https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/climate/wind-farm-renewable-energy-fight.html By  David Gelles , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...In the fight against global warming, the federal government is pumping a record $370 billion into clean energy, President Biden wants the nation’s electricity to be  100 percent carbon-free by 2035 , and many states and utilities plan to ramp up wind and solar power. But ...the future of the American power grid is in fact being determined in town halls, county courthouses and community buildings across the country. ...In Piatt County, population 16,000, the project at issue is Goose Creek Wind, which has been proposed by Apex Clean Energy, a developer of wind and solar farms based in Virginia. ...If completed, the turbines, each of them 610 feet tall, would march across 34,000 acres of farmland. The $500 million project is expected to generate 300 megawatts, enough to power about 100,000 homes. The renewable, carbon-free electricity would he...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/business/water-development-west.html By  Keith Schneider , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...The development, Teravalis, is expected to have 100,000 homes and 55 million square feet of commercial space. But to make it happen, the project’s developer, the Howard Hughes Corporation, will need to gain access to enough water for its projected 300,000 residents and 450,000 workers. Teravalis is seen by local and state leaders as a crowning achievement in a booming real estate market, but it also represents the intensifying challenge in Arizona and other fast-growing Southwestern states: to build huge mixed-use projects in an era of water scarcity. ...Persistent dry conditions are driving up the cost of water and prompting more resistance to new development. But the scarcity of water is also pushing developers to innovate with design and install expensive infrastructure to save fresh water and recycle more wastewater. ...In Arizona, groundwater leve...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/climate/polar-vortex-winter-cold-weather.html By Henry Fountain , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The polar vortex is descending on the midsection of the United States, bringing bitterly cold Arctic air and causing temperatures to plunge rapidly in many areas. The deep freeze will be accompanied by a major snowstorm that is expected to cause travel chaos. The vortex is a large rotating expanse of cold air that generally circles the Arctic, but occasionally shifts south from the pole. Vortex-related cold snaps occur regularly in the United States. One of the most damaging occurred in February 2021, when the frigid air reached deep into Texas, resulting in temperatures that were as much as 40 degrees Fahrenheit below normal. That freeze led to at least 250 deaths and caused extensive damage to the state’s power infrastructure. As global emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide continue, the Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than other parts ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/business/energy-environment/battery-recycling-electric-vehicles.html By  Niraj Chokshi  and  Kellen Browning , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Benjamin Reynaga used power tools to hack his way into a beat-up hybrid Honda Fit at an auto dismantling plant at the edge of the Mojave Desert until he reached the most important part of the car: its lithium-ion battery. ...It would be disassembled nearby and then sent to Nevada, where another company, Redwood Materials, would recover some of the valuable metals inside. The plant where Mr. Reynaga works, in Adelanto, Calif., is at the front lines of what auto industry experts, environmentalists and the Biden administration believe could be an important part of a global shift to electric vehicles: recycling and reusing metals like cobalt, lithium and nickel. If batteries past their prime supply the ingredients for new ones, electric cars, trucks and vans would become more affordable and environ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/20/big-oil-is-behind-conspiracy-to-deceive-public-first-climate-racketeering-lawsuit-says By  Nina Lakhani , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The same racketeering legislation used to bring down mob bosses, motorcycle gangs, football executives and international fraudsters is to be tested against oil and coal companies who are accused of conspiring to deceive the public over the climate crisis. ...in a lawsuit being brought by communities in  Puerto Rico  that were devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017. “Puerto Rico is one of the most affected places by climate change in the world. It is so precariously positioned – they get hit on all fronts with hurricanes, storm surge, heat, coral bleaching – it’s the perfect place for this climate litigation,” said Melissa Sims, senior counsel for the plaintiffs’ law firm Milberg. The 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act was originally intended to combat criminal e...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/climate/congress-climate-finance-biden.html By Lisa Friedman , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Congress has proposed $1 billion to help poor countries cope with climate change, a figure that falls significantly short of President Biden’s promise that the United States will spend $11.4 billion annually by 2024 to ensure developing nations can transition to clean energy and adapt to a warming planet. The money is part of a sprawling $1.7 trillion government spending package that lawmakers made public early Tuesday and are expected to vote on this week. Democrats had sought $3.4 billion for various global climate programs but Republicans quashed what they called  “radical environmental and climate policies ” in the spending bill....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/20/climate/postal-service-electric-trucks.html By  Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In a win for the Biden administration, the United States Postal Service said it would spend nearly $10 billion to create one of the largest electric truck fleets in the nation. ...The United States Postal Service announced on Tuesday that it planned to buy at least 66,000 electric vehicles by 2028. ...intends to stop buying gas-powered delivery trucks altogether after 2026. ...When the Postal Service made public a plan in February to replace up to 165,000 older mail trucks, many of which are 30 years old and lack air-conditioning, it announced that only 10 percent of the new vehicles would be electric. The rest would be gasoline-powered and get an estimated 8.6 miles per gallon when the air conditioning was turned on. That  triggered a fierce backlash  from Biden administration officials and Democrats in Congress, who warned that all those ne...

