By Associated Press/The Guardian.  Excerpt: Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ...The power plant rule marks the first time the federal government has restricted  carbon dioxide emissions  from existing coal-fired power plants. The rule also would force future electric plants fueled by coal or gas to control up to 90% of their carbon pollution. The new standards will stave off 1.38bn metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047, equivalent to the annual emissions of 328m gas cars, the EPA said, and will provide hundreds of billions of dollars in climate and health benefits, measured in fewer premature deaths, asthma cases, and lost work or school days. ...Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said that through the latest rules, “the EPA is systematically dismantling the reliability of the US electric grid”. ...Coal provided about 16

By Dan Gearino , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: For people who have spent their careers trying to expand access to rooftop solar energy, the announcement on Monday of $7 billion worth of project support from the Biden administration is almost unfathomable in its size and scope. Money from the Solar for All program, which is part of the Inflation Reduction Act, will go to 60 recipients that include state and Tribal governments and nonprofit organizations. Its goal is to help lower-income and otherwise disadvantaged households obtain the financial and environmental benefits of solar. “It’s a good day,” said Erica Mackie, CEO and co-founder of GRID Alternatives, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit that will receive two grants totaling more than $310 million and is involved with a third grant of $62.3 million. ...GRID Alternatives started in 2004 with the installation of two solar systems and has grown to about 500 employees who provide job training for solar installers and set up solar

By Delger Erdenesanaa , The New York Times.  Excerpt: To mark Earth Day (and to try to reach young, environmentally-minded voters) President Biden is  promoting a new national program  to train and employ people in climate-related jobs, and reminding voters of the clean-energy investments underway following the Inflation Reduction Act. ...Uruguay, a nation of 3.4 million people wedged between Argentina and Brazil, generates nearly all its electricity from renewable sources. In 2008, the  government set a goal  of transforming the electric grid, which had come to depend on imported oil. ...Between 2013 and 2018, wind generation grew sharply from almost nothing to about a quarter of Uruguay’s electricity mix. By the end of 2022, the most recent year data is available, Uruguay generated more than  90 percent of its power  from renewables, with wind and solar growing even as hydropower declined. ...Transportation is the second biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Electric car sales

By ELISE CUTTS , Science.  Excerpt: Samples of eerie blue glacial ice from Antarctica are a staggering 6 million years old, scientists announced last week,  doubling the previous record  for Earth’s oldest ice. The ice opens a new window on Earth’s ancient climate—one that isn’t exactly what scientists expected. The ice opens a new window on Earth’s ancient climate—one that isn’t exactly what scientists expected. The results are preliminary, stresses Ed Brook, a geochemist at Oregon State University (OSU) and leader of the U.S. Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), which  presented   the   discovery  last week here in multiple talks at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. But if even a tiny drop in CO 2  can kick off a major climate change, Brook adds, “you know, we probably care about that.”....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/oldest-ever-ice-offers-glimpse-earth-ice-ages . 

By CHRISTIAN ELLIOTT , Science.  Excerpt: The helicopter hovered overhead, whipping up snow. ...One trip down, 17 more to go,  thought [Peter] Neff, a polar glaciologist  at the University of Minnesota (UM) Twin Cities. ...Neff and his team would have just 10 days to drill ice cores on Canisteo, a peninsula on the west coast of Antarctica—and a blizzard was already looming. ...Scientists usually target sites deep in the continent’s interior, where the weather is calmer and they can spend years collecting kilometers-long ice cores that record hundreds of thousands of years of climate history. Neff needed just a couple hundred years of history, and he only needed to drill 150 meters deep to get it. But his chosen location was exceptionally remote and stormy. He was there because of ...the  Pine Island  and  Thwaites glaciers , which jut into the Amundsen Sea as frozen shelves tens of kilometers wide. These glaciers act as corks in the bottle of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which ...stor

By WARREN CORNWALL , Science.  Excerpt: In March 2021, a grisly scene materialized on the beaches of South Africa. Giant bat-winged manta rays sprawled belly up on rocks. Hulking bull sharks lay dead in the sand. Puffer fish littered shorelines like deflated footballs. Such fish kills are usually triggered by hot water, low oxygen, or toxic algae blooms. But this time it was a surprising culprit. In the middle of the southern summer, these fish died of cold—a phenomenon that may be linked to climate change, according to  a new paper . At a time when global warming is driving ocean temperatures to record-setting highs and  marine heat waves are striking around the globe , it might seem paradoxical that climate change could be linked to the underwater equivalent of a cold snap. But researchers now say that in some parts of the world, incidents like the 2021 cold spell appear to be getting more common as currents change, with potentially lethal consequences for marine life....  See articl

By Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Permafrost underlies a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. A comprehensive analysis shows that the area may have shifted from a sink to a source of greenhouse gases, bringing a longtime prediction to fruition. Permafrost underlies about  14 million square kilometers  of land in and around the Arctic. The top 3 meters contain an estimated 1 trillion metric tons of carbon and 55 billion metric tons of nitrogen. Historically, the northern permafrost region has been a sink for carbon, as frozen soils inhibit microbial decomposition. But rising temperatures contribute to thawing permafrost and enhance the biogeochemical activities that  exacerbate climate change  by releasing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ), and nitrous oxide (N 2 O). ... Ramage et al.   synthesized greenhouse gas measurements of the northern permafrost region between 2000 and 2020 to provide a carbon balance for the region, as well as the first compr

By Nathaniel Scharping , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The U.S. oil and gas industry is responsible for emitting 3 times more methane than current government estimates, according to a new study. Those emissions cost $9.3 billion annually because of their effects on global warming and air quality, the authors estimated. The study,  published in  Nature , used aerial surveys to track methane emissions from oil and gas fields, pipelines, processing facilities, and more in six fossil fuel–producing regions of the United States. It adds to a  growing body of evidence  indicating that methane emissions are  far higher than previously thought .. See article at https://eos.org/articles/methane-emissions-from-the-oil-and-gas-industry-are-triple-current-estimates . Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, often calculated to be 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (though  some studies  say it could be even more powerful), and is responsible for around a  third of human-caused global warming  to date. Cur

By Hilary Howard , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Heat pumps, which both warm and cool buildings and are powered by electricity, have been touted as the answer to curbing greenhouse gas emissions produced by homes, businesses and office buildings, which are responsible for about  one-third of the emissions  in New York State. ...A heat pump moves heat. ...During warm weather, a pump works just like an air-conditioner by rerouting indoor heat outdoors. When it’s cold outside, the process is reversed: Heat from the chilly outdoor air is extracted and delivered indoors with the help of refrigerants and a compressor. ...The devices are highly efficient, which should help limit the growing burden on the grid, said Rohit T. Aggarwala, the [New York] city’s climate chief. ...In New York City, Con Ed customers have completed more than 30,000 installations since 2020. And across the state,  nearly 23,000 heat pump projects  were installed in 2022, a threefold increase from the year before.... Se

By Christopher Mims , The Wall Street Journal.  Excerpt: In the next five years, significant upgrades to the batteries in electric vehicles should finally hit the market. In the works for decades, these changes are likely to mean that by 2030, gas vehicles will cost more than their electric equivalents; some EVs will charge as quickly as filling up at a gas station ; and super long-range EVs will make the phrase “range anxiety” seem quaint. ...a new kind of battery which will hold more than 20% more energy than the previous type, and charging speed and range will also improve by up to 30%, says a BMW spokesman. ...In theory, a [solid] lithium metal anode can hold 10 times as many lithium ions as a graphite one [ that’s in today’s lithium-ion batteries ]. All other things being equal, this means the energy density of a battery using lithium metal in place of graphite could be up to 50% higher. ... engineers aim to deliver to automakers a battery that can add 100 miles of range in just

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-04-11/explosive-levels-of-methane-detected-at-cesar-chavez-park-berkeley By Tony Briscoe , Los Angeles Times.  Excerpt: Brimming with wildlife and offering panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, César Chávez Park welcomes visitors who might never suspect this stretch of shoreline was built atop a municipal landfill. But beneath the sprawling grasslands and charming hiking trails, decomposing waste continues to generate methane gas. That’s why the city of Berkeley operates an underground system that collects this flammable gas and torches it at a large mechanical flare near the center of the park. In recent years, environmental regulators have grown increasingly concerned that this equipment has fallen into disrepair and released landfill gases. The  Bay Area Air Quality Management District  has fined Berkeley after finding explosive levels of methane leaking from at least two cracked gas collection wells in the park. Both have since been re

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/line-five-pipeline-amicus-brief.html By Rebecca Halleck  and  Dionne Searcey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Department of Justice has weighed in on a court battle over an oil and gas pipeline in Wisconsin, saying that a Canadian oil company has been willfully trespassing on tribal lands in the state for more than a decade.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/climate/ocean-heat-records.html By Delger Erdenesanaa , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The ocean has now broken temperature records every day for more than a year. And so far, 2024 has continued 2023’s trend of beating previous records by wide margins.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/world/europe/climate-human-rights.html By Isabella Kwai  and  Emma Bubola , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Europe’s top human rights court said on Tuesday that the  Swiss government had violated its citizens’ human rights  by not doing enough to stop climate change, a landmark ruling that experts said could bolster activists hoping to use human rights law to hold governments to account. In the case, which was brought by a group called KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, said that Switzerland had failed to meet its target in reducing carbon emissions and must act to address that shortcoming.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/climate/electric-grid-more-power.html By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: One of the biggest obstacles to expanding clean energy in the United States is a lack of power lines. Building new transmission lines can take a decade or more because of permitting delays and local opposition. But there may be a faster, cheaper solution,  according to two reports released Tuesday . Replacing existing power lines with cables made from state-of-the-art materials could roughly double the capacity of the electric grid in many parts of the country, making room for much more wind and solar power.... 

