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| Grist,Grist Climate and Energy |
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Climate change is sending ticks into new areas. Georgia researchers are on it. - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 19) |
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Sep 19 · On a blisteringly hot, sunny day this summer, Emory University researcher Arabella Lewis made her way through the underbrush in a patch of woods in Putnam County, Georgia, about an hour southeast of Atlanta. She was after something most people try desperately to avoid while in the woods: ticks.
“Sometimes you gotta get back in the weeds to get the best ticks,” she explained, sweeping a large square of white flannel along the forest floor.
The idea was that the ticks could sense the movement of the fabric and smell the carbon dioxide Lewis breathed out and would grab onto the flannel flag.
“My favorite thing about them is their little grabby front arms, the way that ... Read more ...
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In coal-rich Kentucky, a new green aluminum plant could bring jobs and clean energy - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 15) |
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Sep 15 · When John Holbrook first started working as a pipefitter in the early 1990s, jobs were easy to come by in his corner of northeastern Kentucky.
A giant iron and steel mill routinely needed maintenance and repair work, as did the coal “coking” ovens next to it. There was also a hulking coal-fired power plant and a bustling petroleum refinery nearby. Fossil fuels extracted from beneath the region’s rugged Appalachian terrain supplied these industrial sites, which sprung up during the 19th and 20th centuries along the yawning Ohio River and its tributary, Big Sandy.
“Work was so plentiful,” Holbrook recalled on a scorching August morning in Ashland, a quiet riverfront city ... Read more ...
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The Gulf Coast is sinking, making hurricanes like Francine even more dangerous - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 11) |
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Sep 11 · Hurricane Francine barreled into southern Louisiana on Wednesday as a Category 2 storm, packing 100 mph winds and sending a surge of water into coastal communities. Because so much of southern Louisiana sits at or below sea level, the surge could race inland unimpeded. The last hurricane to hit the state was Ida in 2021, which unleashed a catastrophic storm surge and caused $75 billion in damages and killed 55 people.
“Storm surge is really a nasty, nasty thing,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “It’s hurricane winds essentially bulldozing the ocean onto land. It doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
The Gulf Coast’s storm ... Read more ...
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States are falling behind in using IRA funding to advance climate action - Grist (Aug 30) |
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Aug 30 · When President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, into law two years ago, a starting gun sounded. “The race is on,” said Jacob Corvidae, a senior principal with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a clean energy think tank, for states to attract and encourage the private actions that will position their economies at the forefront of the clean economy, and capture the tax incentives in the IRA that spur those investments.
According to a new report from RMI, which Corvidae co-authored, that race is off to a slow start. Corvidae and his team estimate that, for the nation to meet its clean energy goals, the federal government would need to invest ... Read more ...
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Why Mississippi coal is powering Georgia’s data centers - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 27) |
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Aug 27 · Last October, Georgia Power approached regulators with what it said was a crisis. Unless they did something soon, they discovered, the growing demand for electricity would outpace production sometime in the winter of 2025. Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp and other state leaders had been courting data centers and new manufacturing plants for some time, and it was all catching up to the aging power grid.
The Georgia Public Service Commission, the elected body tasked with regulating the utility company, had approved Georgia Power’s long-term grid plan, which the company makes every three years, in 2022. Since then, the company said, its projections for the growth of electricity ... Read more ...
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This simple farming technique can capture carbon for thousands of years - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 22) |
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Aug 22 · Simon Kitol’s 25-acre farm in western Kenya teems with maize, tomatoes, and beans, but also an invasive menace: Prosopis juliflora, better known as the mathenge plant. Its long roots steal water from his crops, and the shrub takes up valuable room for growing food. Kitol’s livestock also dine on the mathenge pods, which are loaded with sugar, causing even more problems.
“It damages their teeth, and eventually the cows or goats die,” Kitol said. The thickets also provide cover for predators like wild dogs and hyenas. “They hide there because it is so thick that you can’t see them. At night, when the goats or sheep walk around, they are attacked and killed.”
Last ... Read more ...