https://apnews.com/article/california-agriculture-climate-and-environment-2591f7c60f1a143e08b599610dc49fce By Sophie Austin, Associated Press.  Excerpt: California air regulators voted unanimously Thursday to approve an ambitious plan to drastically cut reliance on fossil fuels by changing practices in the energy, transportation and agriculture sectors, but critics say it doesn’t go far enough to combat climate change. ...It aims to do so in part by reducing fossil fuel demand by 86% within that time frame. ...It calls for the state to cut liquid petroleum fuel demand by 94% by 2045, and quadruple solar and wind capacity along that same timeframe. ...residential and commercial buildings will be powered by electric appliances before the next decade. ...The board has already passed a policy to  ban the sale of new cars powered solely by gasoline  in the state starting in 2035. ...It calls for the state to capture 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and stor...

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/17/climate-change-studies-connecticut By Maya Yang , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Starting next July,  Connecticut  will become one of the first states in America to mandate climate change studies across its public schools as part of its science curriculum....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/climate/anthropocene-age-geology.html By  Raymond Zhong , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The official timeline of Earth’s history — from the oldest rocks to the‌ dinosaurs to the rise of primates, from the Paleozoic to the Jurassic and all points before and since — could soon include the age of nuclear weapons, human-caused climate change and the proliferation of plastics, garbage and concrete across the planet. In short, the present. ...a panel of scientists on Saturday took a big step toward declaring a new interval of geologic time: the Anthropocene, the age of humans. Our current geologic epoch, the Holocene, began 11,700 years ago with the end of the last big ice age. The panel’s roughly three dozen scholars appear close to recommending that, actually, we have spent the past few decades in a brand-new time unit, one characterized by human-induced, planetary-scale changes that are unfinished but very much underway. “If you were around...

https://www.science.org/content/article/ocean-geoengineering-scheme-aces-its-first-field-test By Paul Voosen, Science.  Excerpt: Alkaline lime powder spread in Florida estuary drew down carbon and reduced acidification. The balmy, shallow waters of Apalachicola Bay, off Florida’s panhandle, supply about 10% of U.S. oysters. But the industry has declined in recent years, in part because the bay is warming and its waters are acidifying because of rising carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) levels. ...state officials encouraged climate scientists to perform an unusual experiment to see whether they could reverse the changes in the water. In May, at an Apalachicola estuary, the researchers injected some 2000 liters of seawater enriched with lime, an alkaline powder and a primary ingredient in cement that’s derived from chalk or limestone. They showed it neutralized some of the acidity and, in the process, drew CO 2  out of the atmosphere. ...as CO 2  continues to rise and geoengineering a ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/business/energy-environment/california-rooftop-solar-subsidy.html By  Ivan Penn , The New York Times.  Excerpt: California regulators voted unanimously on Thursday to significantly reduce how much utilities have to pay homeowners with rooftop solar panels for power they send to the electric grid — a decision that could hurt the growing renewable energy business. The five members of the California Public Utilities Commission said the existing payments to homeowners through a program known as net metering amounted to an excessively generous subsidy that was no longer needed to encourage the use of solar panels. Under  the proposal adopted on Thursday , compensation for the energy sent to the grid by rooftop panels will be reduced by about 75 percent for new rooftop solar homes starting in April. ...By reducing the subsidy to rooftop solar owners, the commission aimed to establish what it said would be a more equitable system, agreeing with...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/13/carbon-free-energy-fusion-reaction-scientists By  Arthur Turrell , The Guardian.  Excerpt: This is a moment that scientists have dreamed of for well over half a century. The US’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) has smashed the longest-standing goal in the quest for carbon - free energy from  fusion , the nuclear process that powers stars. Researchers from NIF used the world’s most energetic laser to fire 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy into a millimetre-sized capsule of hydrogen fuel. Reaching temperatures many times those found in the sun’s core and pressures 300bn times those normally experienced on Earth, a wave of nuclear reactions ripped through the fusion fuel, releasing 3.15 MJ of fusion energy – 1.1 MJ more than was put in – over   a few tens of nanoseconds. ...it’s the first scientific proof that fusion can produce more energy  out  than is put  in , also known as “net energy gain”. If...