https://hakaimagazine.com/news/can-green-hydrogen-production-help-bring-oceanic-dead-zones-back-to-life/ By Brian Owens , Hakai Magazine.  Excerpt: Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had met with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, in nearby Stephenville, Newfoundland...in August 2022, the two leaders locked in Canada’s commitment to supply Germany with hydrogen gas. ...Stephenville...is the site of the proposed World Energy GH2 project, a facility that will use wind power to produce hydrogen gas ...reducing Germany’s reliance on Russian oil. ...[Douglas] Wallace, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, was tracking how dissolved oxygen moves from the Atlantic Ocean through the gulf into the St. Lawrence River, and how the dearth of oxygen in some places can lead to the development of low-oxygen dead zones. ...So when he heard that Canada was set to ramp up hydrogen production—achieved by electrically splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen—he wondered:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/05/letitia-james-jbs-meat-lawsuit-greenwashing By Whitney Bauck , The Guardian.  Excerpt: When the office of the New York attorney general, Letitia James,  announced  that it would be suing the world’s largest meat company, JBS, for misleading customers about its climate commitments, it caused a stir far beyond the world of food. That’s because the suit’s impact has the potential to influence the approach all kinds of big businesses take in their advertising about sustainability, according to experts. It’s just one in a string of greenwashing lawsuits being brought against large airline, automobile and  fashion  companies of late. “It’s been 20 years of companies lying about their environmental and climate justice impacts...,” said Todd Paglia, executive director of environmental non-profit Stand.earth. ...Research  suggests  that citizens are increasingly demanding more sustainably produced goods, and big businesses are taking note. But

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-never-too-late-to-take-climate-action/ By JAMES K. BOYCE , Scientific American.  Excerpt: It’s official: this February was the  hottest one  on record. You may have noticed something odd when you stepped outside your door and winter was missing. It turns out the  weather weirdness was worldwide . In case you missed it, this comes on top of the news that  January  was the hottest ever, too, and that 2023 was the  hottest year  we’ve experienced so far. Again and again, climate activists have warned that we have only so much time left to head off catastrophe. Soon, we are told, it will be “ too late ” to save the planet and ourselves. Their message rests on the assumption that fear is the most potent spur to action. This communication strategy is deeply flawed. Politically, it leads many to  despair  that all is lost. When the climate apocalypse fails to arrive on schedule, it leads others to seek comfort in the parable of the boy who cried

https://www.science.org/content/article/clearer-skies-may-be-accelerating-global-warming By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: When 2023 turned out to be  the hottest year in history , it underscored the warnings of some prominent climate scientists, including James Hansen, that the pace of global warming was accelerating and had entered a dangerous new phase. A new study,  published  Wednesday in Communications Earth & Environment, suggests one reason for such an acceleration: Earth’s skies are getting clearer and letting in more sunshine. ...a set of NASA instruments in space [the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES)] since 2001 have tracked the delicate balance of energy entering and leaving the planet...have detected a  marked rise  in the amount of solar energy the planet has absorbed—well beyond the warming expected from rising greenhouse gases. The readings show the planet has become less reflective, as if it recently put on a darker shirt. One reason is a drop

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/africas-carbon-sink-capacity-is-shrinking By Rachel Fritts , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The population of Africa, the second-largest continent in the world, currently sits at about 1.4 billion, but is set to exceed 2 billion by 2040. This means greater swaths of land than ever before are being used for agriculture, and livestock numbers are increasing. A new estimate of Africa’s greenhouse gas budget between 2010 and 2019 quantifies just how much these changes in land use have affected Africa’s role in the global carbon cycle. ...To make their estimates,  Ernst et al.  ...took a comprehensive look at all major potential carbon sources, including human sources such as agriculture and fossil fuel emissions and natural sources such as termites and wildfires. They also considered natural sinks: the  grasslands ,  savannas , and  forests  that still cover much of the continent. The team found that between 2010 and 2019, Africa transitioned from being a slight net

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04042024/biden-administration-green-bank-network-disadvantaged-communities/ By Kristoffer Tigue , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: The Biden administration on Thursday announced it was creating the nation’s first “green bank” network, an historic $20 billion investment aimed at making clean energy affordable to low-income and rural residents. ...Under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund—also known as  the country’s first national green bank —eight community development banks and nonprofit organizations will receive that federal funding to go toward rooftop solar installations, energy efficiency upgrades and other projects that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act created the green bank in 2022 with an initial federal investment of $27 billion. ...The groups, which consist of Coalition for Green Capital, Power Forward Communities, Appalachian Community Capital, Climate United, Justice Climate F

https://www.sfchronicle.com/weather/article/geoengineering-cloud-research-alameda-19368199.php By Anthony Edwards , San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: In Alameda [CA], scientists are embarking on a novel attempt to cool the Earth — by spraying salt into clouds. The work, known as marine cloud brightening, is controversial and is just one method of geoengineering — which describes interventions meant to slow Earth’s warming. But proponents say the technology may be needed to mitigate climate change. To brighten clouds, researchers spray microscopic sea salt into the air over the ocean to boost clouds’ reflectivity. This means less sunlight is absorbed, leading to a planetary cooling effect. ...Scientists hypothesize that by manually increasing the number of particles in the atmosphere, clouds will reflect more sunlight back to space, causing Earth to cool. ...Scientists like Russell say that before more drastic solutions are deployed, the focus should be on reining in greenhouse gas emi