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Extreme weather 101: Your guide to staying prepared and informed - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 20) |
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Aug 20 · No matter where you live, extreme weather can hit your area, causing damage to homes, power outages, and dangerous or deadly conditions. If you’re on the coast, it may be a hurricane; in the Midwest or South, a tornado; in the West, wildfires; and as we’ve seen in recent years, anywhere can experience heat waves or flash flooding.
Living through a disaster and its aftermath can be both traumatic and chaotic, from the immediate losses of life and belongings to conflicting information around where to access aid. The weeks and months after may be even more difficult, as the attention on your community is gone but civic services and events have stalled or changed ... Read more ...
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Your guide to voting after a disaster - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 20) |
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Aug 20 · In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Louisiana experienced a parade of devastating hurricanes. On August 27, Hurricane Laura hit the state’s southwest coast as a Category 4 storm, bringing winds up to 150 miles per hour, extreme rainfall, and a 10-foot storm surge. Hurricane Delta hit the same region six weeks later as a Category 2. Hurricane Zeta then hit the southeast part of the state a week before the election. The storms made voting a chaotic and difficult process: polling locations damaged, thousands displaced from their state, all the necessary paperwork and IDs lost to floodwaters.
It is an experience that many Americans have found themselves in, ... Read more ...
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Recent Supreme Court decisions are already slowing climate progress - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 19) |
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Aug 19 · During its last session, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority dealt blow after blow to federal agencies’ authority to draft and enforce policies, including those aimed at mitigating climate change. Its decisions have already created upheaval for courts considering issues ranging from the approval of a solar project to vehicle emissions rules. This has upended the legal landscape for judges and for regulators, and could slow climate progress as a result.
The uncertainty has alarmed, but not surprised, legal experts who earlier this summer predicted that four rulings limiting federal authority could curtail the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency and other ... Read more ...
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Hurricane Ernesto arrived way early. It’s an ominous sign. - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 16) |
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Aug 16 · After unleashing widespread flooding and knocking out electricity for half of Puerto Rico, this season’s third hurricane, Ernesto, has turned north, and is approaching Bermuda. In an average Atlantic season, the third hurricane doesn’t spin up until September 7, so Ernesto has arrived way, way early. As of August 9, this summer had already produced a third of the activity in a typical season - with nearly 90 percent of it remaining.
All that makes Ernesto, now a Category 2 hurricane, an ominous sign of what’s still to come in the next few months - and what to expect as the planet rapidly warms. “Being a little more than three weeks ahead of schedule for the third hurricane is ... Read more ...
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Climate change fueled last year’s extreme wildfires - some more than others - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 15) |
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Aug 15 · Starting in March 2023, Canada burned for eight months, with flames licking all 13 provinces and territories in the country’s deadliest ever fire season. At least 150,000 people evacuated, and tens of millions across North America were affected by the drifting smoke. In New York, residents experienced the worst air quality in half a century.
Five months later, Greece was besieged by the European Union’s largest blaze yet, which claimed almost 350 square miles of forests and took the lives of 19 immigrants. Near the equator, the Amazon experienced a record-breaking number of fires. For months, satellite images showed thick plumes of smoke shrouding entire countries and swaths ... Read more ...
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How the 2024 Paris Olympics handled the heat - and didn’t - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 9) |
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Aug 9 · Curled up on a small, white rectangle of fabric on the grass by a park bench in Paris, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon inadvertently took the internet by storm simply by sleeping outside. The moment, posted to social media on Monday by a fellow Olympic athlete, came a week after Ceccon failed to qualify for the men’s 200-meter backstroke finals, despite having just won gold in the 100-meter event.
In an interview with an Italian broadcaster, Ceccon blamed his performance gap on subpar sleeping conditions in the Olympic Village - namely, heat. This week, media speculation that the uncomfortable temperatures were also behind his alfresco nap stirred an already roiling pot of ... Read more ...
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California’s Park Fire is spawning its own smoke thunderclouds - Grist Climate and Energy (Jul 30) |
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Jul 30 · With 600 square miles burned so far, the Park Fire is already one of California’s biggest wildfires ever - and it’s still far from contained. Driven by strong winds, the blaze has chewed through desiccated plants, spewing smoke high into the atmosphere. So much smoke and rising hot air, in fact, that it’s been creating fire tornados and one of the strangest natural phenomena on earth: the pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb.