https://eos.org/articles/third-wettest-year-in-arctic-wraps-up By  Jenessa Duncombe , Eos/AGO.  Excerpt:  The annual Arctic Report Card charts the rise in rain in northern latitudes and serves as a new “vital sign” of the region’s shifting climate.  The 17th annual NOAA  report , presented today at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2022 in Chicago, features original, peer-reviewed research from 147 authors from 11 nations. The report card emphasized that rain is becoming more common than ever before in many parts of the Arctic. Total annual precipitation—both rain and snowfall—has also been increasing across most of the Arctic since the 1950s.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/13/climate/climate-footprint-map-neighborhood.html By  Nadja Popovich , Mira Rojanasakul and  Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: New data shared with The New York Times reveals stark disparities in how different U.S. households contribute to climate change. Looking at America’s cities, a pattern emerges. Households in denser neighborhoods close to city centers tend to be responsible for fewer planet-warming greenhouse gases, on average, than households in the rest of the country. Residents in these areas typically drive less because jobs and stores are nearby and they can more easily walk, bike or take public transit. And they’re more likely to live in smaller homes or apartments that require less energy to heat and cool.... 

https://eos.org/articles/could-floating-solar-panels-help-mitigate-climate-change By  Sofia Moutinho , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Many countries bet on solar panels when engaging in the switch to  cleaner energy . But the technology requires much larger areas than conventional fossil fuel plants to generate the same amount of electricity. An emerging solution to save space is to float the panels on bodies of water: floatovoltaics. Scientists believe this new approach could help solar energy to scale globally and fight climate change, but its environmental impacts are largely unexplored.... 

https://www.science.org/content/article/supercomputer-re-creates-one-most-famous-pictures-earth By Paul Voosen, Science.  Excerpt: Fifty years ago today, astronauts aboard Apollo 17, NASA’s last crewed mission to the Moon, took an  iconic photograph of our planet . The image became known as the Blue Marble—the first fully illuminated picture of Earth, in color, taken by a person. Now, scientists have re-created that image (above)  during a test run of a cutting-edge digital climate model . The model can simulate climatic phenomena, such as storms and ocean eddies, at 1-kilometer resolution, as much as 100 times sharper than typical global simulations. ...the European Union’s Destination Earth project ...aims to create a “digital twin” of Earth  to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans .... 

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-mission-will-study-hidden-ocean-swirls-soak-heat-global-warming By Paul Voosen, Science.  Excerpt: Eddies have been overlooked for too long. These turbulent swirls of water, ranging in size from a few kilometers to hundreds of kilometers across, peel off large ocean currents and mix heat and carbon dioxide into deeper ocean layers, like cream stirred into coffee. They are the most energetic feature of the ocean, critical to getting climate models right—but also largely invisible to satellites.... No longer. Eddies and, on land, the ebb and flow of rivers and lakes will snap into focus after the launch of  the Surface Water and Ocean Topography  (SWOT) satellite, a joint venture between NASA and CNES, the French space agency. ...The satellite  will capture eddies  as small as 7 kilometers across and cover nearly the entire globe every 21 days. On land, SWOT will be able to map the changing height of more than...

