Most recent 20 articles: Grist Climate and Energy
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The IRA has injected $240 billion into clean energy. It might not be enough. - Grist Climate and Energy  (Mar 12) |
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Mar 12 · If, in the 18 months since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, you’ve found yourself muttering Jerry Maguire’s timeless mantra “Show me the money!,” a handful of policy analysts has just done exactly that. Their analysis of the nation’s investment in clean energy found that for every dollar the government has contributed to advancing the transition, the private sector has kicked in $5.47, leading to nearly a quarter-trillion dollars flowing into the clean economy in just one year. Across nearly every segment tracked by Rhodium Group and its collaborators at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investments have not only increased since President Joe Biden signed the ... Read more ... |
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SEC will require companies to disclose emissions, with one glaring gap - Grist Climate and Energy  (Mar 6) |
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Mar 6 · After two years of drafting, public comments, and delays, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, finally approved its highly-anticipated climate disclosure rules on Wednesday, laying out new requirements for companies to divulge their climate risks and some of their greenhouse emissions in public filings submitted annually to the agency The new rules require publicly traded companies to analyze and publish how climate change threatens their business - whether through physical risks like floods and other extreme weather or through “transition risks” like regulation. This is in line with the SEC’s mission to protect investors and maintain “fair, orderly, and ... Read more ... |
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How to ‘decouple’ emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can’t. - Grist Climate and Energy  (Mar 4) |
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Mar 4 · For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint. This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher. Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This ... Read more ... |
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How to recycle the giant magnets inside wind turbines? These scientists have a few ideas. - Grist Climate and Energy  (Feb 27) |
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Feb 27 · Every year, hundreds to thousands of megawatts’ worth of wind turbines across the United States get a facelift. These aging turbines have their rotors swapped out, their blades replaced, and key components like the generator upgraded in order to enhance the machines’ ability to produce electricity from wind. This process is known as “repowering.” Included among the components that sometimes get replaced are magnets made with rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which also play essential roles inside smartphones, laptops, and electric car motors. The wide range of applications for rare-earth minerals translates into a lot of potential ways to repurpose the ... Read more ... |
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A geothermal energy boom could be coming to Chicago’s South Side - Grist Climate and Energy  (Feb 23) |
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Feb 23 · Naomi Davis won’t lose her faith in the earth. At a recent community meeting in Chicago’s South Side she wanted to drive the point home - that the city’s Black community will not be left out of the new, emerging green economy. To do it, she’s betting on energy trapped deep below the surface of the earth known as geothermal, which could be an answer to heating and cooling homes more efficiently and a path to building decarbonization. Davis heads Chicago’s Blacks in Green, an environmental justice group which has dedicated the past 17 years to figuring out the blueprint for self-sustaining, climate-resilient Black communities everywhere. “We’re hit first and worst, ... Read more ... |
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Campus divestment activists eye fossil fuel profits on stolen land - Grist Climate and Energy  (Feb 9) |
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Feb 9 · Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona, has spent years urging university officials to take climate change seriously. As a leader of UArizona Divest, she and her classmates have been pushing the university toward three goals: to divest from fossil fuels by 2029; commit to no further investments in fossil fuels; and to implement socially responsible investing goals. “It’s hard to both combat the climate crisis and also fund it,” said Gonsalves-Wetherell. She has met with university officials to ask them what stocks the university has invested in and how much revenue oil and gas investments bring in. But until now, she had no idea that the ... Read more ... |
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A Superfund for climate change? States consider a new way to make Big Oil pay. - Grist Climate and Energy  (Feb 2) |
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Feb 2 · Last June, the normally warm and humid but still pleasant New England summer was disrupted by a series of unusually heavy rain storms. Flash floods broke creek banks and washed away roads, inundating several cities and towns. Vermont and upstate New York in particular saw immense damage. As communities attempted to recover from the havoc, legislators in these states, and several others, asked themselves why taxpayers should have to cover the cost of rebuilding after climate disasters when the fossil fuel industry is at fault. Vermont is now joining Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York in a multi-state effort to hold Big Oil accountable for the expensive damage wrought by ... Read more ... |