It’s a smoke thundercloud that makes a dangerous wildfire like the Park Fire, burning in the northern part of the state, even more unpredictable. PyroCbs can produce lightning that goes on to spark more fires around the very blaze that made the clouds. And ... Read more ...
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Plants and their pollinators are increasingly out of sync - Grist Climate and Energy (Jul 30) |
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Jul 30 · For the past four years, plant biologist Elsa Godtfredsen has trekked to a subalpine meadow in Colorado to study the interactions between wildflowers and bumblebees. The pollinators buzz among fields of purple delphinium and columbine, an iconic image of spring in the Rocky Mountains.
Godtfredsen works at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a research center set amid evergreens and jagged granite peaks in Gothic, Colorado. Each spring and summer, they track four species of wildflowers from bloom to seed set, using this data to model the impact of climate change on these plants and their pollinators.
“Subalpine and alpine ecosystems are changing rapidly,” ... Read more ...
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Earth just sweltered through the hottest day ever recorded - Grist Climate and Energy (Jul 23) |
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Jul 23 · Sunday was an unprecedented day, and not just because President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race so close to the election. July 21 was the hottest day on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, with a global average temperature of 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly beating out the previous record set on July 6 of last year.
For 13 straight months now, the planet has been notching record temperatures, from hottest year (2023) to hottest month (last July). And what was a daily temperature record eight years ago has now become worryingly commonplace. “What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 ... Read more ...
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Homeowners associations in Michigan now have to allow rooftop solar - Grist Climate and Energy (Jul 11) |
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Jul 11 · This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
People who want to install solar panels on their roofs have to consider a lot: sunlight, cost, and coordinating with contractors and utilities. Tens of millions of people across the country also have to think about their homeowners association.
In Michigan, a new law aims to remove that barrier by telling homeowners associations, or HOAs, they have to allow rooftop solar.
The Homeowners’ Energy Policy Act was signed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer on Monday.
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To support our nonprofit environmental ... Read more ...
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Taking a train during a heat wave? Watch out for ‘sun kinks’ - Grist Climate and Energy (Jul 9) |
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Jul 9 · One of the iconic sensory experiences of riding a train is actually the sound of ingenuity. As steel railroad tracks heat up, they grow: 1,800 feet of rail expands by more than an inch for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit of temperature increase. So rails used to be laid down in sections - each between 30 and 60 feet long - with small gaps.
“The very specific railway noise that you hear - chuchat … chuchat … chuchat … chuchat … chuchat - is because there is a gap between the rails, and this gap is meant for such expansion,” said Dev Niyogi, who studies urban climate extremes at the University of Texas at Austin.
Still, in a severe heat wave, the rail can swell until the ... Read more ...
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Scientists just got closer to solving a major Antarctic puzzle - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 28) |
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Jun 28 · Three million years ago, the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide levels weren’t so different from those of today, but sea levels were dozens of meters higher. Looking that far back presents a foreboding peek into the future, as satellite records show that melting Antarctic ice sheets are on their way to bulking up this epoch’s oceans, too. The puzzle for scientists is that the climate models they create can’t seem to match what they see with their own eyes. “Lots of people have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what is missing from our ice sheet models,” said Alex Bradley, an ice dynamics researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, part of the United Kingdom’s Natural ... Read more ...
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The Tule River Tribe of California recruits an old ally in its fight against wildfires: Beavers - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 28) |
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Jun 28 · After a decade of work, the Tule River Tribe has released nine beavers into the nation’s reservation in the foothills of California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains. The beavers are expected to make the landscape more fire and drought resistant. Beaver dams trap water in pools, making the flow of water slower so the surrounding ecosystem can reap the benefits of the moisture while making it more difficult for forest fires to start. They can also help a forest heal after a fire by rehydrating the area.
“We’ve been through numerous droughts over the years,” Kenneth McDarmet said, who is a Tule River tribal member and former councilman. “It’s going to be wonderful to ... Read more ...
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The secret to decarbonizing buildings might be right under your feet - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 27) |
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Jun 27 · Along with earthworms, rocks, and the occasional skeleton, there’s a massive battery right under your feet. Unlike a flammable lithium ion battery, though, this one is perfectly stable, free to use, and ripe for sustainable exploitation: the Earth itself.
