Articles on or after 3/18/2024: Washington Post - Climate and Environment
|
Biden seeks to accelerate the EV transition in biggest climate move yet - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 20) |
|
Mar 20 · The Biden administration finalized the United States’ toughest limits on planet-warming emissions from passenger cars and light trucks Wednesday, in a controversial bid to accelerate the nation’s halting transition to electric vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency rule - President Biden’s most far-reaching climate regulation yet - will require automakers to ramp up sales of electric vehicles while slashing carbon emissions from gasoline-powered models, which account for about one-fifth of America’s contribution to global warming. But unlike last year’s proposed rule, automakers will not need to dramatically boost electric vehicle (EV) sales until after 2030. The ... Read more ... |
|
|
Birds, bees and even plants might act weird during the solar eclipse - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 26) |
|
Mar 26 · A total eclipse isn’t just a spectacle in the sky. When the moon consumes the sun on April 8, day will plunge into twilight, the temperature will drop - and nature will take notice. Reports abound of unusual animal and plant behavior during eclipses. A swarm of ants carrying food froze until the sun reemerged during an 1851 eclipse in Sweden. A pantry in Massachusetts was “greatly infested” with cockroaches just after totality in 1932. Sap flowed more slowly in a 75-year-old beech tree in Belgium in 1999. Orb-weaving spiders started tearing down their webs and North American side-blotched lizards closed their eyes during an eclipse in Mexico in 1991. Plenty of scientists ... Read more ... |
|
|
Climate change is altering Earth’s rotation enough to mess with our clocks - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 27) |
|
Mar 27 · Climate change is messing with time itself. The melting of polar ice due to global warming is affecting Earth’s rotation and could have an impact on precision timekeeping, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The planet is not about to jerk to a halt, nor speed up so rapidly that everyone gets flung into space. But timekeeping is an exact science in a highly technological society, which is why global authorities more than half a century ago felt compelled by the slight changes in Earth’s rotation to invent the concept of the “leap second.” Climate change is now making these calculations even more complicated: In just a few years it may be ... Read more ... |
|
|
Dunes aren’t just big piles of sand. Here’s why Earth needs them. - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 20) |
|
Mar 20 · The famed coastal dunes that inspired the shifting sand landscape of the desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel “Dune” are also under siege - from climate change and human development. Like many beaches around the world, the vast sandy ecosystem that stretches along Oregon’s central coastline is threatened by sea level rise and more powerful storms. “There are a lot of places where dunes are eroding that weren’t eroding in the past,” said Sally Hacker, a coastal ecologist and professor at Oregon State University who researches the landforms. As communities build right up to their edge, disrupting the complex system of sand, these dunes can become ... Read more ... |
|
|
Fastest-moving solar storm in years triggered beautiful green and purple aurora - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 25) |
|
Mar 25 · Skywatchers reported beautiful green, purple and red auroras across Sunday skies in some locations in Europe, New Zealand and parts of the northern United States - at least for a little bit. The auroras, also known as the northern and southern lights, were triggered by the fastest-moving solar storm in at least five years, but dwindled as the geomagnetic activity quickly waned. In Finland, the “aurora did one amazing dance just after the fall of darkness,” Alexander Kuznetsov, a self-described “aurora hunter,” wrote on SpaceWeather.com. “It started as a sharp dancing arc in the Southern horizon, and it quickly went overhead, producing some of the most vibrant red & purple ... Read more ... |
|
|
Indoor farms are remaking the produce market - at a cost to the planet - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 27) |
|
Mar 27 · No one would argue that the climate in North Texas is ideal for growing lettuce, a crop that thrives when there’s a chill in the air. But the region’s boiling summers are of no concern to Eddy Badrina, the chief executive of Eden Green Technology, a vertical, hydroponic greenhouse company located just outside of Dallas. The company, which sells its leafy greens to Walmart, controls every aspect of a plant’s life. Inside its 82,500 square foot facility, cool air is pumped in to create the ideal microclimate around each baby butterhead and romaine lettuce. Seven miles of pipes deliver nutrient-rich water. Although natural light floods the space - setting it apart from other ... Read more ... |
|
|
Northern Lights slash a surprising amount of winter energy bills. Here’s why. - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 23) |
|
Mar 23 · Over many Finnish winters, scientist Timo Asikainen made an observation in his grandma’s old house common to many: when it was cold, money spent on electricity went up. It turns out, though, those cold spells and his energy bills were influenced by an unexpected source in plain sight, the aurora borealis. More than 90 million miles away from Earth, the sun is constantly spewing out charged particles in our direction, sometimes triggering the ultimate celestial light show - an aurora, also known as the northern and southern lights. Now, Finnish scientists have determined that such strong geomagnetic activity around the country can cause warmer weather and lower electricity ... Read more ... |
