Environment

A new report from the Deep Sea Mining Campaign says a threat tied to seabed mining has gone almost entirely unexamined: radioactivity.

The plan to bury carbon under remote Indiana farmland is supposed to be a slam dunk for the climate, according to its supporters—all generously funded by US tax dollars.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A proposed legal settlement with the U.S. government would require the Keystone Pipeline system’s operator to pay a $26.9 million civil penalty over a major oil spill in Kansas in December 2022 and spend about $40 million more to prevent future accidents.

With some still unable to accept humanity’s role in climate chaos, we tackle common misconceptions and deceptions

I will not say this is a silver lining. War should not be the driver for this change. However, here we are.

I will not say this is a silver lining. War should not be the driver for this change. However, here we are.

I took some time to build on a post I had here, and expand it into a broader discussion on climate impacts. I focus on the Happiest Place on Earth as it sweltered in near-deadly wet bulb conditions, AC failed, and asphalt liquefied. I discuss how the area is built for a climate past, still relies on old systems to design and grow, and what it’s impact is now.

A heat wave scorched much of the eastern United States over the Fourth of July weekend, bringing extreme temperatures that caused roads to buckle, snarling holiday traffic.

Family ties to Alsace go back five hundred years. Two generations ago some moved to the US to avoid the, let’s say troubles, between the region and France after WW1. Those that are there reported their gardens simply shriveling. Unbearable heat they only escaped in their cellars. So much smog and traffic because people were trying to a) get into AC in their car and B) get to the mountains.

In late April, visitors to Harbour Lights in Falmouth, Cornwall, may have raised an eyebrow. The fish and chip shop was in the midst of a “cod-free week”, its owners having removed cod from its menu entirely.

The Gila River is among the Southwest’s most important rivers, delivering water for people, farms, and wildlife while linking the snow-fed mountains of southwestern New Mexico to the desert lowlands of southwestern Arizona.

FULL ARTICLE: There’s some good news growing along the coasts of countries around the world.

US political and media discourse has drifted away from the climate crisis amid a frontal assault by Donald Trump upon policies to limit global heating and the president’s pugnacious demands to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas.

Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers that would make traditional approaches to flood and drought planning insufficient, a study has found.

Former federal climate experts warn that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hit a record high in May and that the monthly average global temperature this summer could rise as much as 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.9 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial benchmark used to measure the heating from greenhouse gases.

PJM, the country’s largest power grid operator, is in a tight spot. Thanks to the data center boom, there’s never been more demand for electricity, but years of delay in the interconnection queue has choked off new supply, and PJM’s laissez-faire approach to transmission planning has left us with a grid that needs expensive and time-consuming upgrades. This all adds up to soaring prices and declining reliability, with no end in sight.

“This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

When a severe drought struck La Calera near Bogotá, many of its residents lost their water for drinking, cooking and farming and faced up to 15 days of strict water rationing each month. Yet the area is home to Chingaza reservoir, which supplies about 70% of the drinking water for Colombia’s capital.

On an overcast June morning, I step from the rubber-sided Zodiac boat on to a floating barge at the mouth of Ballona Creek, where it meets Santa Monica Bay on the west side of Los Angeles. The first thing I notice? Salty air is the only smell, despite six giant waste bins sitting atop the tennis court-sized barge.

The upcoming loss of a deep-ocean monitoring system is triggering deep anxiety in Alaska, the nation’s top fish-producing state, where temperatures are warming twice as quickly as the global average.

Canada’s independent watchdog for overseas human rights complaints against Canadian companies has been leaderless since May 2025, leaving at least 24 active cases effectively stalled.

When staff answer the call of nature at the European Space Agency’s headquarters in Paris, their urine is not simply flushed away – it is turned into something much more useful. While urine-diverting toilets are often associated with smelly festival loos, there is nothing bohemian about recycling nutrients from human pee, said David de Chambrier, the chief executive of VunaNexus.

A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores. As detailed in the new report, titled “Tracking Starbucks’ Deceptive Recyclability Claims,” the findings directly contradict Starbucks’ recent public claims that its single-use polypropylene (No. 5 plastic) cold cups are “widely recyclable.”

The EJAtlas is a work in progress. Newly documented cases and information are continuously added to the platform. However, many are still undocumented and new ones arise. Please note that the absence of data does not indicate the absence of conflict.

A new World Meteorological Organization report estimated 13,000 annual heat-related deaths across 17 countries in the region.

Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of climate extremes.

“The campaign to restore the Everglades has received a boost with completion of a key project that returns the flow of water to 55,000 acres that had once been drained for development. Experts see it as a major step forward in bringing back South Florida’s River of Grass.”

Malé is one of the world’s most overcrowded cities, but it faces double pressure. As well as a growing population, the capital of the Maldives is also threatened by rising sea levels. Owing to climate breakdown, its living space is shrinking.

High above the jagged peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada, the view from the cockpit is breathtaking. At first glance, the mountains appear draped in a pristine white blanket. But as the flight crew gears up for a high-stakes mission, the sensors onboard this specialized aircraft prove that looks can be deceiving.