While temperatures above-ground fluctuate throughout the year, the ground stays a stable temperature, meaning it’s humming with geothermal energy that engineers can exploit. “Every building sits on a thermal asset,” said Cameron Best, director of business development at Brightcore Energy in New York, which deploys geothermal systems. “I really don’t think there’s any more efficient or better way to heat and cool ... Read more ...
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A rare celebration of Indigenous Pacific cultures underscores the cost of climate change - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 7) |
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Jun 7 · More than 2,000 people are gathering in Hawai?i this week and next for the 13th Festival of Pacific Island Arts and Culture. It’s the largest gathering of Indigenous Pacific peoples in the world. And it comes at a critical time for the island region known as Oceania as sea levels, storms, and other climate effects threaten traditional ways of life and connections to land and sea.
Normally the festival takes place every four years and rotates between the three regions of the Pacific: Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. But because of the pandemic, the event hasn’t happened for eight years. It was last held on Guam, and this is the first time since it was established in 1972 ... Read more ...
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Illinois legislature puts the brakes on a carbon capture boom - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 7) |
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Jun 7 · The Midwest’s largest potential reservoir to store carbon is buried deep under the farmland of Illinois, and the state’s lawmakers just hit the brakes on any plans for a carbon capture and storage boom there.A controversial technology where carbon dioxide is captured and then stored deep underground, carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is a big part of the Biden administration’s push for a greener planet. And a federal roll out of massive incentives for the nascent industry has spurred a carbon capture gold rush nationwide. In Illinois alone, three pipelines and 22 carbon sequestration wells have already been proposed. But local farmers, landowners, and environmental advocates are ... Read more ...
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As the climate changes, many species are teetering on extinction. How much should we intervene? - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 6) |
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Jun 6 · In the first flush of an Arctic spring, the boreal forest begins to stir, emerging from a silvered quiet. Icicles shatter like glass. Meltwater babbles, braiding in puddles and then in deltas. Snow drops in clumps from the branches of black spruce. Saplings remain crooked from a long wait, as if Dr. Seuss had drawn springtime.
The trees’ twisted crowns are evidence of the forest’s scrappiness: A black spruce seed riding the wind in 1728 - the year the first Danish explorer crossed the Bering Sea between Asia and North America - might have found purchase in the rocky till revealed by retreating glaciers. When ice turned Captain Cook back from the Arctic Ocean a few decades ... Read more ...
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The homeowner mutiny leaving Florida cities defenseless against hurricanes - Grist (Jun 4) |
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Jun 4 · Lisa Hendrickson is almost out of sand.
Hendrickson is the mayor of Redington Shores, Florida, a well-heeled beach town in Pinellas County. Her town occupies a small section of a razor-thin barrier island that stretches down the western side of the sprawling Tampa Bay metro area, dividing cities like Tampa and St. Petersburg from the Gulf of Mexico. Many of her constituents have an uninterrupted view of the ocean.
The town’s only protection from the Gulf of Mexico’s increasingly erratic storms is a pristine beach that draws millions of tourists every year - but that beach is disappearing fast. A series of storms, culminating in last fall’s Hurricane Idalia, have eroded ... Read more ...
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Why this summer might bring the wildest weather yet - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 3) |
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Jun 3 · Summers keep getting hotter, and the consequences are impossible to miss: In the summer of 2023, the Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest season in 2,000 years. Canada’s deadliest wildfires on record bathed skylines in smoke from Minnesota to New York. In Texas and Arizona, hundreds of people lost their lives to heat, and in Vermont, flash floods caused damages equivalent to a hurricane.
Forecasts suggest that this year’s upcoming “danger season” has its own catastrophes in store. On May 23, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could be the most prolific yet. A week earlier, they released a ... Read more ...
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Why this summer might bring the wildest weather yet - Grist Climate and Energy (Jun 3) |
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Jun 3 · Summers keep getting hotter, and the consequences are impossible to miss: In the summer of 2023, the Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest season in 2,000 years. Canada’s deadliest wildfires on record bathed skylines in smoke from Minnesota to New York. In Texas and Arizona, hundreds of people lost their lives to heat, and in Vermont, flash floods caused damages equivalent to those from a hurricane.