https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-americans-broke-cycle-destructive-wildfires-here-s-how-they-did-it By Andrew Curry, Science.  Excerpt: In the southwestern United States, wildfires typically follow a grim, but predictable cycle. When unusually wet years are followed by hot, dry ones, fuel builds up—then burns. But a new look at thousands of fire-scarred tree trunks from the region, combined with archaeology and oral histories, indicates that between 1500 C.E. and 1900 C.E., Indigenous fire management practices managed to break that cycle, buffering the landscape from climate-related conflagrations. The  study , published today in Science Advances, does “a really nice job of addressing questions paleoecologists have struggled with,” says Dave McWethy, a paleoecologist at Montana State University, who was not involved with the research. “They’re able to demonstrate that on a smaller scale, people are having a very strong influence that’s able to dampen the...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/05/stop-burning-trees-scientists-world-leaders-cop15-age-of-extinction-aoe By  Phoebe Weston , The Guardian.  Excerpt: More than 650 scientists are urging world leaders to stop burning trees to make energy because it destroys valuable habitats for wildlife. ...they say countries urgently need to stop using forest bioenergy to create heat and electricity as it undermines international climate and nature targets. Instead, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar should be used, they say. ...Bioenergy has “wrongly been deemed ‘carbon neutral’” and many countries are increasingly relying on forest biomass to meet net zero goals,  according to the letter , addressed to world leaders. ...By 2030, bioenergy is expected to account for a third of “low-carbon” energy,  according to a report  by the International Energy Agency. ...Burning wood for electricity is also  inefficient , releasing comparatively more ca...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/climate/texas-public-policy-foundation-climate-change.html By David Gelles . The New York Times.  Excerpt: When a lawsuit was filed to block the nation’s first major offshore wind farm off the Massachusetts coast, it appeared to be a straightforward clash between those who earn their living from the sea and others who would install turbines and underwater cables that could interfere with the harvesting of squid, fluke and other fish. The fishing companies challenging federal permits for the Vineyard Wind project were from the Bay State as well as Rhode Island and New York, and a  video made by the opponents featured a bearded  fisherman  with a distinct New England accent. But the financial muscle behind the fight originated thousands of miles from the Atlantic Ocean, in dusty oil country. The group bankrolling the lawsuit filed last year was the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based nonprofit organization backed by oil ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/03/south-dakota-reservation-food-desert-residents-transforming-crop-oasis By Hallie Golden , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Near the southern border of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a curved translucent roof peeks out a few feet above the dusty plains. ...below ground, at the bottom of a short flight of stairs, the inside of this 80ft-long sleek structure is bursting with life – pallets of vivid microgreens, potato plants growing from hay bales and planters full of thick heads of Swiss chard and pak choi. ...This is an underground greenhouse, or walipini, and the harvesters are members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. It is one of at least eight underground greenhouses that, over the past decade, have been built or are being constructed on the reservation – which has one of the highest poverty rates in the US. Some hope they can help solve the interconnected problems of the lack of affordable, nutritious food and the difficulties of...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/02/climate/mauna-loa-eruption-keeling-curve.html By  Elena Shao , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Atop the Mauna Loa volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, a little more than two miles above sea level, a 124-foot aluminum tower has been collecting carbon dioxide measurements nearly every hour, every day, for over 60 years. That stopped on Sunday night, when Mauna Loa erupted and the flow of lava cut off power to the monitoring lab there. On Thursday, lava was still moving downhill from the volcano, overtaking roads, but posing few risks to nearby communities. It was a rare interruption in the data collection that has produced the world’s longest running continuous record of the rising levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/world/europe/germany-heat-pumps.html By  Melissa Eddy  and Patrick Junker , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The boxy machines look and function like large air-conditioners on reverse, but Germans hope they hold the key to Europe’s push for fossil-free heating. ...After decades of heating their homes with relatively cheap Russian natural gas, Germans are facing exorbitant prices for energy. ...Using a technology that dates to the 1970s, these boxy machines have suddenly been embraced across Germany — so much so that heat pumps are often sold out, and the wait for a qualified installer can last months. ...Heat pumps work like a reverse air-conditioner, using a large fan that draws air past tubes with refrigerant to extract warmth from the outside environment. The cost for the electricity needed to power a heat pump is about 35 percent cheaper than natural gas, according to Verivox, a company that compares energy prices for German c...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/when-the-aral-sea-dried-up-central-asia-became-dustier By  Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 1959, officials in the Soviet Union decided to divert river flows  feeding the Aral Sea  to the deserts of Central Asia, where the water irrigated farms supplying a  growing cotton industry . As the cotton blossomed, the lake’s level dropped. Today, only slivers remain of what was once the world’s fourth largest lake. As the Aral Sea has become a desert, known as the Aralkum, soil from the dry lake bed has added to the  dust that swirls above Central Asia . This dust carries hazards beyond those typically associated with natural particulate matter: It’s mixed with salt as well as residues from agricultural pesticides and fertilizers introduced into the sea. How much and where dust from the former Aral Sea spreads across the surrounding region are therefore important public health questions. In a new study,  Banks  ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/us/politics/electric-utilities-biden-climate-bill.html By  Eric Lipton , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Just two years ago, DTE Energy, a Michigan-based electric utility, was still enmeshed in a court fight with federal regulators over emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the western shore of Lake Erie that ranks as one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-changing air pollution. But in September, Gerard M. Anderson, who led DTE for the last decade, was on the South Lawn of the White House alongside hundreds of other supporters of President Biden, giving a standing ovation to the president for his success in pushing a climate change package through Congress — a law that will help accelerate the closure of the very same coal-burning behemoth, known as DTE Monroe, that his company had been fighting to protect. Mr. Anderson’s position reflects a fundamental shift among major electric utilities nationwide as they deploy their conside...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/29/big-polluters-given-almost-100bn-in-free-carbon-permits-by-eu By  Damian Carrington , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Big polluting industries have been given almost €100bn (£86bn) in free carbon permits by the EU in the last nine years, according to an analysis by the WWF [World Wildlife Fund]. The free allowances are “in direct contradiction with the polluter pays principle”, the group said. Free pollution permits worth €98.5bn were given to energy-intensive sectors including steel, cement, chemicals and aviation from 2013-21. This is more than the €88.5bn that the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) charged polluters, mostly coal and gas power stations, for their CO 2  emissions. Furthermore, the WWF said, the free permits did not come with climate conditions attached, such as increasing energy efficiency and some polluters were also able to make billions in windfall profits by selling the permits they did not use. The Europe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/business/scotland-wind-farms-offshore.html By  Stanley Reed , The New York Times.  Excerpt: It was a regular workday for these employees and contractors of a Scottish utility, SSE, and its partners, which operate the vast Beatrice wind farm off the northern tip of Great Britain. ...Mr. Larter also considers himself fortunate to have signed onto a business that is growing as Europe seeks to replace oil and gas, whose production has been a mainstay of this part of Scotland, with cleaner energy. ...These initiatives are attractive to investors and lawmakers because they produce enormous amounts of clean energy and can be placed far enough from shore that they are largely out of sight. Britain is already generating more than 10 percent of its electricity from wind at sea, and on some gusty days, like  Nov. 2 , wind produces more than half. As energy security becomes a critical issue in wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the country aspires to ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/record-heat-over-great-barrier-reef-raises-fears-of-second-summer-of-coral-bleaching By  Graham Readfearn , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Ocean temperatures over parts of the  Great Barrier Reef  have reached record levels this month, sparking fears of a second summer in a row of mass coral bleaching. Data from the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) shows sea surface temperatures over the northern parts of the reef have been the highest for any November on a record going back to 1985. With the peak period for accumulated heat over the reef not expected until February, cooler weather conditions and cyclone activity before then could stave off a mass bleaching event. ...Last summer’s mass bleaching,  declared by the Great BarrierReef Marine Park Authority  (GBRMPA), was the first outbreak during a La Niña – a climate pattern that historically has kept ocean temperatures cool eno...

