Most recent 30 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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Climate change is sending ticks into new areas. Georgia researchers are on it. - Grist Climate and Energy (Sep 19, 2024) |
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Sep 19, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Sep 15, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Sep 11, 2024 · 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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Why Mississippi coal is powering Georgia’s data centers - Grist Climate and Energy (Aug 27, 2024) |
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Aug 27, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Aug 22, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Aug 20, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Aug 20, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Aug 19, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Aug 16, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Aug 15, 2024 · 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 09, 2024) |
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Aug 09, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Jul 30, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Jul 30, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Jul 23, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Jul 11, 2024 · 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 09, 2024) |
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Jul 09, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Jun 28, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Jun 28, 2024 · 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, 2024) |
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Jun 27, 2024 · 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 07, 2024) |
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Jun 07, 2024 · 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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