By Elisabeth Pain , Science.  Excerpt: Since 2019, the Institute of Biology and Chemistry of Proteins (IBCP) in Lyon, France, has retrofitted the building for greater energy efficiency, raised freezers’ temperatures 10°C, and reduced the need for autoclaving by 1 month’s worth of cycles per year. The institute increasingly orders consumables in bulk, recycles polystyrene packaging, and gets small lab equipment repaired rather than replaced. Every year it also organizes a contest for researchers to clean out their freezers so it doesn’t have to buy new ones. Thanks to these efforts and more, IBCP reduced its carbon footprint by about 13% between 2019 and 2023. ...These grassroots efforts are part of a larger movement across France. At its forefront is  Labos 1point5 , a collective of some 600 researchers who believe science should lead by example when it comes to reducing society’s carbon footprint. ...more than half of the carbon footprint of most French research laboratories ...

By Tim Appenzeller , Science.  Excerpt: This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June,  according to energy think tank Ember . In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led  Science  to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2025 . 

By Chris Baraniuk , WIRED .  Excerpt: ...workers began adding a secret, light brown powder to water as they mixed up a special fluid that can store energy.... Their goal was to achieve a mixture 2.5 times denser than water. ...Pumped hydro first emerged in the late 19th century . During subsequent decades, countries including the US and UK built lots of large plants, though construction had waned by the 1990s . The tech was originally designed to complement fossil fuel power plants, making use of excess energy they produced. But today grid operators increasingly value pumped hydro plants as workhorses able to mediate highly variable wind and solar assets. They can fill in shortfalls in electricity generation or soak up surplus energy within minutes, and store it for short or long periods....  Full article at https://www.wired.com/story/pumped-hydro-energy-storage-is-having-a-renaissance/ . 

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: NEW ORLEANS— Alarm spread fast today among climate scientists here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU): President Donald Trump’s administration, they learned, was going to try to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), one of the world’s premier climate and weather research centers. The news, delivered last night via a post on X from Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, had come with no prior warning from the White House or from NCAR’s funder, the National Science Foundation (NSF), says Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a consortium that manages NCAR. Vought’s  post  asserted that NCAR is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism,” and said the center’s “vital activities,” such as weather research, would be moved to another entity or location....  Full article at https://www.sc...

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The 20th annual Arctic Report Card reveals new highs in temperature and new lows in sea ice, as well as an uncertain outlook for the availability of federal data. ...After 2 decades of the U.S. government producing the annual report, however, datasets and resources used to create it may be under threat as federal science agencies lose staff and plan for funding uncertainties....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/amid-the-arctics-hottest-year-arctic-science-faces-a-data-deficiency . 

By Arcelia Martin , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Capacity additions to the Texas grid continue to be led by renewables. Battery storage facilities and solar farms powered virtually all capacity growth in Texas’ electric grid throughout 2025, as the home of the nation’s oil and gas industry created almost twice as much new solar power as California. ...according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), operator of Texas’ electric grid...Solar power accounted for the second-largest capacity addition, with more than 4,500 megawatts installed....  Full article at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10122025/texas-electric-grid-transitioning-to-battery-storage-solar/ .

By CHLOE AIELLO  AND  SAM BLUM , Inc.  Excerpt: Inside the fallout from the Department of Energy’s slashing of $8 billion in loans and grants, and how the companies affected aim to ‘Trump-proof’ their businesses. ...Jim Kesseli...was particularly rattled when one of Brayton’s hard-earned Department of Energy contracts was terminated last month. ...The research and development contract was issued by the DOE, and was initially meant to fund a three-year project researching various utility-scale energy storage solutions. ...Kesseli islooking to find new assignments for five people as a direct result of the contract’s cancellation. ... Nearly $8 billion in funding, cancelled ...Since Donald Trump was sworn into office again, U.S. energy policy has drastically veered toward fossil fuels—and away from renewables. The policy has left scores of clean energy startups on precarious financial footing, or scrambling to make up for projected revenue streams that have d...