https://www.science.org/content/article/reforestation-means-just-planting-trees By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: The world is set to get a lot greener over the next 10 years. The United Nations has designated 2021–30 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and many countries, with help from donors, have launched ambitious programs to restore forests in places where they were chopped down or degraded. At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Egypt last week, the European Union and 26 nations  pledged $16 billion  in support of forests, banking on trees’ ability to slow climate change by storing carbon. A significant chunk will be spent on reforestation. ...Between 2000 and 2020, the amount of forest  increased by 1.3 million square kilometers , an area larger than Peru, according to the World Resources Institute, with China and India leading the way. But  about 45%  of those new forests are plantations, dense aggregations dominated by a single ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/24/over-20000-died-western-europe-heatwaves-figures-climate-crisis By Sandra Laville , The Guardian.  Excerpt: More than 20,000 people died across western  Europe  in this summer’s heatwaves.... ...During the summer heatwaves temperatures  exceeded 40C  (104F) in London, areas in south-west France  reached 42C  and Seville and Córdoba  in Spain  set records of 44C.  Analysis  from the World Weather Attribution group of scientists found that such high temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis. ...The summer of 2022 was the  hottest on record , according to the EU’s Copernicus climate change service....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/climate/un-climate-cop27-loss-damage.html By Brad Plumer ,  Max Bearak ,  Lisa Friedman  and  Jenny Gross , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Diplomats from nearly 200 countries concluded two weeks of climate talks on Sunday by agreeing to establish a fund that would help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the greenhouse gases from wealthy nations. ...For more than three decades, developing nations have pressed rich, industrialized countries  to provide compensation  for the costs of destructive storms, heat waves and droughts linked to rising temperatures. ...While the  new climate agreement  dealt with the damages from global warming, it did far less to address the greenhouse gas emissions that are the root cause of the crisis.... See also The New York Times articles Inside the Saudi Strategy to Keep the World Hooked on Oil and In a First, Rich Countries Agree to Pay for Clim...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/business/where-to-retire-climate-change.html By  Susan B. Garland , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...A small but growing number of older people ...are taking climate change into account when choosing a retirement destination, real estate agents and other experts say. Armed with climate studies, many retirees are looking for communities that are less likely to experience extreme weather events, such as wildfires, drought and flooding.... 

