My Climate Change News

The Biden administration rolled out its plan Thursday to overhaul the United States’ aging patchwork of fossil-fueled electrical grids, finishing work on a suite of regulations designed to rein in rising utility bills and stem worsening blackouts while cutting planet-heating pollution from power plants.

The regulatory package includes the nation’s first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, tighter restrictions on mercury gas and coal ash, and a new way to speed up construction of badly needed transmission lines.

Paired with the billions of dollars in carrots for manufacturing, building and buying modern energy equipment that came with President Joe Biden’s landmark climate-spending laws, the rules chart a path for the U.S. to avoid nearly 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047. That’s equal to taking 328 million gasoline-fueled cars off the road or a full year of emissions from the U.S. electric power sector today.

The ...

Chinese car giants locked in a cut-throat price war descended on the capital for the start of the Auto China show Thursday, vying to draw consumers and headlines in the world's biggest electric vehicle market and abroad.

China's EV sector has exploded in recent years, and firms are now engaged in a no-holds-barred battle to offer customers the coolest accessories at the lowest prices.

EV makers from China have made inroads into markets from Europe to Southeast Asia and Tesla's Elon Musk described them in January as "the most competitive car companies in the world".

Beijing's Auto China show, which lasts until May 4, sees dozens of firms square off in a bid to draw customers at one of the country's biggest car shows.

Thursday saw crowds surge into the convention complex hosting the event, which takes place every other year but had not been held since 2019 because of the pandemic.

Several of the Chinese automotive world's top stars addressed ...

Colonies of emperor penguin chicks were wiped out last year as global warming eroded their icy homes, a study published Thursday found, despite the birds' attempts to adapt to the shrinking landscape.

The study by the British Antarctic Survey found that record-low sea ice levels in 2023 contributed to the second-worst year for emperor penguin chick mortality since observations began in 2018.

It follows a "catastrophic breeding failure" in 2022, signaling long-term implications for the population, the study's author Peter Fretwell told AFP.

Emperor penguins breed on sea-ice platforms, with chicks hatching in the winter between late July and mid-August.

The chicks are reared until they develop waterproof feathers, typically in December ahead of the summer melt.

But if the ice melts too early, the chicks risk drowning and freezing.

Fourteen of 66 penguin colonies, which can each produce several hundred to several thousand chicks in a year, were ...

The Biden administration has expressed growing alarm that efforts to fight climate change could falter unless the electric grids are quickly expanded.

Reporting from Washington

The Biden administration on Thursday finalized a rule meant to speed up federal permits for major transmission lines, part of a broader push to expand America’s electric grids.

Administration officials are increasingly worried that their plans to fight climate change could falter unless the nation can quickly add vast amounts of grid capacity to handle more wind and solar power and to better tolerate extreme weather. The pace of construction for high-voltage power lines has sharply slowed since 2013, and building new lines can take a decade or more because of permitting delays and local opposition.

The Energy Department is trying to use the limited tools at its disposal to pour roughly $20 billion into grid upgrades and to streamline approvals for new lines. But experts say a ...

The Biden administration released a major climate regulation aimed at virtually eliminating carbon emissions from coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels and a driver of global warming.

The Biden administration has effectively moved to end the use of coal to keep the lights on in America. On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency released four major regulations designed to slash multiple forms of toxic and planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation’s dirtiest source of electricity.

The most consequential of the new rules is aimed at nearly eliminating carbon dioxide emissions from the coal plants. The other three rules would cut the emission of mercury, a neurotoxin linked to developmental damage in children; restrict the seepage of toxic ash from coal plants into water supplies; and reduce the discharge of wastewater from the plants. Once implemented, the rules are widely expected to result in the shuttering of nearly all the nation’s ...

Thailand issued fresh warnings about scorching hot weather on Thursday as the government said heatstroke has already killed at least 30 people this year.

City authorities in Bangkok gave an extreme heat warning as the heat index was expected to rise above 52 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit).

Temperatures in the concrete sprawl of the Thai capital hit 40.1 C on Wednesday and similar levels were forecast for Thursday.

A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted parts of South and Southeast Asia this week, prompting schools across the Philippines to suspend classes and worshippers in Bangladesh to pray for rain.

The heat index - a measure of what the temperature feels like taking into account humidity, wind speed and other factors - was at an "extremely dangerous" level in Bangkok, the city's environment department warned.

Authorities in Udon Thani province, in the kingdom's rural northeast, also warned of blazing temperatures on ...

Limiting power plant pollution is the last major climate rule expected from President Biden. Donald J. Trump has already vowed to “cancel” it if re-elected.

The Biden administration on Thursday placed the final cornerstone of its plan to tackle climate change: a regulation that would force the nation’s coal-fired power plants to virtually eliminate the planet-warming pollution that they release into the air or shut down.

The regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency requires coal plants in the United States to reduce 90 percent of their greenhouse pollution by 2039, one year earlier than the agency had initially proposed. The compressed timeline was welcomed by climate activists but condemned by coal executives who said the new standards would be impossible to meet.

The E.P.A. also imposed three additional regulations on coal-burning power plants, including stricter limits on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin linked to developmental damage in ...

Ice acceleration and rotation in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior in recent decades, Løkkegaard et al., Communications Earth & Environment:

In the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated, partly due to the speedup of glaciers. However, uncertainty in speed derived from satellite products hampers the detection of inland changes. In-situ measurements using stake surveys or GPS have lower uncertainties. To detect inland changes, we repeated in-situ measurements of ice-sheet surface velocities at 11 historical locations first measured in 1959, located upstream of Jakobshavn Isbræ, west Greenland. Here, we show ice velocities have increased by 5–15% across all deep inland sites. Several sites show a northward deflection of 3–4.5° in their flow azimuth. The recent appearance of a network of large transverse surface crevasses, bisecting historical overland traverse routes, may indicate a fundamental shift in local ...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday finalized an ambitious set of rules aimed at slashing air pollution, water pollution and planet-warming emissions spewing from the nation’s power plants.

If fully implemented, the rules will have enormous consequences for U.S. climate goals, the air Americans breathe and the ways they get their electricity. The power sector ranks as the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change, and it is a major source of toxic air pollutants tied to health problems.

Before the restrictions take effect, however, they will have to survive near-certain legal challenges from Republican attorneys general, who have been emboldened by the Supreme Court’s skepticism of expansive environmental regulations.

Another wild card is the November election, which could hand the White House back to former president Donald Trump, who has pledged to scrap dozens of President Biden’s green policies if he returns to office.

One of ...

A Tesla that may have been operating on the company's Autopilot driving system hit and killed a motorcyclist near Seattle, raising questions about whether a recent recall went far enough to ensure Tesla drivers using Autopilot pay attention to the road.

After the crash Friday in a suburban area about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northeast of the city, the driver of a 2022 Tesla Model S told a Washington State Patrol trooper that he was using Autopilot and looked at his cellphone while the Tesla was moving.

"The next thing he knew there was a bang and the vehicle lurched forward as it accelerated and collided with the motorcycle in front of him," the trooper wrote in a probable-cause document.

The 56-year-old driver was arrested for investigation of vehicular homicide "based on the admitted inattention to driving, while on Autopilot mode, and the distraction of the cell phone while moving forward, putting trust in the machine to drive for him," the affidavit said.

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Yale Climate Connections

With the November election fast approaching, political campaigns across the country are targeting that most coveted of groups: “likely voters.” Once identified, most campaigns inundate them with mailers, phone calls, and advertisements.

But the Environmental Voter Project flips conventional campaign wisdom. The nonprofit goes after those with voting records so dismal they’re written off by other campaigns. The Environmental Voter Project’s founder and director Nathaniel Stinnett believes there’s gold in those “unlikely voter” rolls, and his organization has been mining them since 2015 to great success. According to a report the group published last year, the Environmental Voter Project has transformed nearly 1.5 million unlikely voters into consistent voters who have one thing in common: “climate change and the environment” tops their list of ...

Rotating crops, conserving soil nutrients and deploying other strategies to "diversify" agriculture all at the same time can yield major benefits for the environment and people alike -- including increased crop yields and improved food security for entire communities.

That's the take-home message of a landmark new study, including researchers from more than 15 nations and data from 2,655 farms on five continents. The team published its findings April 4 in the journal Science.

"This is evidence that this can actually work -- we can imagine agricultural systems that are more diverse and serve people and nature at the same time," said Zia Mehrabi, a co-author of the new study and assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The study comes as farms across much of the world are increasingly growing just one type of crop or raising a single kind of animal -- a transition to "monoculture" agriculture that may bring with it a ...

Extreme heat scorched the Philippines on Wednesday, forcing schools in some areas to suspend in-person classes and prompting warnings for people to limit the amount of time spent outdoors.

The months of March, April and May are typically the hottest and driest in the archipelago nation, but conditions this year have been exacerbated by the El Niño weather phenomenon.

"It's so hot you can't breathe," said Erlin Tumaron, 60, who works at a seaside resort in Cavite province, south of Manila, where the heat index reached 47 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit) on Tuesday.

"It's surprising our pools are still empty. You would expect people to come and take a swim, but it seems they're reluctant to leave their homes because of the heat."

The heat index was expected to reach the "danger" level of 42C (108F) or higher in at least 30 cities and municipalities on Wednesday, the state weather forecaster said.

The heat index measures what a temperature ...