By Jean Chemnick , E&E News by Politico.  Excerpt: EPA has ...modified sections of  its website  by deleting information about human-created greenhouse gases and the role they play in warming the planet. It also removed links to scientific data and information. The website now directs visitors to a subsection  on climate “causes”  that mentions only natural phenomena as the drivers of warming, like changes in the Earth’s orbit and variations in solar activity. Two subsections titled “ Climate Change Indicators ” and “ Climate Change Impacts and Analysis ” have been removed....  Full article at https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-erases-references-to-human-caused-climate-change-from-websites/ . 

By Eric Niiler , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A 5,500-mile blob of seaweed in the Atlantic Ocean that has menaced beaches across the Caribbean and Florida in recent years is exploding in size, while a second patch farther north is declining rapidly, driven by rapid changes in the region’s climate. A study published Thursday in the journal  Nature Geoscience  finds a big shift in the growth patterns of sargassum, a type of floating macroalgae that provides food and shelter for fish, turtles, seabirds and other marine life. The southern patch, known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, has now reached 38 million metric tons, a 40 percent increase from its record year of 2022. “Usually we have a 10 percent to 20 percent fluctuation year to year,” said Chuanmin Hu, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of South Florida and an author of the paper. “But this year was crazy, and we do not have an answer of why.” ...“The climate is having a very significant eff...

By Andrew Curry , Science.  Excerpt: The Black Death is the single most deadly documented pandemic in human history. In 1347 C.E., it spread from a few Italian port cities to nearly every corner of Europe, killing tens of millions of people within a decade and eliminating more than half the continent’s population. In a paper published today in  Communications Earth & Environment , researchers argue that cool weather  spurred by previously unidentified volcanic eruptions  set into motion a deadly chain of events. ...The authors of the new paper suggest volcanic eruptions a few years before the plague’s rapid spread played a role, by pushing plumes of sulfur high into the atmosphere that cooled parts of Europe and caused harvests to fail around the Mediterranean. These failures, in turn, forced Italian cities to import large quantities of grain from the plague-wracked Black Sea region—along with infected fleas, capable of subsisting on grain dust in the cargo holds...

By Hayley Smith, Los Angeles Times.  Excerpt: The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has stopped receiving any coal-fired power, officials announced Thursday. The city's last remaining coal source was the Intermountain Power Project in Utah, which provided 11% of L.A.'s energy in 2024. It's a milestone in the city's transition to 100% clean energy....  Full article at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-12-04/los-angeles-says-so-long-to-coal . 

By Science Advisor.  Excerpt: By the 1990s, the world had achieved a striking victory: largely banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), compounds used as refrigerants but destructive to the ozone layer. Unfortunately, their replacements, while safer for ozone, are still potent greenhouse gases; they contribute a few percent to emissions globally. Alternatives to compressible liquid coolants have so far suffered from inefficient heat transfer and the inability to scale. In a typical refrigerator or air conditioner, cooling is achieved by transporting heat away from the system using a fluid that absorbs heat, evaporates into a gas, and gets condensed back into a liquid. Researchers probed a different way to cool down:  adding ions to water to improve its ability to absorb heat  , similar to how we spread salt on the roads to melt snow in the winter. The team ...determined that the cooling process was three times more efficient than conventional systems and could reduce electrici...

By Savannah Gupton ,  Mark Bradford ,  Alex Polussa ,  Sara E. Kuebbing  and  Emily E. Oldfield , Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In the modern era, the necessity to adapt has led to expansive land use, fertilization, irrigation, and other agricultural routines—powered primarily by combusted carbon and freshwater extractions—to suit local environmental conditions and meet demands of growing populations. These practices have been a boon to food supplies, but have also contributed to many of today’s  climatic  and  environmental   challenges . ...the  Paris Agreement  ...  legally binds  participating nations to implement land use methods that mitigate emissions and actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. One such set of  modified land management practices , known collectively as climate-smart agriculture [ U.S. Department of Agriculture , 2025], is lauded as a pragmatic, low-barrier pathway to manage climate change through natur...