Every year, the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, tracks a set of key climate indicators — including the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the Earth’s temperature — to assess how global warming is progressing. In their latest report, released last Sunday, the authors decided to include a new...
Texas saw a $50B future in clean energy. Then the political winds shifted.
On an unseasonably warm January day, Duff Hallman’s goats and sheep wandered unhurried through the rocky hills of his ranch 30 miles south of San Angelo, Texas, unbothered by the long shadows that swept over the ground. The shadows fell from wind turbines towering 250 feet above, their blades spinning...
As climate change threatens student athlete safety, states try to adapt
When George LaComb moved two years ago to a new high school in Orlando, Florida, he quickly noticed safety precautions that the football team at his previous, less affluent school never had. There was a designated recovery room, staffed by a full-time athletic trainer, giant ice baths to cool overheated...
Your ‘widely recyclable’ Starbucks cup is still trash
Frappuccino lovers, rejoice: Your plastic to-go cups are now “widely recyclable.” That’s according to an announcement made in February by Starbucks, the waste hauler WM (formerly known as Waste Management), and three recycling groups called The Recycling Partnership, GreenBlue, and Closed Loop Partners. In a press release, they said that...
With its new farm bill, Florida’s climate fight just hit a tractor-sized roadblock
Against the backdrop of a looming global energy crisis, rising food insecurity, and the increased frequency and intensity of heat, hurricanes, and floods fueled by global warming, Florida’s governing bodies have had a consequential, but unsurprisingly counterproductive, month. At the beginning of March, the state legislature passed a bill blocking...
The West’s unprecedented winter could fuel a summer of disaster
In Park City, Utah, skiers could find patches of grass poking through the slopes for much of the winter — a striking sign of a season that never really arrived. Now, after one of the warmest winters on record, much of the West is entering spring with snowpack at historic...
‘We’re harvesting the sun’: A huge solar project grows in California
Harris Ranch Resort isn’t close to much. Residents of California’s major cities know it mainly as a rest stop about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on Interstate 5’s long run through the San Joaquin Valley. The sprawling stucco building has a Western-themed gift shop and a couple of good restaurants where travelers...
DOGE goes nuclear: How Trump invited Silicon Valley into America’s nuclear power regulator
Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the U.S. government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology. On the agenda that...
California’s fossil fuel phaseout has left it vulnerable to the Iran oil shock
California has managed a remarkable feat over the past 20 years. Even as its economy has grown to overtake Germany’s as the fourth-largest in the world, the state’s consumption of gasoline has declined by almost 15 percent, and consumption of petroleum diesel has fallen by around two-thirds. This has happened...
To keep climate science alive, researchers are speaking in code
At the Department of Agriculture’s research division, everyone knows there’s one word they should never say, according to Ethan Roberts. “The forbidden C-word” — climate. Roberts, union president at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois, has worked for the federal government for nearly a decade. In...