Posts

The Gulf Oil Shock Is Pushing E.V. Sales to New Heights Globally

By -
By Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Electric car sales are on track to hit record highs this year, with 29 percent of all new cars purchased around the world expected to be either purely battery-powered models or plug-in hybrids, according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency. That’s a sharp increase from just 4 percent in 2020. The boom in sales was somewhat unexpected. Some analysts had predicted a slower market for electric vehicles this year — until the U.S. war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused oil and gasoline prices to spike. That has led to a frenzy of electric car sales in many unexpected corners of the globe. In South Africa, sales of electric cars more than quintupled in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. In Laos, imports of battery-powered vehicles from China are soaring. And in countries as different as Australia, Colombia and South Korea, the E.V. share of total...
Read more

Cash Cow

By -
By Inside Climate podcast.  Excerpt: In this episode, co-host Jake Bolster sits down with reporters Georgina Gustin and Lisa Sorg to talk about the wide-ranging impacts of how America fattens animals to become the meat that people eat....  Full article/video at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16082026/inside-climate-podcast-cash-cow-cafos/ .
Read more

So Much Solar: Digging Into the List of Every US Power Plant That Went Online This Year

By -
By Dan Gearino , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Utility-scale solar leads by a mile, followed by batteries. Fossil fuels, not so much. ...368 utility-scale plants that began operation from January to June, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration . The group is dominated by utility-scale solar. This is a top-heavy list, led by SunZia Wind South and SunZia Wind North in New Mexico , which went online this spring and are the largest wind farms in the country, with a combined generating capacity of 3,650 megawatts. ...the story of power plant completions in the first half of 2026 was mainly about utility-scale solar and batteries. Utility-scale solar led in the number of projects coming online, with 207, followed by batteries, with 95. ...If we look at projects in terms of generating capacity, utility-scale solar led with 11,458 megawatts, followed by batteries, 8,207 megawatts, and then onshore wind, mostly because of the SunZia projects, with 5,473 megawatts...
Read more

This Year’s El Niño Is Huge and Already Changing the World

By -
By Raymond Zhong and Chico Harlan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: El Niño is the planet’s naturally recurring chaos agent, scrambling weather patterns, spiking global temperatures and typically reaching full strength by December. But this year’s El Niño, which is expected to be record-breaking, is already strong and having big effects, nudging up global temperatures and causing dry spells and crop failures on multiple continents. Parts of Panama, normally one of the wettest countries on Earth, haven’t had a major storm since early May. Ethiopia’s fertile highlands are enduring one of their driest summer stretches in four decades. And India had its fifth-driest June since the country’s modern rain records began in 1901. “This is a good sign that the El Niño response has really kicked in,” said Chris Funk, director of the Climate Hazards Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Funk termed it an “early onset El Niño.” ...Scientists are debating whether human-caused...
Read more

As Europe Faces Another Heat Wave, Travelers Are Forced to Adapt

By -
By Ryley Ober , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The first half of summer in Europe has featured a grueling series of heat waves and widespread wildfires, which have burned more than 1.3 million acres across the European Union. The Danube and Rhine rivers hit record lows caused by drought from the prolonged heat waves, upending river cruises and forcing operators to cancel or change itineraries with alternative bus transfers and hotel stays. ...Dozens of travelers told The New York Times that the sweltering season in Europe led them to reschedule travel dates, cancel tours of outdoor sites like the Roman Colosseum, leave trips early or plan future summer vacations to more temperate locations like Scandinavia or mountainous regions....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/travel/europe-travel-tourism-wildfires-heat-waves.html . 
Read more

Plagued by drought: how water scarcity reshapes host–parasite interactions

By -
By Pieter Johnson and Tara Stewart Merrill , Trends in Ecology and Evolution.  Excerpt: Drought is becoming a defining ecological force, yet its consequences for infectious diseases remain difficult to predict across systems. Emerging evidence shows that water limitation can intensify many water-associated diseases, challenging assumptions that drying suppresses transmission. Rather than acting solely as a climatic stressor, drought restructures transmission by altering host aggregation, parasite persistence, community composition, and contact networks across space and time. Divergent disease responses to drought can be explained through three recurring mechanisms: the concentration of interactions, the ecological filtering of communities, and spatial heterogeneity in transmission. Viewing drought as a multiscale ecological restructuring process provides a general framework for predicting disease outcomes in an increasingly water-limited world....  Full article at https://www...
Read more

A warming climate is drying out tiny mountain streams that feed the West’s biggest rivers

By -
By Chris Clements , KNAU News - Arizona Public Radio.  Excerpt: Western rivers like the San Juan and the Colorado are mostly fed by burbling mountain streams, which are themselves fed by groundwater and snowmelt. But a study published on June 5 says those tiny streams are in trouble. The study in the journal Earth's Future says the base amount of water in streams and rivers that doesn’t come from rain, also known as “base flow,” has been steadily declining since 1950, though that trend varies depending on the specific time period. ...The study...predicts that if climate warming continues, by the end of the century, headwater streams could have anywhere from 45% to 65% less base flow to sustain them. ...water levels in Lake Mead reach their lowest point ever . The Colorado River Basin has faced aridification for the last 26 years. Tiny, ephemeral streams like Flagstaff’s Rio de Flag give mighty rivers the juice to flow freely. But they depend on base flow to do that. ...[The Rio de...
Read more