In the last century, only nine hurricanes with winds topping 150 miles per hour have made landfall in the United States. Hurricane Ian became the tenth on Wednesday afternoon, striking the coast of southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm. Ian submerged entire barrier islands, ripped houses apart, and pushed a huge wall of water […]
Brazilian voters head to the polls this weekend to pick their next head of state, with a choice between right-wing incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, a former union leader from the country’s left-wing Workers’ Party and past president of Brazil. After a tumultuous first term, Bolsonaro, commonly referred […]
The Biden administration announced a new environmental justice initiative over the weekend, with $3 billion in block grants to go to communities and neighborhoods hard hit by pollution. Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the new Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights will have a prominent role in the […]
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. More than 14,000 miles of new oil pipelines are under development around the world, a distance equivalent to almost twice the Earth’s diameter, a report has revealed. The projects, led by the U.S., Russia, China, and India, are “dramatically at odds […]
Joe Manchin on Wednesday made public the text of his long-awaited permitting bill, the result of a side deal that the senator from West Virginia made with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as a condition of passing major climate legislation last month. The bill provoked a variety of strong and polarized reactions from climate experts, […]
To get the United States running on clean energy will require a lot of metal: A single electric vehicle battery pack could contain around 8 kilograms of lithium, 14 kilograms of cobalt, and 35 kilograms of nickel. A wind turbine can contain more than 4 tons of copper. Over the next several decades, global demand […]
Advocates for low-income communities and people of color have long argued that if electric cars are necessary for American roads and the health of the planet, then they should be accessible to all Americans, not just the ones with disposable income. But for years, they have also worried that electric cars and trucks could be […]
According to the United Nations, the worst famine of the twenty-first century is unfolding in the Horn of Africa. For months, a climate-change-fueled drought of historic proportions and supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine have combined to cause severe food shortages in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Famine experts expect the situation to […]
Minneapolis, Minnesota, became the third U.S. city to endorse a carbon neutrality goal for shipping last week, joining the California cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach in unanimously passing a so-called “Ship It Zero” resolution. Minneapolis’ resolution takes aim at corporate maritime importers like Walmart, Amazon, and Ikea. It asks them to “abandon fossil-fueled […]
A series of unprecedented floods surged through the region around Yellowstone National Park this week, cutting off several small communities in Montana and Wyoming and forcing officials to close the country’s oldest and most iconic national park. As rescue workers began to survey the damage, several people were marooned in the park and in mountain […]