|
|
Phasing out fossil fuels a 'fantasy,’ oil executives say amid giant profits - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 20) |
|
Mar 20 · HOUSTON - When nations struck a historic deal to phase out fossil fuels last fall, then-U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry was elated. “We are moving away from fossil fuels - and we are not turning back,” Kerry declared at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai. But three months later, it appears that some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies did not get the memo. At an energy conference here this week, their leaders struck a much different tone, predicting that fossil fuels will continue to power the global economy well into the future. “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco, said to ... Read more ... |
|
|
|
Steel, cement and - cheese? U.S. spends big to cut these carbon footprints. - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 25) |
|
Mar 25 · Americans love their macaroni and cheese, devouring millions of boxes each year. But producing all of that gooey yellow pasta takes a toll on the planet, since heating and drying the ingredients requires an enormous amount of energy. On Monday, the Biden administration took a big step toward tackling those and other industrial emissions as part of its broader climate agenda. The Energy Department announced up to $6 billion for 33 projects intended to curb carbon pollution from industrial facilities, including steel mills, cement plants and a Michigan factory where Kraft Heinz makes its staple food of college dorm rooms everywhere. The funding, which comes from President ... Read more ... |
|
|
The surprising reasons why Big Oil may not want a second Trump term - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 26) |
|
Mar 26 · HOUSTON - As president, Donald Trump vowed to unleash American “energy dominance,” while on the campaign trail, he has summarized his energy policies with the slogan “drill, baby, drill.” Yet a possible Trump victory in the 2024 election is not delighting oil and gas executives as much as one might expect, according to interviews with several industry leaders at a recent energy conference in Houston. Fossil fuel firms have found a lot to like in President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has vowed to unravel. The law offers lucrative tax credits for companies to capture and store carbon dioxide - subsidies that several oil giants ... Read more ... |
|
|
U.S. clamps down on oil and gas firms releasing potent greenhouse gas - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 27) |
|
Mar 27 · Oil and gas companies will need to stem the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from their drilling operations on federal and tribal lands under a highly anticipated rule the Biden administration finalized Wednesday. The rule from the Bureau of Land Management, an arm of the Interior Department, builds on the Biden administration’s broader strategy for tackling methane, which accounts for nearly a third of global warming. Cutting methane emissions is one of the fastest ways to slow climate change, because it traps 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere. The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled plans for preventing ... Read more ... |
|
|
Why EVs are now almost as cheap as gas cars - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 18) |
|
Mar 18 · The price of electric cars is plummeting so fast that they’re now almost as cheap as gas-powered cars. Since EVs first hit the market, car buyers have had to pay a steep premium if they wanted a car that ran on batteries instead of a gas engine. Two years ago, they would have paid about $17,000 more on average for a new electric car than for a new gas-powered car. But that gap has been rapidly closing, shrinking to $5,000 last month, according to data from Cox Automotive. That’s an 11 percent markup over the average new car price last month - roughly similar to the price difference between picking the base model of some cars vs. the performance model that comes with all ... Read more ... |
|
|
Why experts think tornado season could soon spring to life - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 19) |
|
Mar 19 · The United States sees, on average, about 1,200 tornadoes per year. Most are weak and fleeting - often touching down only briefly and causing minimal damage. A few are strong or violent, tracking dozens of miles and destroying entire neighborhoods. Experts are warning that this year, the peak of tornado season - from April through June - could be extra busy in the Plains. Tornadoes happen in every month of the year. While the winter months of December through February are usually quieter, it’s not uncommon for spinning storms to skirt the Gulf Coast and Florida. By March warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico wafts north over the Deep South. As it clashes with remnant ... Read more ... |
|
|
Why Tennessee lawmakers are pushing a bill to keep government from spraying the sky - Washington Post - Climate and Environment  (Mar 27) |
|
Mar 27 · Republican state lawmakers are going after a new threat they say could cause harm to the environment - and playing into a baseless claim at the same time. In a Tennessee bill passed by the state Senate last week, lawmakers targeted geoengineering, an experimental - and controversial - practice not yet in use that could help cool the planet amid climate change. But the text of the bill can also be seen as referring to “chemtrails,” plumes of toxic chemicals that believers of the unfounded claim say governments and corporations are spewing into the sky. Now, the confusion between solar geoengineering and chemtrails threatens to muddy the waters around nascent ... Read more ... |
|
|