Repeated record-breaking heat waves cooked the European continent this summer, delivering the region’s hottest June on record. A simultaneous, though possibly related, drought shriveled rivers to record lows. In addition to their impact on public health, the dual crises put pressure on Europe’s energy system: Wind power struggled under stagnant...
How Florida quietly removed climate change content from textbooks
Had Florida’s high school marine biology students read the original draft of their textbook, they would have learned about research that found climate change is killing at least 150,000 people per year, and another 1 degree Celsius of warming would double that. Instead, they learned that “human health will also...
Who’s most at risk in the cyclospora outbreak? The farmworkers on the front lines.
Earlier this summer, when the news broke about an outbreak of cyclosporiasis — a parasitic infection that results in abdominal distress and is passed on via food or water that has been contaminated by human fecal matter — spreading across the country, one question came up again and again: How...
All aboard Amtrak’s sleeker, cleaner new trains
On Charlie Hamilton’s regular Amtrak rides from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia, he passes some of the country’s most spectacular vistas: the Puget Sound coast and the Skagit Valley. On clear days, he can even see Mount Rainier. But perhaps the most beautiful sight is not the...
US Army Corps approves a pipeline project it knows harms Indigenous lands
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a key permit for a plan to update an aging segment of the Line 5 pipeline crossing the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan, waterways that tribal nations say are central to their ways of life. It’s a procedural win for Line 5 owner...
Trump administration advances plan to open national forests to development
The Trump administration is proposing to rescind the “roadless rule,” a 25-year-old policy that bars development like road construction and logging on nearly 45 million acres of national forest land, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Tuesday. In a press release, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the rule has...
Why plugging in all those EVs could actually save the power grid
California has a good problem. As it scrambles to deploy more solar panels and wind turbines, it is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality while hitting the challenge of intermittency: When the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow, you’re not generating electricity. So the state is...
How this Georgia factory is surviving America’s solar policy whiplash
Inside the vast Qcells factory in Cartersville, Georgia, workers — and a bevy of robots — move ultra-thin slices of polysilicon through a lengthy series of machines and chemical baths to get what are known as cells. “The $2.5 billion, the 3.5 million gallons of water, the 90 megawatts of...
Why Egyptian farmers are growing crops under solar panels
Ancient Egyptian civilization blossomed in the scorching desert thanks to the Nile River, which delivered fresh water and annual dumps of nutrient-rich sediment. Clever engineering moved H2O so efficiently that farmers were able to churn out huge surpluses of staple crops like wheat, which fed the Roman Empire. Thousands of...
Extreme weather is changing how Americans see the world
We tend to imagine that experiencing the effects of global warming will wake people up to the problem. The thinking goes that when people see their homes flood or the skies turn orange from wildfire smoke, they may change their views on climate science and even be inspired to act....