As gas-guzzling cars are replaced by their electric counterparts, tailpipe emissions are on the decline. But cars have other negative impacts on environmental health, beyond what comes out of their exhaust pipes. One of the bigger, and lesser known, problems is tire pollution — or “tire and road wear particles,” in industry terminology. Tires shed […]
As the Northern Hemisphere emerges from the hottest summer on record, South America has, for now, anyway, taken up the planet’s extreme-heat mantle. Winter just ended there, but a large swath of the continent is sweltering under an unprecedented heat dome that’s pushing temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Brazil. That could leave […]
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is republished with permission. In Arizona, utilities have used a counterintuitive tool to help keep the lights on despite the state’s ongoing wave of historic heat — they’ve asked customers to turn their air conditioners down. In July and August, Arizona’s three biggest utilities were able to […]
This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News. Olivia Dreizen Howell wasn’t seeking out a climate lesson when she and her kids, aged 7 and 9, tuned into Molly of Denali, a popular children’s show on PBS. But there it was: Molly, a 10-year-old Alaska Native and vlogger from the fictional village of Qyah, goes […]
This summer, the United States roasted like never before. People got third-degree burns from simply falling onto hot pavement in Arizona, filling up all the beds in Maricopa County’s burn center. High humidity teamed up with the Midwest’s worst heat wave in years to send the heat index, or the “feels like” temperature, soaring above […]
This story was originally published by the Center for Media and Democracy and is republished with permission. In a ruling last week, a Minnesota judge summarily dismissed misdemeanor charges against three Anishinaabe water protectors who had protested at a pipeline construction site in an effort to stop the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline. […]
Buildings, particularly older ones and those with poor energy efficiency, account for 31 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond contributing to the climate crisis, these structures can saddle their occupants with high utility bills, further burdening those with low incomes. On Thursday, the U.S. Climate Alliance, an association of 25 governors of states […]
When Beauregard Burgess and three friends decided to start a hog and poultry farm in 2015, they chose an odd location: 20 acres of swampy land on the east side of Homer, Alaska, a coastal hamlet south of Anchorage. The land, logged years ago, was in an industrial part of town, and its soil was […]
Smoke from wildfires across the continental U.S is stalling — in some places, reversing — years of progress on air quality. A new study published in Nature found that since 2016, wildfire smoke has undone 25 percent of air quality improvements achieved since 2000. “We’re not back to 2000 levels. But in some parts of the […]
The United States is about to embark on an experiment inspired by one of the New Deal’s most popular programs. On Wednesday, the Biden administration authorized the creation of the American Climate Corps through an executive order. The program would hire 20,000 young people in its first year, putting them to work installing wind and […]