Forecasts suggest that this year’s upcoming “danger season” has its own catastrophes in store. On May 23, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could be the most prolific yet. A week earlier, they ... Read more ...
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Salt in the womb: How rising seas erode reproductive health - Grist Climate and Energy (May 30) |
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May 30 · Support climate news that leads to action. Help Grist raise $35,000 by May 31.
All donations DOUBLED.
Support climate news that leads to action. Help Grist raise $35,000 by May 31. All donations DOUBLED.
Today, 30-year-old garment factory worker Khadiza Akhter lives in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Her small concrete house is clean and organized. Green shutters frame the windows, and clothes hang on lines outside her front door. A water spigot sticks out of the concrete next to the drying laundry, and the turn of a white plastic knob is all it takes for clear, clean water to rush out. Akhter calls it “a blessing of God.”
Akhter grew up ... Read more ...
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The 'Doomsday Glacier’ is melting faster than scientists thought - Grist Climate and Energy (May 24) |
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May 24 · At the bottom of the Earth sits a massive bowl of ice you may know as the West Antarctic ice sheet. Each day, the ocean laps away at its base, slowly eroding the glaciers that line its rim. When they inevitably give in, the sea will begin to fill the basin, claiming the ice for its own and flooding coastlines around the world.
Thwaites Glacier is one of the bulwarks guarding against the collapse of this critical ice sheet, most of which rests below sea level and holds enough ice to raise the ocean by 60 meters, or about 195 feet. Unfortunately, this frosty Goliath, the size of Florida, is also one of the world’s most unstable and fastest-melting glaciers. While glaciologists ... Read more ...
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A trillion cicadas will emerge in the next few weeks. This hasn’t happened since 1803. - Grist Climate and Energy (May 15) |
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May 15 · This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit, environmental media organization.
If you live in the Midwest or the Southeast, you know the cicadas are coming.
And if you live in Chicago, you know the Cicadalypse is coming.
Cicadas, winged buggy noisemakers whose relatives include leaf-hoppers and spittle bugs, come in two varieties: the annual cicadas who, sure enough, appear every year and the periodical cicadas, who appear in 13-year and 17-year cycles.
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To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. ... Read more ...
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Michigan wants fossil fuel companies to pay for climate change damages - Grist Climate and Energy (May 13) |
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May 13 · This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday that she plans to sue fossil fuel companies for knowingly contributing to climate change, harming the state’s economy and ways of life.
“It’s long past time that we step up and hold the fossil fuel companies that are responsible for all these damages accountable,” she said.
With this litigation, Michigan would join dozens of local, tribal and state governments that have taken similar steps to try to make the industry pay for climate damage.
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Michigan wants fossil fuel companies to pay for climate change damages - Grist Climate and Energy (May 13) |
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May 13 · This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday that she plans to sue fossil fuel companies for knowingly contributing to climate change, harming the state’s economy and ways of life.
“It’s long past time that we step up and hold the fossil fuel companies that are responsible for all these damages accountable,” she said.
With this litigation, Michigan would join dozens of local, tribal, and state governments that have taken similar steps to try to make the industry pay for climate damage.
Grist thanks its sponsors. Become ... Read more ...
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Occidental Petroleum’s net-zero strategy is a 'license to pollute,’ critics say - Grist Climate and Energy (May 9) |
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May 9 · More so than any other fossil fuel company, Occidental Petroleum - known as Oxy - has built its climate strategy around innovations that capture carbon before it can be emitted or pull it directly out of the air. The Texas-based oil giant, which made more than $23 billion in revenue last year, says on its website that these “visionary technologies” will help it achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and enable a lower-carbon future.
Scientists agree that such technologies will be necessary to limit global warming. But Oxy’s plans for them appear to be less about sustainability and more about creating a “license to pollute,” according to a new analysis from the nonprofit ... Read more ...