https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/04/03/california-leads-us-emissions-of-little-known-greenhouse-gas/ By Hannah Robbins, Johns Hopkins University.  Excerpt: California, a state known for its aggressive greenhouse gas reduction policies, is ironically the nation's greatest emitter of one: sulfuryl fluoride. As much as 17% of global emissions of this gas, a common pesticide for treating termites and other wood-infesting insects, stem from the United States. The majority of those emissions trace back to just a few counties in California, according to a new study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. ...60-85% of sulfuryl fluoride emissions in the U.S. come from California, primarily Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties.... First approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for use as a pesticide in 1959, sulfuryl fluoride gained popularity after countries around the world agreed to phase out more reactive fumigants that were depleting the ozone layer, the researchers s

https://www.science.org/content/article/satellite-signals-can-measure-forest-s-moisture-and-its-ability-survive By SEAN CUMMINGS , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The same radio signals that enable your smartphone to pinpoint your location may also reveal how much water a forest holds within its foliage. By measuring how much GPS satellite signals weakened as they passed through a forest canopy, researchers were able to estimate the canopy’s water content. Experts say the technique, which uses a simple setup of two GPS receivers, could provide a simple and affordable way to track a forest’s water content. ...it could provide useful data to researchers trying to figure out how forests will fare under climate change.... 

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-ferry-building-sea-level-rise-19380061.php By Laura Waxmann , San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: An ambitious government plan to  protect San Francisco’s Ferry Building  from flooding and sea level rise by lifting it up as much as 7 feet has at least one powerful skeptic: the developer that’s set to operate the iconic building for another four decades. San Francisco and Army Corps of Engineers officials are considering raising the 126-year-old building as part of a $13.5 billion proposal intended to protect the city’s waterfront in the coming decades. ...But the Ferry Building, with its 245-foot clock tower, is more than a landmark — it’s also a “working building” that would likely see its operations interrupted for years if the plan is executed as proposed, said Hudson Pacific Properties, which runs the Ferry Building under a long-term lease with the Port of San Francisco.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/31/climate/climate-change-carbon-capture-ccs.html By David Gelles , The New York Times.  Excerpt: On a windswept Icelandic plateau, an international team of engineers and executives is powering up an innovative machine designed to alter the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere. If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe. ...Global temperatures are now expected to rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. That has given new weight to what some people call geoengineering, though that term has become so contentious its proponents now prefer the term “climate interventions.” ...Many of the projects are controversial. A plant similar to the one in Iceland, but far larger, is being

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado8276 By ROSE M. MUTISO , Science.  Excerpt: When Buti Manamela  visited  Lengau, one of Africa’s fastest supercomputers, he had more prosaic technology in mind: electricity. South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology was at the Center for High Performance Computing in Cape Town for what should have been a showcase tour of a facility providing the country with the computing power needed to run and analyze the kinds of complex models and huge datasets that underpin artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But Manamela was there to better understand the impact of South Africa’s  rolling power blackouts  on the center’s operations. Lengau, which means “cheetah” in Setswana, is one of the most important outposts in Africa’s AI infrastructure landscape; yet, it is struggling to operate at full capacity because of unreliable power. ...I’ve written before on the following connection:  no power, no int

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi7735 By DANIEL H. CUSWORTH   et al, Science.  Abstract: Methane emissions from solid waste may represent a substantial fraction of the global anthropogenic budget, but few comprehensive studies exist to assess inventory assumptions. We quantified emissions at hundreds of large landfills across 18 states in the United States between 2016 and 2022 using airborne imaging spectrometers. Spanning 20% of open United States landfills, this represents the most systematic measurement-based study of methane point sources of the waste sector. We detected significant point source emissions at a majority (52%) of these sites, many with emissions persisting over multiple revisits (weeks to years). We compared these against independent contemporaneous in situ airborne observations at 15 landfills and established good agreement. Our findings indicate a need for long-term, synoptic-scale monitoring of landfill emissions in the context of climate change mit