When Leonore Gewessler hops on the underground trains and street-level trams that run like clockwork across the breadth of Vienna, she appreciates the ease, affordability and time she “gets as a present” instead of idling in traffic. But Austria’s former climate and transport minister is also aware that cars still dominate the capital’s streets. She says good public transport is just the “precondition” to changing how people move around the city.

You’ve no doubt heard some variation of the claim that “AI” will somehow solve the climate crisis. You’ve also probably heard the warnings: that the rapid expansion of all the data centres needed to deploy more of this technology comes with considerable environmental costs. There’s a widening rift, with competing voices making wildly different arguments about the tech’s climate impacts.

Critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel are becoming the “oil of the 21st century” as the scramble for precious metals deepens poverty and creates public health crises in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, a report by the UN’s water thinktank has found.

Original link

The Pacific heat pulse is temporary, but scientists warn that its climate impacts are not.

More than 50 nations are attending a world-first conference on phasing out fossil fuels in Colombia next week as the Iran war underscores how dependent countries remain on planet-heating coal, oil and gas.

Extreme heat is threatening the world’s food systems, with farmers unable to work outside, livestock experiencing stress and crop yields falling, putting the livelihoods of more than a billion people in peril, the UN has warned.

tl;dr: Billionaire control over the media.

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

archive article: https://archive.is/ZDeUd

Argentine MPs approved a bill early Thursday promoted by President Javier Milei that authorizes mining in ecologically sensitive areas of glaciers and permafrost, and has outraged environmentalists.

Virtual power plants continue to be one of the buzziest energy industry obsessions.

Every summer, people descend on the wildflower capital of Colorado to see grasslands flush with corn lilies, aspen sunflowers and sub-alpine larkspur. In January 1991, scientists set up a unique experiment in these Rocky Mountain meadows. It was one of the first (and longest running) to work out how the changing climate would affect an ecosystem.

While the US government continues to call climate change a hoax and attack the science, in courtrooms from The Hague to Honolulu, fossil fuel companies are taking a different approach. Shell, Chevron, RWE and TotalEnergies all accept that climate change is real, human-caused and serious. The era of corporate climate denial, at least in legal proceedings, is largely over.

The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.

When the Trump administration announced plans last year to rescind a rule limiting roadbuilding and timber harvests on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands, officials called the repeal necessary to prevent and manage wildfires.

The primary unit of climate collapse is the zettajoule. If you have never heard of this term, you are not alone. Even scientists who work on a planetary scale struggle to relate the immensity of the change measured by this titanic unit of energy.

War in the Middle East is once again exposing the downsides of our addiction to oil and gas. Transportation and electricity costs are soaring for ordinary families, while multinational oil giants and Vladimir Putin reap windfalls. Then add in the usual planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

The case is quickly becoming a national test of how states deploy terrorism laws against protest movements tied to environmental issues.

By the 1980s, Detroit’s once titanic carmakers were being upended by rivals from Japan. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had grown rich selling gas guzzlers, but when oil prices rose and suddenly cheap, fuel-efficient Japanese models looked attractive, they were unprepared. The collapse in sales led to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the automotive heartland of the US.

Reading through speculation about what the Monsterverse’s new kaiju *Titan X aka Le Gran Dios de la Mar may be (such as the article linked above), it sounds increasingly as though she may be a new protective mother figure, impacted or possibly even responding to the effects of global heating on the oceans.

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Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean may have brought devastating floods to the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, according to a recent study in which its authors link three wildly different lines of evidence to tell the story.

The benefits of agrivoltaics—the placement of solar panels over cropland for more efficient land use—varies dramatically depending on where it’s located, finds new research from the United States. As agrivoltaics spread and attract more interest, this is one of the first studies to really dig into its inherent trade-offs, and identify places where it works well for both electricity generation and farmers’ bottom lines.

The economics of running fossil fuel infrastructure rely on having an economy of scale. As that scale decreases, the cost efficiency will plummet, leading the public sector to abandon them, most likely. We will either need to nationalize some of these things and run them at a loss as the sunsetting happens, or people will be left behind on the old fuels they can no longer access.

Yes. For more details, read or listen to content on the other side of that link.

Host David Roberts speaks with guest, environmental scientist Dr Sarah Kapnick. They discuss the overall status of the globe with regards to climate with a level of steadiness that is hard to find. Dr Kapnick is able to communicate effectively the complexities of the topic without downplaying the severity nor inducing overwhelming panic.

Host David Roberts speaks to Bruce Friedrich about how fake meat, plant based or lab grown, can reduce our land use substantially, reduce emissions substantially, and end or reduce the cruelty of animal agriculture. Notably, Friedrich contends that fake meats could end up on a learning curve to bring down the price of these meat alternatives to be cheaper than the real stuff. Much in the same way that we got better at making solar panels and flat screen TVs to the point where those items are magnitudes cheaper than they were just 10 years ago.

A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought, could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says.