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Ignoring Indigenous rights is making the green transition more expensive - Grist Climate and Energy  (Feb 2) |
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Feb 2 · In December, a federal judge found that Enel Green Power, an Italian energy corporation operating an 84-turbine wind farm on the Osage Reservation for nearly a decade, had trespassed on Native land. The ruling was a clear victory for the Osage Nation and the company estimated that complying with the order to tear down the turbines would cost nearly $260 million. Attorneys familiar with Federal Indian law say it’s uncommon for U.S. courts to side so clearly with tribal nations and actually expel developers trespassing on their land. But observers also see the ruling as part of a broader trend: Gone are the days when developers could ignore Indigenous rights with impunity. Now, ... Read more ... |
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Across the country, houses of worship are going solar - Grist Climate and Energy  (Jan 31) |
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Jan 31 · This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan. On a Sunday morning in Charlevoix, a small town surrounded by lakes in northern Michigan, people gathered in the Greensky Hill Indian United Methodist Church. The small, one-room log building is almost 200 years old and the hymns are sung in English and Anishinaabemowin. It was December, so Pastor Johnathan Mays was leading an Advent service, one of his last, since he would soon retire. In between reflections on scripture, Mays touched on an important venture: The church is planning to install solar panels on their larger meeting hall, working with ... Read more ... |
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Chicago could be first major Midwestern city to ban gas in new construction - Grist Climate and Energy  (Jan 29) |
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Jan 29 · This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for WBEZ newsletters to get local news you can trust. Chicago could soon be the first major Midwestern city with an indoor emissions standard that would make gas-powered appliances and heating systems a thing of the past. The Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance, introduced by Mayor Brandon Johnson during the first city council meeting of the year last week, would effectively phase out fossil-fuel based appliances and heating systems in new construction and substantially ... Read more ... |
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How California is casting a cloud over residential solar - Grist Climate and Energy  (Jan 26) |
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Jan 26 · The past five years have been something of a blur for the crew at Energy Concepts Enterprises. The company, which has been installing solar panels in and around Fresno, California, since 1992, could barely keep up with demand as consumers embraced the technology in ever-greater numbers. Every year was busier than the last. Until 2023, when business plummeted. According to marketing director Carlos Beccar, sales fell from as many as 40 systems a month to 10, or less. “It’s been an incredible downturn,” he said. “We laid off half of our staff and we’re probably not done.” California is leading what analysts expect to be the first year-over-year decline in ... Read more ... |
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Advocates in Georgia call for better protections for salt marshes, a key carbon sink - Grist Climate and Energy  (Jan 12) |
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Jan 12 · Coastal Georgia regulators want to change a rule designed to protect the state’s marshes, which serve as a buffer against storms and rising sea levels and a vital part of the coastal ecosystem. But advocates say the seemingly small change points to a need for a broader review of marsh protections.The state passed a law to protect coastal salt marsh half a century ago, which means that now, though Georgia has just 100 miles of coastline, it’s home to half a million acres of salt marsh - the second-largest amount of salt marsh in the country and a third of the marshes on the East Coast. Those marshes absorb the power of strong storm surges and capture carbon in their grasses and ... Read more ... |
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Oil-friendly Louisiana now has the power to approve carbon capture projects - Grist Climate and Energy  (Jan 9) |
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Jan 9 · Both Republicans and Democrats in deep-red Louisiana have warmed up to the idea of carbon removal, a practice that involves capturing carbon dioxide from large industrial operations and storing it a mile underground. Federal tax incentives promise to make the burgeoning industry profitable at a time when businesses are looking to slash their carbon emissions. There’s one big hangup: the Environmental Protection Agency has been slow to issue permits for underground wells where the captured carbon is supposed to be stored. So when the agency announced in the waning days of 2023 that it’s handing over permitting duties, known as “primacy,” to Louisiana regulators, elected ... Read more ... |
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In Juneau, Alaska, a carbon offset project that’s actually working - Grist Climate and Energy  (Jan 4) |
