstill.

Last year’s level of emissions, though a record high, was nevertheless lower than experts had expected. Increased deployment of renewable energy, electric vehicles and heat pumps together helped prevent an additional 550 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions, the IEA said.

Strict pandemic measures and weak economic growth in China also curtailed production, helping to limit overall global emissions. And in Europe, the IEA said, electricity generation from wind and solar power exceeded that of gas or nuclear for the first time.

“Without clean energy, the growth in CO2 emissions would have been nearly three times as high,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said in a statement.

“However, we still see emissions growing from fossil fuels, hindering efforts to meet the world’s climate targets. International and national fossil fuel companies are making record revenues and need to take their share of responsibility, in line with their public pledges to meet climate goals.”

Though emissions continue to grow at worrisome levels, a reversal that would help achieve the climate goals that nations have committed to remains possible, said John Sterman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan Sustainability Initiative.

Nations must subsidize renewables, improve energy efficiency, electrify industry and transportation, set a high price for carbon emissions, reduce deforestation, plant trees and rid the system of coal, Sterman argued.

“This is a massive, massive undertaking to do all these things, but that’s what’s needed,” he said.
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Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched a four-person crew on a trip to the International Space Station early Thursday, with a Russian cosmonaut and United Arab Emirates astronaut joining two NASA crewmates on the flight.

The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A live NASA webcast showed the 25-story-tall spacecraft ascending from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the predawn sky.

The launch was expected to accelerate the Crew Dragon to an orbital velocity of 28,164 kph, more than 22 times the speed of sound.

The flight came 72 hours after an initial launch attempt was scrubbed in the final minutes of countdown early on Monday due to a clog in the flow of engine-ignition fluid. NASA said the problem was fixed by replacing a clogged filter and purging the system.

The trip to the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting some 420 kilometers above Earth, was expected to take nearly 25 hours, with rendezvous planned for about 1:15 a.m. EST (0615 GMT) Friday as the crew begins a six-month science mission in microgravity.

Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Musk — billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla and social media platform Twitter — began sending American astronauts to orbit in May 2020.

The latest ISS crew was led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a onetime U.S. Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.

Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as the Crew 6 pilot, was making his first spaceflight.

The Crew 6 mission also is notable for its inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from U.S. soil as part of a long-duration space station team. UAE’s first-ever astronaut launched to orbit in 2019 aboard a Russian spacecraft.

Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 was Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 42, who like Alneyadi is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the team.

Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly aboard an American spacecraft under a renewed ride-sharing deal signed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Crew 6 team will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS occupants — three U.S. NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly to space, along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.

The ISS, about the length of a football field, has been continuously operated for more than two decades years by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The Crew 6 mission follows two recent mishaps in which Russian spacecraft docked to the orbiting laboratory sprang coolant leaks apparently caused micrometeoroids, tiny grains of space rock, streaking through space and striking the craft at high velocity.

One of the affected Russian vehicles was a Soyuz crew capsule that had carried two cosmonauts and an astronaut to the space station in September for a six-month mission now set to end in March. An empty replacement Soyuz to bring them home arrived at the space station Saturday.
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NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a spot between two boulders during last September’s first test of a planetary defense system, sending debris hurtling into space and changing the rocky, oblong-shaped object’s path a bit more than previously calculated. 

Those were among the findings released by scientists on Wednesday in the most detailed account of the U.S. space agency’s proof-of-principle mission on using a spacecraft to change a celestial object’s trajectory — employing sheer kinetic force to nudge it off course just enough to keep Earth safe. 

“The DART test was phenomenally successful. We now know that we have a viable technique for potentially preventing an asteroid impact if one day we had the need to,” said planetary scientist Terik Daly of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, lead author of one of the DART studies published in the journal Nature.  

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided on September 26, 2022, at 22,530 kilometers per hour with Dimorphos, an asteroid about 150 meters in diameter, roughly 11 million kilometers from Earth. Dimorphos is a moonlet of Didymos, which is defined as a near-Earth asteroid and has a shape like a top spinning in space with a diameter of about 780 meters. Neither object imperils Earth.  

“We were trying to change the amount of time that it took for Dimorphos to orbit around Didymos by colliding head-on with Dimorphos,” said Northern Arizona University planetary scientist Cristina Thomas, lead author of another of the studies published in Nature.  