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27032024/sea-level-rise-flooding-coastal-cities/ By Moriah McDonald , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: In the affected cities, as many as 500,000 people and one in every 35 properties could be impacted by the flooding, and communities of color face disproportionate effects. Flooding could affect one out of every 50 residents in 24 coastal cities in the United States by the year 2050, a study led by Virginia Tech researchers suggests. The study, published this month in  Nature , shows how the combination of land subsidence—in this case, the sinking of shoreline terrain—and rising sea levels can lead to the flooding of coastal areas sooner than previously anticipated by research that had focused primarily on sea level rise scenarios. ...The study combines measurements of land subsidence obtained from satellites with sea level rise projections and tide charts, offering a more holistic projection of potential flooding risks in 32 cities located along the At

https://www.science.org/content/article/startups-aim-curb-climate-change-pulling-carbon-dioxide-ocean-not-air By ROBERT F. SERVICE , Science.  Excerpt: ...one long gray barge docked at the [Port of Los Angeles] is doing its part to combat climate change. On the barge, which belongs to Captura, a Los Angeles–based startup, is a system of pipes, pumps, and containers that ingests seawater and sucks out CO 2 , which can be used to make plastics and fuels or buried. The decarbonated seawater is returned to the ocean, where it absorbs more CO 2  from the atmosphere, in a small strike against the inexorable rise of the greenhouse gas. After a yearlong experiment with the barge, which is designed to capture 100 tons of CO 2  per year, Captura is planning to open a 1000-ton-per-year facility later this year in Norway that will bury the captured CO 2  in rock formations under the North Sea. Equatic, another Los Angeles–based startup, is launching an even larger 3650-ton-per-year ocean CO 2  cap

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26032024/permian-basin-methane-flaring/ By Martha Pskowski , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: As the new federal methane rule enters the home stretch, stranded gas in the Permian Basin could contribute to more flaring this year. [Sharon] Wilson documented widespread flaring, venting and other methane releases during a week in the Texas Permian Basin this month. Natural gas prices in the Permian Basin fell below zero during March. When natural gas prices are low, companies are more likely to vent or flare methane. Pipeline capacity to transport the gas out of the Permian Basin is currently limited, which can also result in more flaring. That’s bad news for efforts to fight climate change. Natural gas is mostly made up of methane and the Permian Basin is the single-largest source of methane emissions in the U.S. oil and gas industry. As a greenhouse gas, methane is about 80 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year per

https://climateworks.org/press-release/statement-on-the-historic-6-billion-for-industrial-decarbonization-in-the-u-s/ By ClimateWorks Foundation .  Excerpt: Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) took a huge step to accelerate  industrial decarbonization  and transform polluting heavy industries to clean production. The $6 billion investment is the largest ever made in industrial climate solutions. ...In the U.S., the industrial sector emits  30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions . This funding will accelerate emissions reductions in all of the most polluting industries: steel, cement, chemicals, aluminum, and food processing. The new technologies that come out of these investments will be used across the country and around the world. In addition, heavy industry is a leading cause of health-harming air and water pollution. Many of the projects receiving DOE funding will also dramatically reduce this pollution and improve the health of all Americans.... 

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/us-awards-record-6-bln-back-industrial-emissions-reduction-projects-2024-03-25/ By Andrea Shalal  and  David Shepardson , Reuters.  Excerpt: The U.S. Energy Department on Monday announced $6 billion in federal funding to subsidize 33 industrial projects in 20 states to cut carbon emissions, saying the investment would support well-paying union jobs and boost U.S. competitiveness. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will unveil the awards during a visit to a Cleveland-Cliffs Steel Corp  (CLF.N), opens new tab  facility in Middletown, Ohio, which will receive up to $500 million to install two new electric arc furnaces and hydrogen-based technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1 million tons. ...Together, the projects are expected to eliminate 14 million metric tons of pollution each year, equivalent to taking some 3 million gas-powered vehicles off the road, she said. The Portland Cement Association, an industry

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/travel/texas-big-bend-rio-grande-boat.html Daniel Modlin , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Rio Grande is in peril: Its  water is being depleted by farmers and cities , while a  climate-change-induced   megadrought  that has desiccated the American Southwest for more than two decades is threatening hopes of its recovery. In 2022, the river  ran dry in Albuquerque  for the first time in four decades. In the same year, the picturesque Santa Elena Canyon, one of the most popular sights in Big Bend, also  ran dry  for the first time in at least 15 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ...For the West Texan river guides, it’s simply another precarious reality of life in the Chihuahuan Desert. “In my lifetime, I expect river trips to no longer be feasible,” said Charlie Angell of  Angell Expeditions , a tour guide service based in Redford, Texas. ...“We think the river has changed, but really, we have changed the river,”

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/03/19/the-heat-index-how-hot-it-feels-is-rising-faster-than-temperature By Robert Sanders , Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Texans have long endured scorching summer temperatures, so a global warming increase of about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 Celsius) might not sound like much to worry about. But a new study concludes that the heat index — essentially how hot it really feels — has increased much faster in Texas than has the measured temperature: about three times faster. That means that on some extreme days, what the temperature feels like is between 8 and 11 F (5 to 6 C) hotter than it would without climate change. The study, using Texas data from June, July and August of 2023, highlights a problem with communicating the dangers of rising temperatures to the public. The temperature alone does not accurately reflect the heat stress people feel. Even the heat index itself, which takes into account the relative humidity and thus the capacity to cool off by sweati

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/world/asia/afghanistan-drought-photos-climate-change.html By Lynsey Addario  and  Victoria Kim , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In a country especially vulnerable to climate change, a drought has displaced entire villages and left millions of children malnourished.... 