A new study finds that "sunny day flooding," which occurs during high tides, increases the levels of fecal bacteria in coastal waters. While the elevated bacteria levels in the coastal waters tend to dissipate quickly, the findings suggest policymakers and public health officials should be aware of potential risks associated with tidal flooding.

"Historically we see the highest levels of fecal bacteria contamination in coastal waterways after it rains, because the rain washes contaminants into the waterways," says Natalie Nelson, corresponding author of a paper on the study and an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering at North Carolina State University. "Due to sea level rise, we're seeing an increase in flooding in coastal areas at high tide -- even when there isn't any rainfall. We wanted to see whether sunny day floods were associated with increases in fecal bacteria contamination in waterways."

For the study, researchers collected water ...

Lanthanide elements are important for clean energy and other applications. To use them, industry must separate mixed lanthanide sources into individual elements using costly, time-consuming, and waste-generating procedures. An efficient new method can be tailored to select specific lanthanides. The technique combines two substances that do not mix and that prefer different types of lanthanides. The process would allow for smaller equipment, less use of chemicals, and less waste production.

The metals called lanthanides have valuable properties for clean energy technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines and for many other applications. These elements include several critical materials. In nature, lanthanides are often found mixed together. Industry must separate them to take advantage of their individual properties. But conventional approaches to this separation are time consuming and costly and generate waste. Scientists have developed an efficient new ...

Even if CO2 emissions were to be drastically cut down starting today, the world economy is already committed to an income reduction of 19 % until 2050 due to climate change, a new study published in Nature finds. These damages are six times larger than the mitigation costs needed to limit global warming to two degrees. Based on empirical data from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years, scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) assessed future impacts of changing climatic conditions on economic growth and their persistence.

"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected. These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labour productivity or infrastructure," says PIK scientist and first author of the study Maximilian Kotz. ...

Common "hard" coastal defenses, like concrete sea walls, might struggle to keep up with increasing climate risks. A new study shows that combining them with nature-based solutions could, in some contexts, create defenses which are better able to adapt. Researchers reviewed 304 academic articleson the performance of coastal defenses around the world, including: natural environments; soft measures (which support or enrich nature); hard measures (such as concrete sea walls); and hybrids of the aforementioned. Soft and hybrid measures turned out to be more cost-effective than hard measures, and hybrid measures provided the highest hazard reduction overall in low-risk areas. Although their comparative performance during extreme events that pose a high risk is not clear due to lack of data, these results still support the careful inclusion of nature-based solutions to help protect, support and enrich coastal communities.

Japan's dramatic natural coastline, with iconic views of ...

Soil contains about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere and plants combined. It is a major carbon sink, capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases. Management of soil carbon is key in efforts to mitigate climate change, in addition to being vital to soil health and agricultural productivity.

Measuring soil carbon, however, is a painstaking, expensive process. Samples must be dug from the ground and sent to a lab for analysis, making upscaling measurements on a large spatial scale challenging.

Now environmental scientists have combined field-level data with machine-learning techniques to estimate soil organic carbon at the U.S. continental scale. The Journal of Geophysical Research -- Biogeosciences published the new soil organic carbon estimate, which improves the overall estimate for the United States and gives new insights into the effects of environmental variables on soil organic carbon.

"There is growing recognition ...

Semitransparent photovoltaics are able to convert sunlight into electricity without blocking visible light. This makes them attractive for building integrated applications, such as windows, facades and greenhouses.

Unlike traditional silicon-based cells, organic photovoltaics can be flexible and can also be tailored to be transparent. Yet the more transparent the solar cell, the less light it captures for producing electricity.

Organic solar cells typically rely on an active layer called a bulk heterojunction—comprised of electron donor and acceptor materials—to capture and convert sunlight. Upon contact, sunlight can excite electrons to higher energy states in the heterojunction, which creates electron–hole pairs, or excitons, that detach at the donor–acceptor interface.

With this charge separation, the electrons migrate toward the acceptor, while the positively charged holes move toward the donor, generating electricity. ...

As any surfer will tell you, waves pack a powerful punch. Now, we are one step closer to capturing the energy behind the ocean's constant ebb and flow with an improved "blue energy" harvesting device. Researchers report in ACS Energy Letters that simply repositioning the electrode -- from the center of a see-sawing liquid-filled tube to the end where the water crashes with the most force -- dramatically increased the amount of wave energy that could be harvested.

The tube-shaped wave-energy harvesting device improved upon by the researchers is called a liquid-solid triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). The TENG converts mechanical energy into electricity as water sloshes back and forth against the inside of the tube. One reason these devices aren't yet practical for large-scale applications is their low energy output. Guozhang Dai, Kai Yin, Junliang Yan and colleagues aimed to increase a liquid-solid TENG's energy harvesting ability by optimizing the location of the ...