“The momentum of the collision and the momentum of the ejected material both acted to decrease the amount of time it takes Dimorphos to orbit by 33 minutes. This also results in the object orbiting a little bit closer to Didymos,” Thomas said. 

Before the impact, the orbital period was 11 hours, 55 minutes. It now is 11 hours, 22 minutes. NASA’s previous estimate, announced in October, was an orbital change of 32 minutes. The benchmark for success had been set as a change of at least 1 minute, 13 seconds. 

The scientists gave a blow-by-blow account of how the collision unfolded. 

“First, one of the spacecraft’s solar panels directly hit a large boulder near the impact site. Next, the second solar panel grazed another large boulder. Finally, the spacecraft bus — the box between the solar panels — hit between these two boulders,” Daly said. 

“We suspect that these two boulders were destroyed. After impact, ejecta [debris blasted into space] was launched from the surface for a period of time,” Daly added, saying satellite and telescope images showed a large amount of such material. 

The research also clarified details such as the precise location of the impact and the angle of impact. 

“People may think of the DART mission as a fairly straightforward experiment that is similar to playing billiards in space — one solid spacecraft impacts into one solid asteroid,” Thomas said. “However, asteroids are far more complex than just a solid rock. In fact, most asteroids are what we think of as rubble piles.” 

The $330 million DART mission was seven years in development. 

“We don’t know of any asteroids at this time that pose a threat to Earth, but we want to be ready for such a scenario,” Daly said. “It’s analogous to testing a car’s airbags. You make sure they work during a crash test instead of waiting to get in a real car accident to find out if they work.”
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Eli Lilly will cut prices for some older insulins later this year and immediately give more patients access to a cap on the costs they pay to fill prescriptions. 

The moves announced Wednesday promise critical relief to some people with diabetes who can face thousands of dollars in annual costs for insulin they need in order to live. Lilly’s changes also come as lawmakers and patient advocates pressure drugmakers to do something about soaring prices. 

Lilly said it will cut the list prices for its most commonly prescribed insulin, Humalog, and for another insulin, Humulin, by 70% or more in the fourth quarter, which starts in October. 

List prices are what a drugmaker initially sets for a product and what people who have no insurance or plans with high deductibles are sometimes stuck paying. 

A Lilly spokeswoman said the current list price for a 10-milliliter vial of the fast-acting, mealtime insulin Humalog is $274.70. That will fall to $66.40. 

Likewise, she said the same amount of Humulin currently lists at $148.70. That will change to $44.61. 

Lilly CEO David Ricks said Wednesday that his company was making the changes to address issues that affect the price patients ultimately pay for its insulins. 

He noted that discounts Lilly offers from its list prices often don’t reach patients through insurers or pharmacy benefit managers. High-deductible coverage can lead to big bills at the pharmacy counter, particularly at the start of the year when the deductibles renew. 

“We know the current U.S. health care system has gaps,” he said. “This makes a tough disease like diabetes even harder to manage.” 

Patient advocates have long called for insulin price cuts to help uninsured people who would not be affected by price caps tied to insurance coverage. 

Lilly’s planned cuts “could actually provide some substantial price relief,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University who studies drug costs. 

She noted that the moves likely won’t affect Lilly much financially because the insulins are older, and some already face competition. 

Lilly also said Wednesday that it will cut the price of its authorized generic version of Humalog to $25 a vial starting in May. 

Lilly also is launching in April a biosimilar insulin to compete with Sanofi’s Lantus. 

Ricks said that it will take time for insurers and the pharmacy system to implement its price cuts, so the drugmaker will immediately cap monthly out-of-pocket costs at $35 for people who are not covered by Medicare’s prescription drug program. 

The drugmaker said the cap applies to people with commercial coverage and at most retail pharmacies. 

Lilly said people without insurance can find savings cards to receive insulin for the same amount at its InsulinAffordability.com website. 

The federal government in January started applying that cap to patients with coverage through its Medicare program for people 65 and older or those who have certain disabilities or illnesses. 

President Joe Biden brought up that cost cap during his annual State of the Union address last month. He called for insulin costs for everyone to be capped at $35. 

Biden said in a statement Wednesday that Lilly responded to his call. 

“It’s a big deal, and it’s time for other manufacturers to follow,” Biden said. 

Aside from Eli Lilly and the French drugmaker Sanofi, other insulin makers include the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. 

Representatives for both Sanofi and Novo Nordisk said their companies offer several programs that limit costs for people with and without coverage. 
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