https://nature.berkeley.edu/news/2024/03/not-my-backyard-wind-turbines-have-little-effect-us-property-values By Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research .  Excerpt: The values of houses in the United States within a wind turbine’s viewshed drop only slightly and temporarily due to the disrupted view, a new study published today in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  (PNAS) shows. The effect is smaller the further away the recently installed turbines are and fades over time. ...“The impact of wind turbines on house prices is much smaller than generally feared: In the U.S., it’s about one percent for a house that has at least one wind turbine in a 10 km radius,” explains  Maximilian Auffhammer , a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ARE) at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of the study. ...scientists from the German  Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research  (PIK), the  Italian Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Ca

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/science/renewable-energy-storage-climate.html By Amos Zeeberg , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Central Sardinia ...in Ottana, ..., a new technology is taking shape that might help the world slow climate change. ...Energy Dome, a start-up based in Milan, runs an energy-storage demonstration plant that helps to address a mismatch in the local electricity market. ...Energy Dome uses carbon dioxide held in a huge balloon... as a kind of battery. During the day, electricity from the local grid, some produced by nearby fields of solar cells, is used to compress the carbon dioxide into liquid. At night, the liquid carbon dioxide is expanded back into gas, which drives a turbine and produces electricity that is sent back to the grid....

https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/home-insurance-wildfire-risk-19021575.php   By Megan Fan Munce , San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: A newly proposed regulation aims to draw  insurers  back to the state by allowing them to anticipate future  wildfire risks  when raising their rates. The proposed rule change...would allow companies to submit catastrophe models for  wildfires , floods and terrorism to the California Department of Insurance for approval. If approved, insurers could then use predictions from those models when requesting rate hikes for commercial or homeowners insurance.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/climate/tax-breaks-oil-gas-us.html By Lisa Friedman , The New York Times.  Excerpt: As a candidate in 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned to end billions of dollars in annual tax breaks to oil and gas companies within his first year in office. It’s a pledge he has been unable to keep as president. ...Mr. Biden’s wish is opposed by the oil industry, Republicans in Congress and a handful of Democrats. ...The oil and gas industry enjoys nearly a dozen tax breaks, including incentives for domestic production and write-offs tied to foreign production. ...The Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker, run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, calculated the total to be about $14 billion in 2022. ...The oldest, known as “intangible drilling costs,” was created by the Revenue Act of 1913 and was aimed at encouraging the development of U.S. resources. The deduction allows companies to write off as much as 80 percent of the costs of drilling, .... An

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/climate/amazon-rainforest-fires.html By Ana Ionova and  Manuela Andreoni , The New York Times.  Excerpt: By this time of the year, rain should be drenching large swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rains at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of the rainforest that do not usually burn. ...The fires in the Amazon, which reaches across nine South American nations, are the result of an extreme drought fueled by climate change, experts said. ...If deforestation,  fires and climate change continue to worsen , large stretches of the forest could transform into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades. That, scientists say, would trigger a collapse that could send up to 20 years’ worth of global carbon emissions into the atmosphere, an enormous blow to the struggle to contain climate change.... 

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/07/australia/mass-coral-bleaching-event-great-barrier-reef-intl-hnk-scn/index.html By Helen Regan , CNN.  Excerpt: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is suffering another  mass bleaching event , the reef’s managers confirmed Friday, the result of soaring ocean temperatures caused by the global climate crisis and amplified by  El Niño . This is the seventh mass bleaching event to hit the vast, ecologically important but fragile site and the fifth in only eight years.... 

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj5763 By Erin Saupe, Cooper Malanoski, et al, Science.  Excerpt: A polar bear floating on a tiny piece of sea ice has become the iconic image of the extinction risks of climate change. But not all threats to species from our warming planet are so easy to see. That’s why paleobiologist Erin Saupe, Ph.D. student Cooper Malanoski, and their colleagues turned to the fossil record. By understanding which species fell victim to climactic fluctuations in the past, they aimed to get a better sense of which organisms might be most vulnerable now. “Despite the threat that climate change poses to biodiversity, we do not yet fully understand how it causes animals to go extinct,” Saupe and Malanoski  explain in an article for  The Conversation . So, the team examined data from nearly 300,000 marine invertebrate fossils from the last 485 million years, using statistics to examine how traits of the animals and their environment link to their likelihood o

https://eos.org/features/can-the-belt-and-road-go-green ]  By Mark Betancourt , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: China’s global infrastructure investments could tip the scales on climate change, but its relationship with partner countries is complicated. ...The  Cauchari Solar Plant , which came online in 2019, can generate up to 300 megawatts of power at a time, making it the largest solar park in South America. ...China has emerged as a dominant force behind Argentina’s engineering infrastructure, partly because Western banks have been hesitant to support the country, .... China, on the other hand, has poured more than  $26 billion  into Argentina’s infrastructure since 2005. ...the  Belt and Road Initiative  (BRI) ...Xi announced that  China would no longer build new coal power plants abroad , signaling a major shift to green infrastructure that could bend billions of dollars toward slowing climate change. ...It remains to be seen how aggressively China will pursue renewable power, but  more tha

