As the 2016 presidential election clanks into gear, it's a good time to assess the state of climate change politics in the United States.

In short: Things are not so good. Democrats are largely stuck in an ineffective holding pattern, implementing reasonable reforms with one hand and handing victories to oil companies with the other. Meanwhile, conservatives are still effectively denying the problem exists. Though the movement against climate change is making strides, there is a long ways to go yet.

Royal Dutch Shell has been accused of pursuing a strategy that would lead to potentially catastrophic climate change after an internal document acknowledged a global temperature rise of 4C, twice the level considered safe for the planet.

A paper used for guiding future business planning at the Anglo-Dutch multinational assumes that carbon dioxide emissions will fail to limit temperature increases to 2C, the internationally agreed threshold to prevent widespread flooding, famine and desertification.

Customers generally visit the Marriott hotel near Regent’s Park in London, for a good night’s sleep, not to help fight climate change.

But a radical program of energy demand reduction is underway to help them do both.

In another ominous sign of human-caused climate change, U.S. government scientists said lately that global carbon dioxide concentrations have reached a new monthly record of 400 parts per million.

Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas, and is a harmful by-product of burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

Despite growing concerns over climate change and energy security, the scale of subsidies given to fossil fuels is increasing globally.

Global fossil fuel subsidies amounted to USD 523 billion in 2011, increasing by 20% from 2010 (International Energy Agency, 2013). When compared to subsidies given to the renewable energy sector, these amounted to USD 88 billion in 2011 (IEA, 2013).

In 2013, the composition A Song of Our Warming Planet transformed 133 years of global temperature measurements into a haunting melody for the cello. Following its release, A Song of Our Warming Planet was featured by The New York Times, Slate, the Weather Channel, National Public Radio, io9, The Huffington Post and many others on its way to becoming a viral sensation and reaching audiences around the globe.

Now the co-creators, University of Minnesota undergraduate Daniel Crawford and geography professor Scott St. George, are back with a new composition that uses music to highlight the places where climate is changing most rapidly.

Chemistry books say there are three fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

Lately you could get the impression that coal is the only one.

Morocco's environment minister on Tuesday announced that the North African nation will reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 2030 by at least 13 percent.

The announcement comes ahead of the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in December.

Thomas Malone does not believe there is a solution to the problem of climate change. He thinks there are lots of solutions — and he has set out to find them.

Malone is founder and head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate CoLab, an online community that is attempting to use crowdsourcing to tackle one of the thorniest and most complex problems facing the planet.

In its first six months of existence, the world’s first solar road is performing even better than developers thought.

The road, which opened in the Netherlands in November of last year, has produced more than 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power a single household for one year, according to Al-Jazeera America.