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The surging demand for data is guzzling Virginia’s water. - Grist Climate and Energy (May 8) |
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May 8 · Every email you send has a home. Every uploaded file, web search, and social media post does, too. In massive buildings erected from miles of concrete, stacked servers hum with the electricity required to process and store every byte of information that modern lives rely on.In recent years, these data centers have been rapidly expanding in the United States. But the gargantuan facilities do more than keep cloud servers running - they also guzzle absurd amounts of water to run cooling systems that protect their components from overheating. Now, as artificial intelligence applications become ubiquitous, they’re using more water than ever.
Northern Virginia is the data center ... Read more ...
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New documents show oil executives promoted natural gas as green — but knew it wasn't - Grist (May 2) |
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May 2 · A congressional hearing on the fossil fuel industry’s “evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change” turned into a spectacle on Wednesday morning as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., grilled a panel of experts on wide-ranging - and often irrelevant - topics. The thousands of internal oil company documents released before the hearing, however, contained some bombshell findings.
One of the biggest revelations is that BP executives understood that natural gas, which the company promoted as a “bridge” or “destination” fuel to a cleaner future as coal declined, was incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015. “[O]nce built, gas locks in future ... Read more ...
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Have the world's coral reefs already crossed a tipping point? - Grist (Apr 29) |
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Apr 29 · About a year ago, the seas got unusually hot, even by our current, overheated standards. Twelve months of broken records later, the oceans are still more feverish than climate models and normal fluctuations in global weather patterns can explain.
When the seas turn into bathwater, it threatens the survival of the planet’s coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine life and a source of sustenance for many people living along the world’s coasts. Mostly clustered in the shallow waters of the tropics, coral reefs have one of the lowest thresholds for rising temperatures of all the possible “tipping points,” the cascading feedback loops that set off large, abrupt changes in the ... Read more ...
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How should Georgia elect key utility regulators? US Supreme Court asked to weigh in - Grist Climate and Energy (Apr 24) |
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Apr 24 · This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
In a case that could impact other lawsuits on voting rights, Black voters who sued over Georgia’s elections for key utility regulators are appealing their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Those elections for the Georgia Public Service Commission have been on hold for years and while last week a federal appeals court lifted an injunction blocking the elections from taking place, there is little chance the elections will happen this year.
Public Service Commissioners have enormous ... Read more ...
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Pediatricians say climate conversations should be part of any doctor’s visit - Grist Climate and Energy (Apr 19) |
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Apr 19 · The reality of climate change came home for Dr. Samantha Ahdoot one summer day in 2011 when her son was 9 years old.
She and her family were living in Charlottesville, where Ahdoot is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. There was a heat wave. Morning temperatures hovered in the high 80s, and her son had to walk up a steep hill to get to his day camp.
About an hour after he left for camp, she received a call from a nearby emergency room. Her son had collapsed from the heat and needed IV fluids to recover.
“It was after that event that I realized that I had to do something,” she said. “That, as a pediatrician and a mother, this ... Read more ...
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Landfills bake the planet even more than we realized - Grist (Mar 28) |
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Mar 28 · A landfill is a place of perpetual motion, where mountains of garbage rise in days and crews race to contain the influx of ever more trash. Amid the commotion, an invisible gas often escapes unnoticed, warming the planet and harming our health: methane.
On Thursday, the climate-data sleuths at Carbon Mapper published a study in Science that shows U.S. landfills emit methane at levels at least 40 percent higher than previously reported to the Environmental Protection Agency. At more than half of the hundreds of garbage dumps surveyed - in the largest assessment yet of such emissions - most of the pollution flowed from leaks, creating concentrated plumes. The researchers found ... Read more ...
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Florida is about to erase climate change from most of its laws - Grist (Mar 25) |
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Mar 25 · In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state - Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer - and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areas threatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats.
But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on ... Read more ...
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FBI Infiltrated Standing Rock Protests With Up To 10 Informants - Grist (Mar 15, 2024) |
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Mar 15, 2024 · Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The new details about federal law enforcement surveillance of an Indigenous environmental movement were released as part of a legal fight between North Dakota and the federal government over who should pay for policing the pipeline fight. Until now, the existence of only one other federal informant in the camps had been confirmed.
The FBI also regularly sent agents wearing civilian clothing into the camps, one former agent told Grist in an interview. Meanwhile, the ... Read more ...
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