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Can Florida’s orange growers survive another hurricane season?
Oranges are synonymous with Florida. The zesty fruit can be spotted adorning everything from license plates to kitschy memorabilia. Ask any Floridian and they’ll tell you that the crop is a hallmark of the Sunshine State. Jay Clark would be quick to agree. He’s 80 and a third-generation grower...
The green transition will make things worse for the Indigenous world
The green transition will deepen entrenched socioeconomic barriers for Indigenous peoples — unless Western forms of science and ongoing settler colonialism are addressed by researchers. That’s according to a new study out this month focused on the use, and abuse, of Indigenous knowledge to solve climate change. Despite disenfranchisement, researchers added, Indigenous nations remain the best stewards of the land.
Wind turbines rarely fail. So why did Vineyard Wind’s fall apart?
A preliminary analysis of the Vineyard Wind turbine that failed has found that, although the fundamental design of the machine’s 351-foot blades is sound, a manufacturing flaw caused one of them to snap as it spun over the Atlantic Ocean earlier this month. The July 13 accident, which prompted...
Plant-based meat needs government support to scale up, but a culture war stands in the way
Just a few years ago, the alternative protein industry promised to revolutionize the way people eat burgers: They would still sizzle and bleed, they’d taste great, but they wouldn’t actually contain any meat. Today it seems that, if that revolution is still coming, its arrival has been more than a little delayed. Sales of plant-based meat and seafood have fallen over the last two years, and a recent bevy of headlines suggest that this latest wave of imitation meat was just that: a passing fad.
Deal of the day: New study links online shopping to air pollution
In recent decades, the way Americans buy things has undergone a radical transformation. E-commerce firms like Amazon have reshaped how people shop and how they receive their purchases, dotting the country with gigantic warehouses for the distribution of merchandise and bringing high volumes of truck traffic to nearby communities. In...
Meet the scientists behind the ice sanctuary — a memory vault for dying glaciers
“When you lose it, you’ve lost a record of climate on Earth that can never be recovered. There’s a lot of scientists who realize this, and have realized it for decades, who are making heroic efforts to recover this ice before it disappears forever.”. — Ice core scientist...
How Israel’s war on Gaza unraveled a landmark Mideast climate deal
Just weeks before the international climate summit in Dubai, one of the biggest climate agreements ever proposed between Middle Eastern countries unraveled. For two years, Israel and Jordan had negotiated a trade of precious resources they’ll need in a hotter future: renewable energy and drinking water. Under their proposed deal, Israel would dip into its water surplus to send its neighbor billions of gallons each year. In return, Jordan would share electricity from a new 600-megawatt solar farm in its sun-soaked desert.
‘Roadspreading’ returns: How Pennsylvania’s oil industry quietly dumped waste across the state
Siri Lawson and her husband live on a stamp of wooded, hilly land in Warren County, Pennsylvania, nestled in the state’s rural northwest corner. During the summer heat, cars traveling on the county’s dirt roads cast plumes of dust in their wake. Winter’s chill can cause a hazardous film of ice to spawn on paved roads. To protect motorists from both slippery ice and vision-impairing dust, communities across Pennsylvania coat these roads with large, cheap volumes of de-icing and dust-suppressing fluids. In Lawson’s case, her township had been using oil and gas wastewater as a dust suppressant, believing the material was effective.
What defines a heat wave? The answer could decide where disaster dollars go.
Another brutal summer is shattering temperature records, broiling over a third of Americans under extended heat advisories. As smoke from wildfires begins to choke skies and death counts tick upwards, affected states say they need more help from the federal government. During most climate-driven emergencies, such as hurricanes or floods,...
Earth just sweltered through the hottest day ever recorded
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.
Inside a new experiment to find the climate-proof coffee of the future
This story was produced by Grist and co-published by Roast Magazine/Daily Coffee News. David Ngibuini is a second-generation coffee farmer in Kenya’s central highlands, an area of cool temperatures and rich volcanic soil that’s long been one of the best places to grow coffee on Earth. On an afternoon in May, after a couple of months of rain, his 11-acre plot is lush. Six thousand trees — nearly all of them varieties of Coffea arabica, the most widely consumed and best-tasting coffee species — sit in neatly planted rows, their waxy, deep green leaves shimmering in the sun. Workers sort a pile of freshly-picked cherries — the red fruit that contains the beans that will be fermented, dried, and shipped to roasters around the world.
‘Wood vaulting’: A simple climate solution you’ve probably never heard of
In northwestern Montana’s Swan Valley, a pile of about 100 small logs, 10 feet long or so, sits neatly stacked, ringed by berry bushes, a few white wildflowers, and towering larch trees. Surrounding the logs are several acres of U.S. Forest Service land, which was thinned of dead, downed, and dense understory trees last year to reduce wildfire risk. The log pile that remains is too small to be processed into lumber, plus the sawmill just down the highway recently closed. So the wood may get sent to a pulp mill, if the price is right. Or it may sit in the forest for years. Smaller limbs may be burned in a prescribed fire. But Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, is sizing up the pile, too. He sees another solution: burying the logs, and all the planet-heating gases they’d otherwise release, underground.
In Georgia, companies want to cut emissions. Utilities are holding them back.
This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising electricity bills to developing renewable energy. With much fanfare and celebration, Georgia Power, the state’s largest electricity provider,...
Tribal lands in Oklahoma are 5 times more likely to flood than rest of state
In Oklahoma, Indigenous communities are the most likely to be at risk of flooding, with one recent study showing the danger increases by more than five times when compared to surrounding areas. The reason for the risk: location. “We get stuck in places where nobody else wants to live,” said...
What would a Harris presidency mean for the climate?
After weeks of intense media speculation and sustained pressure from Democratic lawmakers, major donors, and senior advisors, President Joe Biden has announced that he is bowing out of the presidential race. He is the first sitting president to step aside so close to Election Day. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus entirely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden said in a letter on Sunday.
The problematic chemicals fueling America’s EV revolution
This investigation was reported in collaboration with The Examination, The Post and Courier, Columbia Journalism Investigations and RTBF, and co-published in partnership with Mother Jones. The story is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Propulsion without the need for petroleum: That’s the lithium-ion battery’s promise.
The US is failing renters during extreme heat waves
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As this summer has already made clear, extreme heat is here, and it’s poised to get worse in the coming years. Due to soaring temperatures, more and more people are also...
What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US
As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this week to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government.
One way a plastics treaty could help the Global South: Fund waste management.
If all goes according to plan, by the end of the year, some 170 countries will finalize the world’s first legally binding treaty to curtail plastic pollution. Its success will depend in no small part on money: creating a funding pipeline so that signatories, especially in the Global South, can execute the promises they agree to.
The state senator leading efforts to return land to tribal nations
As a kid, Mary Kunesh watched her dad travel to reservations in northern Minnesota, working as a pro bono attorney for tribal nations who needed legal assistance. She heard stories from her grandfather about her family’s history, filled with brave Lakota women like her aunt Josephine Gates Kelly, the first tribal chair of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
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