A look at our changing environment.
Rising global temperatures have made droughts and heatwaves more common and intense, leading to larger and more destructive wildfires. In 2020, wildfires in California blackened more than 4 million acres, the largest wildfire season on record. With its continuing drought, California has already had 1.5 million acres burned by wildfires this year, and the fires […]
Nearly 40% of all the water taken from lakes, rivers, and wells in the U.S. isn’t used for agriculture, drinking, or sanitation. It is used to cool power plants that produce electricity by burning fossil fuels or with nuclear reactors. Two-thirds of these power plants use evaporative cooling, which produces huge white plumes billowing from […]
From the early days of hybrid vehicles right on through the current booming market for electric cars, there has been the contention by some people that these cars are responsible for comparable or even greater amounts of greenhouse gas emissions over their product lifetimes. The arguments generally centered around the carbon costs of creating batteries […]
The trillion-dollar infrastructure bill contains a variety of provisions related to energy and the environment. Among them is authorization for more than $12 billion for carbon capture technologies, including direct air capture and demonstration projects on coal, natural gas, and industrial plants and supporting carbon dioxide infrastructure. Inclusion of this provision has largely been driven […]
A combination of factors led to emissions from the U.S. power sector dropping 10% between 2019 and 2020, which was the largest one-year drop measured since annual reports first began being published in 1997. The coronavirus pandemic was certainly a contributing factor, but the drop in emissions is part of a long-term trend being driven […]
San Francisco International Airport is the seventh-busiest airport in the United States. In a typical year, approximately 55 million people pass through SFO on their way to destinations throughout North America and beyond. At some point during their journey to or from the terminals at SFO, each one of those people will pass by a […]
As more and more solar and wind power is added to the electric grid, the need for ways to store the energy produced increases. Using batteries for this purpose is increasingly popular, mostly driven by the improving economics of the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles as well as consumer electronics. There are other battery […]
The organic foods industry is one of the fastest growing agricultural segments in the United States. According to the Organic Trade Association, U.S. organic sales reached $61.9 billion in 2020, a jump of more than 12% over the previous year. Organic food has many benefits. Organic food is free of antibiotics, growth hormones, and GMOs, […]
There are roughly 10,000 cities in the world, defined as places with at least 50,000 inhabitants with a sufficient population density. Roughly half the world’s population lives in cities. Urban carbon emissions are one of the world’s biggest problems with respect to the climate. A new study has determined that just 25 cities globally are […]
The cost of both solar and wind power continues to drop making the two renewable energy sources the cheapest way to make electricity in more and more places. Given the virtually inexhaustible supply of both wind and sun power, these clean electricity sources can in principle meet all our energy needs. The hang up is […]
We have heard a lot about RNA this past year as messenger RNA vaccine technology has been used for the first time to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. Now RNA-based technology has shown promise to make major contributions to agriculture. A group of researchers at the University of Chicago and two Chinese universities have announced that […]
The most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change includes discussion of a number of extreme and untested solutions to the climate crisis. Among these are solar geoengineering – modifying clouds or spraying tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere in order to block some of the sun’s light and thereby cool […]
The Tana River is the longest river and most important waterway in Kenya. It flows 620 miles from its headwaters in the Abderdare mountain range and Mount Kenya to the Indian Ocean. The Tana River produces approximately half of the country’s electricity, and supplies Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, with 80% of its water. According […]
There are millions of wild pigs in the world with the largest numbers in the United States and Australia but significant numbers in South America, Europe, and China. In the US, there are as many as 9 million feral swine living in 38 states. A conservative estimate indicates that they cause about $1.5 billion in […]
July 2021 has the unfortunate distinction as being the world’s hottest month ever recorded according to global data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July is typically the warmest month of the year, but this July was the warmest month of any year on record. The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was […]
According to a new Swedish study recently published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, men spend their money on greenhouse gas-emitting goods and services, such as meat and fuel, at a much higher rate than women. The study looked at the carbon emissions created by consumption among categories like food, clothing, furniture, and vacations to […]
The record-breaking heatwaves this summer have exposed the special vulnerability inner cities have to the effects of summer heat. Climate change has exacerbated and supercharged heatwaves, as was seen in Seattle and Portland in late June. Urban cores can be 10 degrees or more warmer than the surrounding countryside. The urban heat island effect is […]
A newly released study has found that mountaintop glacier ice in the tropics of all four hemispheres has diminished dramatically over the past 50 years. Among the findings of the study, published in the journal Global and Planetary Change, are that a glacier near Puncak Jaya, in Papua New Guinea, lost about 93% of its […]
The world produces over 300 million tons of plastics each year, mostly produced from petroleum. The environmental consequences are substantial and there is a critical need to replace as much of that plastic production with biodegradable plastics as possible. Thus, there is global research aimed at making bioplastics more economical and as environmentally friendly as […]
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities recently selected to fund Ocean Wind 2, a 1,148-MW offshore wind energy project proposed by the Danish company Ørsted. The agency also awarded Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind a contract to develop 1,410-MW of offshore wind capacity. Ocean Wind 2 will develop the second section of the Ocean Wind […]