That was the year Ogden Bolton Jr. of Canton, Ohio, was awarded U.S. Patent 552,271 for an “electrical bicycle.” A century and change later, electric bikes have gained new currency as car and motorcycle companies like Ducati, Harley-Davidson, Jeep, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Yamaha have horned into the market with their own designs.“In the past 12 to 18 months, you have seen a lot of new brands come into the market,” said Andrew Engelmann, an e-bike sales and marketing manager at Yamaha, which has been in the electric bike business since 1993 and claims sales of two million worldwide. While retail unit sales of bicycles from January to October last year were up 46 percent from a year earlier, electric bikes were up 140 percent. Those numbers, from the market researchers at NPD, do not include online-only retailers such as Rad Power Bikes, so sales may actually be higher still.

The United States climate envoy, John Kerry, on Tuesday warned that global warming was making the world a more dangerous place and posed risks to peace and security around the world. Failing to address the threats of climate change is “marching forward to what is almost tantamount to a mutual suicide pact,” Mr. Kerry said in a session of the United Nations Security Council attended by presidents and prime ministers from several countries.“It’s urgent to treat the climate crisis as the urgent security threat that it is.”Climate change has been coming up in the Security Council for more than a decade, but the Tuesday meeting was notable for its stark contrast to the last four years, when the United States, under the presidency of Donald J. Trump, sought to block even general mentions of climate science in United Nations proceedings.

What will our foreign policy mean for American workers and their families?What do we need to do around the world to make us stronger here at home?And what do we need to do at home to make us stronger in the world?And there is no wall high enough or strong enough to hold back the changes transforming our world.

“The old joke in Wyoming is all you need to use to go coal mining is a three-iron. People were told that coal will always be here, that these are lifetime jobs,” said Rob Godby, an economist at the University of Wyoming. In the midst of this economic despair, Carbon County, on the edge of the Red Desert, ended last year as one of only three counties in the state with budget surpluses, largely thanks to tax revenues from wind projects. The high desert landscape with vistas that stretch to the horizon makes Wyoming one of the best spots in the nation for wind.

A northern branch of the Gulf Stream — the vast ocean current that runs from West Africa to the Americas, up the East Coast and back across the Atlantic to the British Isles — has served for ages as a kind of planetary heat pump that helps regulate the planet’s climate. Now, some scientists think melting ice from Greenland could be inhibiting this crucial northern branch of the current. To learn more, researchers have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the ocean, not only on the surface, but hundreds of feet deep. Why it matters: Consequences could include faster sea level rise along parts of the Eastern United States and Europe, stronger hurricanes barreling into the Southeastern United States, and perhaps most ominously, reduced rainfall across the Sahel, the semi-arid swath of land running the width of Africa that is already a geopolitical tinderbox.

In an unusual — and somewhat controversial — move, federal wildlife officials in California are teaming up with a wind power company to breed endangered California condors in captivity, in an effort to replace any that might be felled by turbine blades. The company, Avangrid Renewables, which operates 126 turbines in the windy Tehachapi Mountains about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, is working with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to breed the birds in captivity at the Oregon Zoo.“Our goal is zero fatalities,” Amy Parsons, the operations wildlife compliance manager for Avangrid Renewables in Portland, Ore., said in an interview on Tuesday. Although the Wildlife Service’s Carlsbad Fish and Wildlife Office said in a statement that there had been no documented cases of a wind turbine injuring or killing a condor at the plant since it opened in 2012, it noted that condor presence near wind energy projects — and the potential for fatal collisions — would continue to increase with the growth of the wild condor population.

In an interview meant to be a curtain raiser to an annual presentation that executives will offer financial analysts and investors on Wednesday, Mr. Woods, 56, waxed poetic about the history of technology and the energy industry and even suggested there was common ground between his plans to reduce emissions and President Biden’s efforts to fight climate change. It also recently invested in Global Thermostat, a company that aims to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Unlike executives of European oil companies, Mr. Woods is not cutting investments in oil and gas in favor of spending money on wind and solar power.“Unlike their big oil competitors that have begun taking action on climate change, Woods and Exxon Mobil continue to live in a fairy tale world of inaction while California burns and Texas freezes,” said Peter Krull, chief executive of Earth Equity Advisors, a research and investment firm specializing in sustainability.

An Alaska Native group failed to meet a critical deadline as part of its proposal to conduct a seismic survey in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Interior Department announced. The failure effectively kills the survey, which would have determined the location of oil and gas reserves in part of the refuge in anticipation of drilling there.A department spokeswoman, Melissa Schwarz, said that the group, the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, had not undertaken reconnaissance flights to detect polar bear dens in the proposed survey area as a prelude to sending trucks and other survey equipment rolling across the refuge’s coastal plain this winter. Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency, had required that three flights be conducted before Feb. 13 as part of the corporation’s request for an authorization that would require extensive efforts to avoid the animals during the full seismic survey.

WASHINGTON — When Representative Deb Haaland was tapped in December to be President Biden’s interior secretary, the decision was hailed as historic. She was the first Native American ever nominated to serve in cabinet — in this case to head a department that, for much of the nation’s history, has mistreated and neglected Indigenous Americans. No other Biden nominee to head a cabinet department has divided the political parties as sharply. To her considerable number of supporters, she embodies the hope of the Biden era, an activist second-term representative from New Mexico who would break ground like no other member of the cabinet, ethnically and politically.

In a report last month, Science Based Targets, which was started by the environmental groups and hundreds of businesses brought together by the United Nations, said the 338 large companies around the world for which it had sufficient emissions data collectively reduced their emissions by 25 percent between 2015 and 2019. For example, Walmart discloses its targets for emissions reductions and the progress it has made to the CDP, including a goal for emissions from its suppliers, and its plan has been vetted by Science Based Targets. The task gets even harder when companies begin the process of reducing so-called Scope 3 emissions — pollution caused by suppliers and customers. At oil companies, for example, Scope 3 would include emissions from cars that use gasoline.