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/climate/sea-level-rise-east-coast-sinking-land-flooding.html By Mira Rojanasakul , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A new study of sea-level rise using detailed data on changes to land elevation found that current scientific models may not accurately capture vulnerabilities in 32 coastal cities in the United States. The analysis , published Wednesday in Nature, uses satellite imagery to detect sinking and rising land to help paint a more precise picture of exposure to flooding both today and in the future. Nearly 40 percent of Americans live along the coasts, where subsidence, or sinking land, can add significantly to the threat of sea-level rise. While the Gulf Coast experiences many of the most severe cases of subsidence — parts of Galveston, Texas, and Grand Isle, La., are slumping into the ocean faster than global average sea levels are rising — the trend can be found all along the United States shoreline.... 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/06/increase-fossil-fuel-pollution-health-risk-report By Carey Gillam , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Chemical pollution tied to fossil fuel operations poses serious risks to human health, warns a new analysis  published  in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. Citing data from dozens of studies, the report points to an alarming rise in neurodevelopmental issues, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and certain cancers in young people taking place amid what the paper’s author calls “explosive growth” in the petrochemical industry. Between 1990 and 2019, rates of certain cancers in people under 50  increased dramatically . Meanwhile, fossil fuel use and petrochemical production have increased fifteen-fold since the 1950s, according to the report.... 

https://www.science.org/content/article/anthropocene-dead-long-live-anthropocene By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: ...a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene—our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age—and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. ...Few opponents of the Anthropocene proposal doubted the enormous impact that human influence, including climate change, is having on the planet. But some felt the proposed marker of the epoch—some 10 centimeters of mud from  Canada’s Crawford Lake  that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s—isn’t definitive enough. ...The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again. ICS has long instituted this mandatory cooling-off period, given how furious debates can turn, for example, over the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleis

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/travel/chamonix-france-glaciers-climate-change.html   By Paige McClanahan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...The term last-chance tourism, which  has gained traction  in the past two decades, describes the impulse to visit threatened places before they disappear.  Studies   have   found  that the appeal of the disappearing can be a powerful motivator. But in many cases, the presence of tourists at a fragile site can accelerate the place’s demise.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/climate/heat-pumps-maine-electrification.html By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Unlike a space heater, a heat pump extracts heat from outside air, even in subzero temperatures, and then runs it through a compressor, which makes it even hotter, before pumping it indoors. In the summer, it can operate in reverse, pulling heat from inside a building and pumping it outside, cooling the indoor spaces. In 2023 heat pumps  outsold gas furnaces  in the United States for the second year running, a climate win. Electrical heat pumps are the  cheapest and most energy efficient  ways to heat and cool homes, and they do not emit the carbon pollution that is overheating the planet. No state has adopted them faster than Maine. That northeastern place of hardy types and snowbound winters is quickly going electric, installing electric heat pumps three times faster than the national average, according to Rewiring America , a nonprofit that promotes widesp

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/business/artificial-intelligence-data-centers-green-power.html By Patrick Sisson , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Artificial intelligence’s booming growth is radically reshaping an already red-hot data center market, raising questions about whether these sites can be operated sustainably. ...The carbon footprint from the construction of the [data] centers and the racks of expensive computer equipment is substantial in itself, and their power needs have grown considerably. ...Just a decade ago, data centers drew 10 megawatts of power, but 100 megawatts is common today. The Uptime Institute, an industry advisory group, has identified 10 supersize cloud computing campuses across North America with an average size of 621 megawatts. ...The data center industry has embraced more sustainable solutions in recent years, becoming a significant investor in renewable power at the corporate level. Sites that leased wind and solar capacity  jumped 50 percent  year o

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/climate/plant-based-treaty-climate.html By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Amsterdam ... Los Angeles ...are signatories to the  Plant Based Treaty,  which was launched in 2021 with the aim of calling attention to the role played by greenhouse gases that are generated by food production. ...Anita Krajnc ...and other activists modeled the Plant Based Treaty after the  Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty , which calls on governments to stop new oil, gas and coal projects. ...The first municipality to sign on was Boynton Beach, Fla., in September 2021.... Twenty-five other municipalities have since joined, including Los Angeles, Amsterdam and more than a dozen cities in India. ...Globally, food systems make up a third of planet-heating greenhouse gasses, with the environmental toll of the meat and dairy industries being particularly high. Livestock accounts for  about a third  of methane emissions, which have 80 times the warming power of ca

https://apnews.com/article/electric-school-buses-diesel-exhaust-environmental-justice-4263455c7d55e34acd6f35dceb6db7c0 By ALEXA ST. JOHN , Associated Press.  Excerpt: Areli Sanchez’s daughter, Aida, used to be one of 20 million American kids who ride a  diesel bus  to school each day. Aida has asthma. When she was little, she complained about the  smell and cloud of fumes  on her twice-daily trip. “When she would come home from school or be on the bus, she got headaches and sick to her stomach. ...Research shows diesel exhaust exposure can cause students to  miss school  and affect learning. ...Diesel  exhaust  from school buses potentially affects one-third of U.S. students... according to federal data. It’s a known  carcinogen  plus it contains harmful nitrogen oxides, volatile gases and particles that  exacerbate lung issues . It also contributes to global warming. ...A few years after her daughter started having problems, Sanchez saw the opportunity to get involved in the nascent m