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Jan 4 · When Kira Roberts moved to Juneau, Alaska, last summer, she immediately noticed how the town of 31,000 changes when the cruise ships dock each morning. Thousands of people pour in, only to vanish by evening. As the season winds down in fall, the parade of buses driving through her neighborhood slows, and the trails near her home and the vast Mendenhall Glacier no longer teem with tourists. “That unique rhythm of Juneau is really striking to me,” she said. “It’s just kind of crazy to think that this is all a mile from my house.” But Mendenhall is shrinking quickly: The 13-mile-long glacier has retreated about a mile in the past 40 years. Getting all those tourists ... Read more ... |
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How mobile home co-ops provide housing security - and climate resilience. - Grist Climate and Energy  (Jan 2) |
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Jan 2 · This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. As mobile home owners fight rising housing costs, some of them have hit upon a solution that also helps in the fight against climate change - by banding together and buying the land underneath their homes. This model of collective ownership, also called resident-owned cooperatives or ROCs, is on the rise. In 2000, there were little more than 200. Today, there are more than 15,000, according to a 2022 study from researchers at the University of California Berkeley, Cornell and MIT. When residents own the land, they can move more quickly to upgrade infrastructure. That’s where climate change comes ... Read more ... |
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A look back at U.S. climate solutions this year - Grist Climate and Energy  (Dec 21) |
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Dec 21 · Some of the most jarring ways the United States will feel the impacts of climate change began to reveal themselves this year. The U.S. saw a record-setting 25 billion-dollar natural disasters. Maui experienced the country’s deadliest wildfire in the last century. Phoenix suffered temperatures over 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 31 consecutive days. Vermont endured epic floods. Despite all this, the Biden administration reneged on its promise and approved the Willow oil project in Alaska. But this year was also filled with news of encouraging, inspiring, and groundbreaking progress in the U.S., not least of which was its joining a global agreement to transition away from ... Read more ... |
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Nuclear had a moment at COP28 - but it may be short-lived - Grist Climate and Energy  (Dec 21) |
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Dec 21 · This year’s COP28 climate conference featured a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. One less-ballyhooed undercurrent was renewed enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a means toward getting there. International climate negotiators explicitly mentioned the technology as a route to decarbonization in their first-ever “stocktake” of global emissions. Looking back across the final texts agreed on at the annual U.N. climate conference since the 2015 Paris Agreement, this is the first time the word “nuclear” has ever been used. Twenty-five countries made the point even more emphatically at the start of the conference in Dubai, where - led by the U.S. - ... Read more ... |
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Here’s how experts graded US climate progress in 2023 - Grist Climate and Energy  (Dec 19) |
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Dec 19 · 'Tis the season to be merry … and get graded. As students across the country anxiously await their report cards, we thought it would be a good time to ask climate experts to grade the United States’ efforts to address the issue over the last year. They were more than happy to play along. “As a professor of sustainability, grading is very much in our working dialog,” one respondent told us. Another chimed in: “I’m finishing up my fall semester class right now, so grades are on my mind.” The stakes, however, are much greater for the planet than for their students. This almost certainly will go down as the hottest year in recorded history, and the time for ... Read more ... |
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What abandoning fossil fuels could look like in the Arab world - Grist Climate and Energy  (Dec 14) |
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Dec 14 · For the second year in a row, world leaders met in the Arab world to negotiate the future of the planet. As a backdrop to the United Nations climate conference in Dubai, it’s a fitting venue for a planet-wide shift that scientists say needs to happen: The region has extensive deposits of oil and gas, but also immense, untapped potential for renewable energy. Over the past several years, European governments and corporations have made moves to capitalize off this potential, investing in sprawling mega-projects to capture the sun’s energy from the region’s vast deserts and export the electricity north. The oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, which constitute the region’s ... Read more ... |
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In EPA’s new methane rule, an innovative way to stop 'super emitters’ - Grist Climate and Energy  (Dec 13) |
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Dec 13 · Scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were flying a plane equipped with a visible-infrared imaging spectrometer over an oil field in California’s San Joaquin Valley when they made a worrisome discovery. Images produced by the device revealed a large plume of methane lingering in the air. The plane made flights over the field for several more weeks, and while the plume shifted and changed shape with the blowing wind, its presence persisted. Believing the source could be a leak at the oil well, the scientists notified the operator. Soon, the plume disappeared. The leak, coming from a small fuel line, had been repaired. “This is the essence of proactive ... Read more ... |
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