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Illinois Legislature puts the brakes on a carbon capture boom
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit, environmental media organization. The Midwest’s largest potential reservoir to store carbon is buried deep under the farmland of Illinois, and the state’s lawmakers just hit the brakes on any plans for a carbon capture and storage boom there.
As the climate changes, many species are teetering on extinction. How far should we go to save them?
This story was produced in partnership with The Virginia Quarterly Review. In the first flush of an Arctic spring, the boreal forest begins to stir, emerging from a silvered quiet. Icicles shatter like glass. Meltwater babbles, braiding in puddles and then in deltas. Snow drops in clumps from the branches of black spruce. Saplings remain crooked from a long wait, as if Dr. Seuss had drawn springtime.
The mysterious X factor behind a year of unbelievable heat
Predicting the future has always been a difficult, sometimes fruitless task, but scientists are surprisingly good at divining how hot the year ahead will be. For decades, their models have largely ended up matching global temperatures. Then 2023 came along. At the beginning of the year, climate scientists at four...
What’s behind the record outbreak of spongy moths in the eastern US?
Take a few steps into a leafy forest in New York’s Hudson Valley, close your eyes, and listen: That’s not the sound of rain, it’s millions of caterpillars chewing and pooping. On a clear spring day, the pitter-patter of spongy moth caterpillars eating their way through oak,...
Nations need to do more to defend Indigenous rights, UN report says
Two months ago, Makanalani Gomes, a Native Hawaiian activist, spoke about the importance of youth self-determination at the largest global gathering of Indigenous peoples at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. After flying back to Hawaiʻi, she had one major takeaway from the event, known as the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues:
Caving on climate: Kathy Hochul axes congestion pricing in New York
At an economic summit in Ireland last month, New York Governor Kathy Hochul bragged about her state’s decades-long quest to implement so-called congestion pricing in New York City. Within mere months, the extensive toll system was poised to take effect, charging cars and trucks a once-per-day fee between $15 and $36 to enter lower Manhattan — a move that, in addition to the quality-of-life benefits touted by Hochul, promised to both drastically reduce carbon emissions in one of the country’s most congested regions and also provide badly needed funding for its most extensive mass transit system.
A different kind of youth activist: Meet the high schoolers who invented a microplastics solution
“I think science is the perfect way to solve this issue. Because a lot of innovation and invention happens in science, and technology is always changing. And so I think, if I really wanted to make a big impact, this would be the way to go.”. High schooler and science...
The pollution paradox: How cleaning up smog drives ocean warming
This story was originally published by Yale 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. They call it “The Blob.” A vast expanse of ocean stretching from Alaska to California periodically warms by up to 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit), decimating fish stocks, starving seabirds, creating blooms of toxic algae, preventing salmon returns to rivers, displacing sea lions, and forcing whales into shipping lanes to find food.
The homeowner mutiny leaving Florida cities defenseless against hurricanes
Lisa Hendrickson is almost out of sand. Hendrickson is the mayor of Redington Shores, Florida, a well-heeled beach town in Pinellas County. Her town occupies a small section of a razor-thin barrier island that stretches down the western side of the sprawling Tampa Bay metro area, dividing cities like Tampa and St. Petersburg from the Gulf of Mexico. Many of her constituents have an uninterrupted view of the ocean.
Who’s afraid of Hurricane Debby? The peculiar importance of a storm’s name
Every year ahead of hurricane season’s official start in June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases the forecast for the Atlantic Ocean’s tempestuous season ahead. In a predictable cycle, articles start swirling in to answer familiar queries: What will these hurricanes be called? Who picks their names? Why do hurricanes get named like people, anyway? This year, the first will be named Alberto, then Beryl, Chris, Debby, and so on all the way to William, the end of the alphabet in terms of desirable letters meteorologists trust they can wrest intelligible names out of.
Why this summer might bring the wildest weather yet
Summers keep getting hotter, and the consequences are impossible to miss: In the summer of 2023, the Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest season in 2,000 years. Canada’s deadliest wildfires on record bathed skylines in smoke from Minnesota to New York. In Texas and Arizona, hundreds of people lost their lives to heat, and in Vermont, flash floods caused damages equivalent to a hurricane.
How an Aboriginal woman fought a coal company and won
In 2019, Australia was on the cusp of approving a new coal mine on traditional Wirdi land in Queensland that would have extracted approximately 40 million tons of coal each year for 35 years. The Waratah coal mine would have destroyed a nature refuge and emitted 1.58 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Electric vehicles need cobalt. Congolese miners work in dangerous conditions to get it.
This story was originally published by CapitalB. The story of “John Doe 1” of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is tucked in a lawsuit filed five years ago against several U.S. tech companies, including Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle producer. In a country where the...
California sides with big utilities, trimming incentives for community solar projects
This story was originally published by CalMatters. California’s utilities regulator adopted new rules for community solar projects on Friday, despite warnings from clean energy advocates that the move will actually undercut efforts to expand solar power options for low-income customers. The state’s biggest utility companies advocated for the new...
Power to the People
Activists pushing San Diego to take over the city’s investor-owned utility aren’t letting last year’s defeat of a similar effort in Maine deter their goal of establishing a nonprofit power company. They recently submitted petitions bearing more than 30,000 signatures from residents who want the City Council to let voters decide the matter this fall.
Better late than never: Wealthy nations finally meet $100 billion climate aid goal
International climate negotiations have long been haunted by a broken promise. In the wake of collapsed negotiations at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, wealthy nations, led by the United States, pledged to provide developing countries with $100 billion in climate-related aid annually by 2020. The money was meant in part to ease tensions between the rich countries that had contributed the most to climate change historically and the poorer nations that disproportionately suffer the effects of a warming planet. But rich countries fell short of the target in both 2020 and 2021, deepening mistrust and stymying progress during the annual United Nations climate conferences, which are known by the abbreviation COP.
Georgia governor calls for even more nuclear power despite budget woes
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp called for more new nuclear energy at an event Wednesday celebrating the first new nuclear reactors built in the U.S. in decades, at Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Georgia. The construction of those reactors, known as Vogtle Units 3 and 4, cost more than twice its original budget and ended years behind schedule.
Expecting worse: Giving birth on a planet in crisis
International climate change panels often point out that women are more vulnerable to climate change than men. Hotter temperatures and more volatile weather inflame existing gender-based vulnerabilities, like domestic violence, inadequate access to health care, and financial insecurity. But there is another, largely invisible layer of climate impacts that falls along gendered lines: Research shows that climate change takes a profound physical toll on bodies that can bear children — from menstruation to conception to birth.
Four lost pregnancies. Five weeks of IVF injections. One storm.
This story is part of the series Expecting worse: Giving birth on a planet in crisis, a collaboration between Grist, Vox, and The 19th that investigates how climate change impacts reproductive health — from menstruation to conception to birth. On their very first date, Kirsti and Justin Mahon talked...
Pregnant in a warming climate: A lethal ‘double risk’ for malaria
This story is part of the series Expecting worse: Giving birth on a planet in crisis, a collaboration between Grist, Vox, and The 19th that investigates how climate change impacts reproductive health — from menstruation to conception to birth. Roger Casupang was working in a coastal clinic on the...
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