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/nov/18/lab-grown-meat-safe-eat-fda-upside-foods By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The US government has cleared the way for Americans to be able to eat lab-grown meat, after authorities deemed a meat product derived from animal cells to be safe for human consumption. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  will allow  a California company called Upside Foods to take living cells from chickens and then grow them in a controlled laboratory environment to produce a meat product that doesn’t involve the actual slaughter of any animals. The FDA said it was ready to approve the sale of other lab-grown meat, stating that it was “engaged in discussions with multiple firms” to do the same, including companies that want to grow seafood from the cells of marine life. ...Making food more sustainable is a major focus of the Cop27 climate talks, shortly finishing in Egypt. The global production of food is responsible for  a third o...

https://www.science.org/content/article/shelter-storm-can-giant-flood-barrier-protect-texas-cities-hurricanes By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: A plan to wall off Houston and nearby industry from flooding caused by hurricanes will cost tens of billions of dollars. Will it be enough? ...In September 2008, Bill Merrell, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University, Galveston, ...trapped with his wife, daughter, grandson, ...by Hurricane Ike ...sat in his office and sketched plans for a project he hoped would put an end to the storm-driven flooding that had repeatedly devastated this part of Texas. It was an ambitious vision: Seventy kilometers of seawalls rising 5 meters above sea level would stretch the length of Galveston Island and beyond. Enormous gates would span the 3-kilometer-wide channel through which ships pass in and out of Galveston Bay. ...Today, that first brainstorm has morphed into a $31 billion plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the nation...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/india-faces-deepening-demographic-divide-as-it-prepares-to-overtake-china-as-the-worlds-most-populous-country By Hannah Ellis-Petersen , The Guardian.  Excerpt: India is currently home to more than 1.39 billion people – four times that of the US and more than 20 times the UK – while 1.41bn live in China. But with 86,000 babies born in India every day, and 49,400 in China, India is on course to take the lead in 2023 and hit 1.65 billion people by 2060. ...On 15 November the world’s population will reach a total of 8 billion people. Between now and 2050, over half of the projected increase in the global population will happen in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Republic of Tanzania – and India....

https://eos.org/articles/the-bottom-of-the-arctic-is-blooming By  Fanni Daniella Szakal , Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Every year in the spring, the Arctic Ocean blooms ...with microscopic algae. After the bloom has exhausted the nutrients on the surface, these plankton sink to the seafloor and, without light, die or remain in a stable state. At least, that was what we thought. A new  study in  Global Change Biology , however, uncovered that in the summer, phytoplankton could bloom at the bottom of the Arctic. ... Takuhei Shiozaki , coauthor of the study ...and his colleagues found that instead of being in a stable state with low productivity, algae in water samples from the seafloor showed high primary production, indicating a bloom. ...The effects of climate change are especially severe in the Arctic, causing the region to warm at a rate  nearly 4 times as fast  as the rest of the planet. Many marine areas that used to be covered by ice year-round are now ice-free in the...