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.
That’s according to preliminary data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The world has been smashing records lately thanks to climate change: 2023 was the hottest year on record. Last summer was the hottest in the Northern Hemisphere in at least 2,000 years. And there’s still time to break more records this summer.
Mining companies want to harvest polymetallic nodules — which are rich in metals that can be used to make batteries — from the deep sea. But scientists just discovered that these so-called “batteries in a rock” might be creating oxygen through seawater electrolysis. It’s a wild revelation that poses new questions about the consequences of mining the deep sea before fully understanding what’s down there.
[Scientific American]
Trump’s new running mate went from saying “we have a climate problem” in 2020 to being “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” The New York Times reports. (Research shows greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are to blame.) Vance suddenly threw his support behind Trump, pushed to repeal EV tax credits and rollback pollution regulations.
[The New York Times]
Renting bins is convenient, slightly more sustainable, and not once did I miss cardboard boxes.
Emissions from nearly 6 million of its vehicles were about 10 percent higher on average than GM said they were on its greenhouse gas emission compliance reports, an EPA investigation found. GM will retire 50 million metric tons of carbon credits to make up for the excess tailpipe pollution. It’ll also pay $145.8 million in penalties.
[The Washington Post]
The Environmental Protection Agency updated its climate change indicators, a comprehensive report on extreme weather, shifting seasons, ocean impacts, and greenhouse gas emissions in the US.
Heatwave season is 46 days longer for Americans now than it was in the 1960s, for instance.
“The climate crisis is affecting every American right now and with increasing intensity,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said in a press release.
