Most recent 10 articles: Grist Climate and Energy
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Ducks love to eat this climate-friendly food. Now you might, too. - Grist Climate and Energy (Oct 09, 2024) |
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Oct 09, 2024 · Like a priceless painting, the beautiful blue and green swirl in a lake or pond presents a look-don’t-touch kind of situation. It’s the work of proliferating cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, which produces toxins that are poisonous to humans and other animals, especially when blooms corrupt freshwater supplies. These toxins, which the microbes evolved to deter herbivores, are linked to ALS and Parkinson’s disease, plus muscle paralysis and liver and kidney failure. One of the toxins, anatoxin-a, is known as Very Fast Death Factor, in case you were doubting that toxicity.
It seemed a shame, then, that a highly nutritious fern called Azolla - that green mat ducks ... Read more ...
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Helene recovery: How to navigate FEMA, flood cleanup, disaster fraud, and more - Grist Climate and Energy (Oct 08, 2024) |
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Oct 08, 2024 · This guide was created in partnership with Blue Ridge Public Radio, so it focuses on western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia. However, there is general information for anyone impacted by flooding or hurricanes (including communities in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida hit by Hurricane Helene), and instructions for how to find assistance in your state. We’ll update this with more resources as recovery continues. Read this page in plain text here.
After a disaster, there’s so much information swirling around about relief and recovery. Whether you’re looking for financial assistance or trying to stay safe while cleaning your home, there’s an ... Read more ...
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The solar supply chain runs through this flooded North Carolina town - Grist Climate and Energy (Oct 08, 2024) |
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Oct 08, 2024 · Due to a quirk of geology, the purest quartz in all the world comes from the picturesque town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The mineral, created deep within the Earth when silicon-rich magmas cooled and crystallized some 370 million years ago, is essential to the production of computer chips and solar panels.
China, India, and Russia provide high-purity quartz as well, but what’s mined there does not match the quality or quantity of what lies beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains. With Spruce Pine among the scores of Appalachian communities reeling from Hurricane Helene, the sudden closure of quartz mines that have supplied chip manufacturers for decades has rattled the global ... Read more ...
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The solar supply chain runs through this flooded North Carolina town - Grist Climate and Energy (Oct 08, 2024) |
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Oct 08, 2024 · Due to a quirk of geology, the purest quartz in all the world comes from the picturesque town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The mineral, created deep within the earth when silicon-rich magmas cooled and crystallized some 370 million years ago, is essential to the production of computer chips and solar panels.
China, India, and Russia provide high purity quartz as well, but what’s mined there does not match the quality or quantity of what lies beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains. With Spruce Pine among the scores of Appalachian communities reeling from Hurricane Helene, the sudden closure of quartz mines that have supplied chip manufacturers for decades has rattled the global ... Read more ...
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The Panama Canal needs more water. The solution could displace thousands. - Grist Climate and Energy (Oct 02, 2024) |
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Oct 02, 2024 · Thousand-foot-long ships chug through the Panama Canal’s waters each day, over the submerged stumps of a forgotten forest and by the banks of a new one, its canopies full of screeching parrots and howler monkeys. Some 14,000 pass through its locks every year, their decks stacked high with 6 percent of the world’s commercial goods, crisscrossing the paths of tugboats on the voyage between oceans.
In early 2023, the weather pattern known as El Niño ushered in a drought that choked traffic through the canal, dropping water levels in Lake Gatun, the canal’s main reservoir, to record lows and revealing the tops of trees drowned when the canal was created at the start of the last ... Read more ...
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The climate fight that’s holding up the farm bill - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 30, 2024) |
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Sep 30, 2024 · Every five years, farmers and agricultural lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill to debate the farm bill, a massive food and agriculture funding bill that helps families afford groceries, pays out farmers who’ve lost their crops to bad weather, and props up less-than-profitable commodity markets, among dozens of other things. The last farm bill was passed in 2018, and in 2023 Congress extended the previous farm bill for an additional year after its negotiations led to a stalemate. That extension expires today, and Congress seems poised to settle for another one.
House Republicans and Democrats’ primary dispute is over on how much funding will go to food programs like SNAP and the ... Read more ...
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How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 26, 2024) |
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Sep 26, 2024 · Matthias Weyland loves having people ask about his balcony. A pair of solar panels hang from the railing, casting a sheen of dark blue against the red brick of his apartment building. They’re connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home. On a sunny day, he’ll produce enough power to supply up to half of his family’s daily needs.
Weyland is one of hundreds of thousands of people across Germany who have embraced balkonkraftwerk, or balcony solar. Unlike rooftop photovoltaics, the technology doesn’t require users to own their home, and anyone capable of plugging in an appliance can set it up. Most people buy the simple ... Read more ...
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What was behind the seismic boom that wrapped Earth for 9 days? - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 25, 2024) |
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Sep 25, 2024 · It was a warning shot picked up by seismometers around the world. Last September, a melting glacier collapsed, sending the mountaintop it propped up careening into the Dickson Fjord in East Greenland. The impact created a 650-foot tall tsunami - twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty - which crashed back and forth between the steep, narrow walls of the channel, booming so loud that the vibrations wrapped the globe in a 90-second interval pulse for 9-straight days.
“It’s like a climate change alarm,” said Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at University College London. Hicks is part of an international team of researchers who finally sleuthed out the source of the vibrations that ... Read more ...
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Net-zero targets are everywhere. But to be effective, they need accountability. - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 25, 2024) |
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Sep 25, 2024 · Averting a worst-case global warming scenario will require the world’s largest institutions to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, and do it fast. Over the last decade and a half, a standard form has emerged in which governments and corporations have made their promise to do so: the net-zero target. This is generally a voluntarily self-imposed deadline, usually decades away, by which the institution’s emissions will not necessarily actually reduce to zero, but rather by which they will at least be ostensibly canceled out by carbon offsets.
As a strategy, the net-zero target has been criticized by climate advocates; at its worst, it can be a vague, unenforceable ... Read more ...
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The secret ingredient in Biden’s climate law? City trees. - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 23, 2024) |
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Sep 23, 2024 · You’ve probably heard that the Biden administration’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, gives people big rebates and tax credits to switch to a heat pump or electric vehicle. But the law also contains a much-less-talked-about provision that could save lives: $1.5 billion for planting and maintaining trees that would turn down the temperature in many American cities.
That money goes to the U.S. Forest Service, which has been doling out the money to hundreds of applicants, including nonprofits and cities themselves. The $1.5 billion is nearly 40 times bigger than what the Forest Service typically budgets for planting and taking care of trees in cities ... Read more ...
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