https://eos.org/articles/el-nino-may-have-kicked-off-thwaites-glacier-retreat By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is currently losing significant mass, contributing to around 4% of all global sea level rise. Now, new research suggests that the start of Thwaites’s current retreat aligns with that of the nearby Pine Island Glacier, which is also losing mass rapidly. The findings, published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , indicate that the mass loss was more likely spurred by regional conditions, such as an  El Niño  event, .... Scientists have observed accelerating ice loss from Thwaites since the 1970s, mostly via satellite data. ...Thwaites likely began to retreat around the 1940s, coinciding with the beginning of a retreat phase at neighboring Pine Island Glacier that had been  determined by previous research . ...a prolonged El Niño that occurred from 1939 to 1942 could have spurred the retre

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/vegas-sphere-energy-efficiency.html By Ed Conway , The New York Times guest essay.  Excerpt: In the 1990s, when multicolor LED lights were invented by Japanese scientists after decades of research, the hope was that they would help to avert climate catastrophe by greatly reducing the amount of electricity we use. It seemed perfectly intuitive. After all, LED lights use 90 percent less energy and last around 18 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the  same  today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is ...Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, .... As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful. ...There’s an economic term for this: the Jevons Paradox, named for the 1

https://www.science.org/content/article/dramatic-shift-ice-age-rhythm-pinned-carbon-dioxide By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: Roughly 1.5 million years ago, Earth went through a radical climatic shift. The planet had already been slipping in and out of ice ages every 40,000 years, provoked by wobbles in its orbit. But then, something flipped. The ice ages began to grow stronger and longer, with durations of 100,000 years, and overall, the planet grew cooler. And nothing about Earth’s orbit could explain it. The cause of this Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), as it’s known, has been a major mystery for decades. A new compilation of global temperatures covering the past 4.5 million years, published this week in Science,  points a finger at a familiar molecule : carbon dioxide. It suggests that a strengthening of an ocean pump in the waters around Antarctica sucked carbon dioxide out of the air and sent it plunging to the abyss, cooling the planet and intensifying the ice ages. The stud

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/eastern-us-reforestation-climate-change By YaleEnvironment360.  Excerpt: Over the 20th century, the U.S. as a whole warmed by 1.2 degrees F (0.7 degrees C), but across much the East, temperatures dropped by 0.5 degrees F (0.3 degrees C). A new study posits that the restoration of lost forest countered warming, keeping the region cool. “This widespread history of reforestation, a huge shift in land cover, hasn’t been widely studied for how it could’ve contributed to the anomalous lack of warming in the eastern U.S., which climate scientists call a ‘warming hole,’”  said lead author Mallory Barnes , of Indiana University. “That’s why we initially set out to do this work.”.... 

https://www.wired.com/story/los-angeles-just-proved-how-spongy-a-city-can-be/ By MATT SIMON , Wired.  Excerpt: ...A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped  9 inches of rain on the city  over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms. The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “ sponge city ,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth. With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. ...Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA i

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17022024/in-wyoming-sheep-may-safely-graze-under-solar-panels-in-one-of-the-states-first-agrivoltaic-projects/ By Jake Bolster , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: The elevated photovoltaic panels can actually improve grazing conditions, a novelty that could help make solar projects more land-efficient and accepted in the ranching-heavy state. Converse County is one of the most welcoming areas in Wyoming when it comes to clean energy. For roughly every 20 residents, there is one wind turbine, the highest ratio in the state. At a recent County Commissioners meeting, it took another step in diversifying its energy infrastructure, signaling its intent to issue its first solar farm permit to BrightNight. The global energy company has proposed to build more than 1 million solar panels, a battery storage facility and a few miles of above-ground transmission lines on a 4,738 acres of private land run by the Tillard ranching family near Glenrock. The Dutchman Pro

https://www.science.org/content/article/amazon-river-may-altered-forever-climate-change By DANIEL GROSSMAN , Science.  Excerpt: Extreme flooding and droughts may be the new norm for the Amazon, challenging its people and ecosystems. MANAUS, BRAZIL ...In the previous 4 months, only a few millimeters of rain have fallen in this city of 2 million at the confluence of the Negro and Amazon rivers. Normally it gets close to a half a meter during the same period. ...Making matters worse, the drought coincided with a series of weekslong heat waves. In September and October, withering conditions persisted across the Amazon, and temperatures here peaked at 39°C, 6°C above normal. ... Schöngart and other researchers  expect such changes to intensify as global climate warms. The current drought provided a grim preview, killing river dolphins and fish, and threatening livelihoods for communities along the river....