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.
‘We view what we are doing as a public service,’ says the cofounder of the nonprofit that millions of people are relying on to stay safe.
Watch Duty: Wildfire Maps, a crowdsourced app that tracks nearby fires, evacuation notices, and other key information, was more popular than ChatGPT, Threads, and Temu today as wildfires burn out of control across Southern California.
Hundreds of thousands of people are without power, and tens of thousands are under evacuation orders with blazes out of control in Southern California.
The Palisades, Hurst, and Eaton fires are growing fast, fanned by strong Santa Ana winds.
More than 625 million acres of the US oceans are now protected after Biden prohibited all future oil and gas leasing.
President-elect Donald Trump has already said he plans to undo the move. But that likely depends on Congress taking action, CNN reports.
When I heard tell of the connected oysters here at CES Unveiled, I thought they were going to be some silly rich people nonsense. They actually help companies monitor water quality by keeping tabs on the health of the mollusks. That’s super cool! And they get to throw around the phrase “happy as a clam” and really mean it.
The Montana Supreme Court upheld a district judge’s 2023 ruling that the state violated young people’s right to a clean and healthy environment.
A group of 16 youths filed suit to push the state to drop a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act that barred officials from considering greenhouse gas emissions and the consequences of climate change when permitting new energy projects.
It’s the latest example of the Biden team approving massive loans for clean energy, battery, and electric vehicle projects as the clock winds down on the president’s time in office. The PG&E loan is the biggest to-date and will go toward investments in “hydroelectric power generation, batteries and power lines,” according to the New York Times.
[The New York Times]
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) published its top 10 priorities for the incoming Trump administration and managed to omit any reference to climate change, Reuters reports. President-elect Donald Trump has called climate change a scam.
Instead, SEIA is focusing on “American energy dominance,” ending “dependence on China,” and even supplying electricity for crypto mining and AI data centers.
Carrboro, NC is suing for damages it expects to incur as climate change leads to more extreme weather. It alleges that Duke Energy has delayed a transition from the fossil fuels to renewable energy as part of a “campaign of deception.”
Hurricane Helene — supercharged by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels — tore a path of destruction through North Carolina earlier this year.
[The New York Times]
The FBI is investigating, Reuters reports. Hackers allegedly targeted US nonprofits and activists who have spoken out against ExxonMobil. Lawyers for ExxonMobil wielded hacked documents to fight lawsuits filed against the company, according to Reuters.
A treaty could potentially put a cap on plastic production. Recycling just isn’t enough to stop the flood of plastic pollution building up in landfills, waterways, in marine life, and that’s even found in baby poop.
And since plastics are made from fossil fuels, curbing production would also cut down the pollution causing climate change.
We’ve been saying this for a while at The Verge: filtering CO2 out of the air is absurdly expensive and not a realistic alternative to fighting climate change by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.
Nevertheless, Big Tech — including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — has pumped hella money into carbon removal strategies that have yet to prove that they can make a meaningful impact.
Negotiations at the United Nations climate summit ended with a deal that falls well short of what vulnerable nations fought for — $1.3 trillion in climate funding that economists estimate is needed to help less affluent countries adapt to disasters and deploy clean energy.
“We don’t have anything there this year,” Meta told the Financial Times.
The annual UN summit is arguably the biggest climate event of the year, and typically an opportunity for tech companies to grandstand. But Big Tech’s obsession with AI has led to growing greenhouse gas emissions, pushing companies further away from climate goals.
Rivian released a short film today in which the company’s CEO RJ Scaringe issues a call to action on climate change, arguing the time is now to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy solutions.
The scale of the challenge means we need to be making these changes now, and we need to begin working toward every increasing renewable content on our grid. We need to replace the roughly one-and-a-half billion combustion powered vehicles on our planet with electric vehicles, but also know that on the path to the end state, we’re going to have solutions that are imperfect, but we need to start.
