Climate change is already shaping what the future will look like and plunging the world into crisis. Cities are adapting to more frequent and intense extreme weather events, like superstorms and heatwaves. People are already battling more destructive wildfires, salvaging flooded homes, or migrating to escape sea level rise. Policies and economies are also changing as world leaders and businesses try to cut down global greenhouse gas emissions. How energy is produced is shifting, too — from fossil fuels to carbon-free renewable alternatives like solar and wind power. New technologies, from next-generation nuclear energy to devices that capture carbon from the atmosphere, are in development as potential solutions. The Verge is following it all as the world reckons with the climate crisis.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other polluting sites. The proposed rule change comes as the Trump administration attempts to get rid of the agency’s ability to regulate planet-heating pollution at all.
[The New York Times]
“They’re doing away with science,” Christine Todd Whitman, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and former Republican governor of New Jersey, tells Bloomberg. That only makes it harder to prepare for the consequences of a warming world, from eroding coastlines to more devastating wildfires across the US.
The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is rallying various agencies to fight wind power — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s health and human services, which historically has had nothing to do with offshore wind farms. The reasoning? A conspiracy theory that wind turbines emit electromagnetic fields that could harm human beings.
Last week, we published Gabriella Burnham’s investigation into the controversy behind Vineyard Wind. She suggested that Nantucket’s debate over wind power represented a microcosm of its future in the US. With Trump’s aggressive moves against sustainable energy, Gabriella’s prediction is looking more and more correct.
How the future of wind energy in the US might come down to NIMBYs and Nantucket.
So it’s no surprise Meta is supporting a new solar farm in South Carolina that’ll provide power for the first data center the tech company is building in the state. Developers also have to race to take advantage of Biden-era tax credits for renewables before they expire, a victim of Republicans’ big spending bill.
Plastic production, and the mountains of waste that creates, are still growing exponentially, Grist shows us in helpful, albeit eye-watering, charts. Whether things start to turn around depends on on thousands of delegates meeting in Geneva this week to try to negotiate an international plastics treaty.
A small city in Kentucky is ground zero for plans to bring uranium enrichment back to the US so nuclear energy can power AI.
The Trump administration proposed tossing out the landmark 2009 “endangerment finding” that allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act.
Greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane cause climate change, of course. Climate change is projected to lead to roughly 250,000 additional deaths each year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat illness between 2030 and 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
The Trump administration wants to build data center projects on Superfund sites, and with as little oversight as possible.
Plans are in place to revive a shuttered plant in Kentucky. The Trump administration and Big Tech are trying to revitalize the nuclear energy industry to meet growing electricity demand from AI data centers.
It’s part of the company’s new push to support the development of technologies that can store renewable energy for longer periods of time than lithium-ion batteries. It’s the kind of thing that might be able to help Google meet growing data center energy demands and maybe even stop its fossil fuel emissions from continuing to rise.
Google is partnering with the company Energy Dome that uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy in the form of pressure and heat.
[energy-storage.news]
NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation plan to launch the satellite on July 30th. The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission is supposed to track ice melt and land deformation, helping scientists better understand the impacts of flooding, earthquakes, and more.
[science.nasa.gov]
The announcement over the weekend follows flash floods that inundated subways. The app notifies users of nearby emergencies and crimes. Now, New York City is adding public safety warnings for floods, extreme heat, fires, and more.
An actually good flash flood alert system involves a lot more than sharing weather updates, experts tell The Verge. Officials also have to avoid causing “alert fatigue” if they’re sending out crime and weather alerts through the same platform.
It takes an ‘all of the above’ approach.
It saw a 6 percent rise in planet-heating pollution last year, according to the company’s latest sustainability report. As it expands data centers for AI, Amazon is moving further away from a goal it set in 2019 to reach net zero carbon emissions.
“One of the biggest challenges with scaling AI is increased energy demands for data centers,” Amazon’s sustainability report says.
The bill quickly sunsets incentives that Congress approved in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that was expected to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40 percent from peak levels by 2030. On top of more pollution, wholesale electricity prices could also increase by 25 percent by 2030 as a result of the bill, according to one initial analysis
The bill now heads to President Donald Trump to sign into law.
It pulled down the federal website that houses national climate assessments, reports that show how climate change affects every region of the US and that have been published every four years or so since 2000. Researchers working on the next national assessment were dismissed in April.
Farmers have successfully sued the Trump administration, however, to restore other climate resources they rely on to federal websites.
Publishing giant Springer Nature is losing millions as a result, Axios reports.
President Trump is also working to slash funding for research institutions in the US, while hundreds of scientists and engineers have accused his administration of censorship.
Tech companies are making bold bets on reaching the “Holy Grail” of energy, nuclear fusion. It’s a dream scientists have been chasing for decades, and that many believe is still decades away at best. Nevertheless, the energy needs of AI and an arms race with China are pumping billions of dollars into efforts to make fusion power a reality.
[washingtonpost.com]
