One Bryant Park Bank of America, was the first building in New York City to achieve this mark. This is the highest rank of certification for any building.
The smog in New York City was horrible up until the creation of the EPA and groups such as the "Scenic Hudson", that cracked down environmental issues throughout the city and along the river. The smog was even causing an increase in illness and eventually death.
This Wall Street Journal article details the inspiration many environmentalists felt about climate change mitigation following the success of the Montreal Protocol, and some aspects preventing similar treaties from being enacted for climate change.
This article from the Atlanta Constitution in 1981 discusses some scientific findings on climate change and its relation to carbon dioxide emissions, but ends by casting doubt on assumptions made in the climate models.
This article from the Atlanta Constitution in 1924 discusses the natural variability of weather, and claims that nature follows no patterns. It also states that climate changes can only happen so slowly that humans would never notice - this belief may have been true at the time, since it wasn't for another 20 years or so that regularly changes in global temperature were accurately and consistently recorded.
Even though the current US President is a climate change denier, climate change still became a topic of the Presidential Debates leading up to the 2020 US Presidential Election. In addition, in the beginning of November a President-Elect with an actual climate change mitigation plan was elected!
While emissions briefly dropped during the global shutdown due to COVID, it quickly became evident that even change of that level wasn't enough to bring emissions down to safe levels. On the bright side, the global response to COVID-19 did indicate that global emergency responses are possible, if the need appears dire enough. The next problem is that by the time the need seems dire enough to deal with climate change, it will be too late.
US President Trump announced the US would be leaving the Paris Agreement as soon as it was able to a matter of months after the agreement went into effect. He claimed the requirements of the agreement would hurt the economy and punish the US over countries like China, who he claimed were much worse for the environment than the US. Since the US is still one of the top-3 greenhouse gas emitting countries, their leaving the Agreement greatly weakened its ability to effectively mitigate climate change.
The Paris Agreement was a voluntary and non-binding international agreement reached in 2015 with a goal of keeping global temperature rise well below 2 degrees C this century and pursue an ambitious goal of staying below 1.5 degrees C, which has been stated as a safer target. Participating countries submitted their own climate plans to try to enact, and the goal was that with less consequence of failure, more countries will dare to be ambitious.
In November 2009, just before the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December, over 1000 emails between scientists from the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia. These emails proved to be rude and dismissive, but were far from evidence of data-tampering that climate skeptics tried to make them out to be. With all the confusion and hype, however, many people were convinced the scientific consensus was considerably less confident about climate change than was accurate, and the "scandal" resulted in a dark cloud over climate science for a long time afterwards.
The Fourth Climate Assessment by the IPCC strengthened the Panel's stance on climate change, stating: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations". As far as 97% of scientists were concerned, as of this point, climate change was happening, although the extent was still unknown.
The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty that aspired to be the Montreal Protocol of climate change, but was unsuccessful. Even though it was originally ratified by over 190 countries, there were no real penalties to failing to reach emission reduction targets and therefore little incentive for drastic change. In addition, the treaty placed most of the obligation on developed countries, excluding India and China who quickly grew to join the ranks of top three emitters as of 2018, alongside the US, who never joined in the first place.
The Montreal Protocol was "a global agreement to protect the stratospheric ozone layer by phasing out the production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances (ODS)", and is highly regarded as a successful global model for dealing with an environmental issue.
The IPCC's third report was published in 2001, where they tentatively claimed that although climate science was still very uncertain, it was more likely than not that severe global warming was coming.
This article published in the Atlanta Constitution was originally written by the New York Times in 1977. It features a straightforward warning about the dangers of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere and predicts a 10 degree F increase in temperature by the latter part of the 22nd century. The confidence of the conclusions were questioned and it was specified that more (expensive) research was necessary.
After acquiring Horsneck as a State Reservation, the Massachusetts State Government built Route 88 in order to create better access to the town and the beaches. This contributed to Westport becoming a full-blown beach town, rather than the fishing town that it was initially, as tourists and vacationers began to arrive in droves after it was built.
After the destruction of the 1938 and 1954 hurricanes, there was no one left living on the beachfront, leading to the state acquiring the beach in 1956 as a protected state reservation, which was a better alternative than the town attempting to rebuild the area once again. This also led to the implementation of policies meant to protect the beach ecosystems, such as restricted access to sand dunes where rare beach birds make their nests.
One of the costliest events in Westport history, there was immense damage done to infrastructure and 22 lives were lost. Almost every home and business on the Horseneck Beach front and in the Westport Harbor were completely leveled. Photo: East Beach on 1938 vs how it looks today.
After the early settlement was broken up by French and Indians in 1754, the district was officially formed in 1772. The early settlement formed around the rivers and streams, such as the Walloomsac.
With the rise of discussions about climate change among governmental and regulatory bodies, the fossil fuel industry began to fight back against the idea that they were contributing to a climate change. One method of this was through the founding of the Global Climate Coalition, an organization that opposed regulation to mitigate CO2 emissions and questioned the science behind climate change.
By the early 90s, most climate scientists agreed that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would result in a climatic temperature increase of at least 1 degree C, although there was still a lot of variability in different estimates and how much other factors like other gases or changes in solar activity were estimated to contribute.
The establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the United Nations' first step towards formally studying climate change and its impacts. Their formal goal was to "prepare a comprehensive review and recommendations with respect to the state of knowledge of the science of climate change; the social and economic impact of climate change, and potential response strategies and elements for inclusion in a possible future international convention on climate." They've since produced 5 formal Climate Assessment Reports, and a number of additional reports relating to climate change.
While they were originally founded in 1984, the right-leaning "free-market thinktank" began their contributions to climate science with their 1994 publication 'Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism', which renounced so-called "environmental alarmism" and called for a much more conservative approach to environmental protections. Today the Heartland Institute can be counted on for "science" disputing the urgency of climate change and the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.