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.
About as much water as a single-use bottle holds, the The Washington Post reports. The electricity it takes is about as much as 14 LED light bulbs might burn through in an hour.
These are rough estimates, but they come with helpful illustrations to show the environmental costs of operating data centers for new AI tools.
An Oregon gas company said it could clean up its act by turning to “renewable natural gas” made from organic waste. Years later, it’s selling customers just as much fossil fuel gas as it did before, according to a ProPublica investigation.
Fossil fuel giants have used AI for years to increase production. Now, Microsoft sees the generative AI boom as an opportunity to boost profits for itself and oil and gas companies it wants to strike deals with, Karen Hao reports for The Atlantic. Microsoft’s own greenhouse gas emissions are growing with its focus on AI, taking the company further away from its climate goals.
[The Atlantic]
It popped up quickly with little transparency around its potential impact on the power grid, air quality, or water resources, local advocates say. The Elon Musk-led company is reportedly running gas generators without a proper permit. Local utility officials reportedly signed NDAs.
“We have been deemed by xAI not even valuable enough to have a conversation with,” says KeShaun Pearson, who grew up a few miles from the facility and is president of the local nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution. “To not even be included in conversations about what is transpiring in our own backyards.”
Meanwhile, Trump claims that under a Harris presidency, “Oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead. We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar.”
I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States and in fact I was the tie breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases on fracking.
Climate advocates previously hoped Harris would take a tougher stance against fracking. This statement in tonight’s debate repeats a promise she made in her CNN interview last month.
The Verge spoke with Bill Gates about AI, misinformation, and climate change.
The number of heat-related deaths recorded in the US climbed 117 percent between 1999 and 2023, according to recent research.
In Hell or High Water, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals, we explore how heat hits certain communities harder after a history of racist redlining in the US. There’s still a lot of work to do to end disparities and save lives.
[Audible.com]
In her first interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash that her “values have not changed,” even though when she ran for the nomination in 2019, she said she was in favor of a ban. Fracking, of course, is a lightning rod issue in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.
The Biden administration needs to conduct more thorough environmental reviews, advocates contend.
Roughly half of customers lost power yesterday. As of this morning, more than 30 percent of customers are still without service, according to power utility Luma Energy.
It shows how vulnerable the US territory’s grid is after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017 and left residents without electricity for up to 11 months. In July, Puerto Rico filed a $1 billion suit against fossil fuel companies.
[The Washington Post]
They’re on different sides of a debate over how to counteract pollution from data centers’ energy use, Financial Times reports.
Amazon and Meta are part of a lobby group that wants more lax standards for renewable energy certificates, which can pose similar risks as carbon offset credits. Google, meanwhile, backs a different strategy for bringing more renewables online wherever data centers operate.
[Financial Times]
SunPower helped kick off a solar boom in the US, Canary Media explains. But the company was hit hard by soaring interest rates and faced allegations of mismanagement, CNBC reports. Solar companies in the US have grappled with inflation and supply chain kinks pushing up projects costs in recent years, and have struggled to compete with more affordable panels made in China.
Scientists discovered ‘dark oxygen’ in the ocean’s abyss, where companies want to mine battery metals.
Just as in Twisters, Reed Timmer custom built his truck to get as close to tornadoes as possible. But where Glen Powell was shooting roman candles at tornadoes, Timmer shoots rockets full of sensors at them.
Researcher Alex Hanna, of Distributed AI Research Institute and previously of Google, reflects on what might come next:
After the dust settles and NVIDIA has stopped churning out shovels (e.g. H100s) for the gold rush, what will be left behind? Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not—they’ll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges?
[Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter]
This is what we’ve pieced together about her views on AI, privacy, antitrust and more.
The Biden administration is investing $20 million in a program to use the GOES-R satellite for wildfire detection. The hope is that the satellite will spot blazes before 911 calls start, and see through a haze of smoke to point to where a fire ignited. That could help officials and firefighters respond more quickly and give them a leg up on fighting the fire.
It shows carbon dioxide pollution moving through Earth’s atmosphere. We can’t usually see the pollution causing climate change, but NASA was able to illustrate it using a a high-resolution weather model and supercomputers. It incorporates data from billions of ground and satellite observations.
