Environment

Jack Sweeney, a college student who uses public flight data to track jets belonging to celebrities like Swift and Elon Musk, has refuted the singer’s claims that his flight tracking accounts on social media cause her “direct and irreparable harm.”

None of the planes actually broke the sound barrier—there was no sonic boom. Instead winds up to 250 mph gave the planes one helluva tailwind and allowed them to travel in excess of 800 mph.

Rooftop gardens are really cool — literally, they help keep indoor temperatures down because evaporation from plants has a cooling effect. Asphalt rooftops in comparison, absorb and trap heat. New research in Seoul now shows that green roofs actually reduced the energy intensity of buildings by close to 8 percent. That boost in energy efficiency means green roofs are helping to keep the planet cool, too.

Warner Bros. first Twister movie was very much a public service announcement about how dangerous running towards tornadoes can be. But that message seems to have been lost on everyone in the first trailer for director Lee Isaac Chung’s upcoming sequel Twisters due out July 19th.

Yup, she still has another one. But apparently, Swift sold her Dassault Falcon 900 in January — not long after her attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action against a college student who shares flight data and greenhouse gas emissions from Swift’s and other billionaires’ jets on social media. Swift topped a 2022 list of celebrities with the biggest carbon footprints from flying. But now she’s one jet down.

Greenidge Generation, a gas-powered Bitcoin-mining operation, agreed to pay $105,000 to settle claims it violated the EPA’s coal ash program. This requires companies to follow certain groundwater monitoring rules, among other things.

It’s dumping nearly half a year’s worth of rain in parts of the state, leaving more than 500,000 customers without power. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for eight Southern California counties. Climate change — no surprise — has already intensified rainfall from atmospheric rivers over California. The Verge took a slightly doomed flight into an atmospheric river a few years ago with scientists studying the phenomenon.

Severe wind and rain left more than 870,000 customers without power on Sunday evening according to data compiled by poweroutage.us, and remains at over 610,000 as Monday dawns.

I love living in New York because there’s always something exciting happening — like a curbside demo of a very normal-looking garbage truck lifting a bin while Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” is blasting in the background.

Tesla was being sued by 25 California DAs for dumping hazardous automotive components and waste like metal car panel welding spatter in the trash instead of handling it appropriately.

If passed, the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024 would compel the EPA to conduct a study on the environmental footprint of AI. It would also make the National Institute of Standards and Technology develop standards for measuring those impacts and set up a voluntary reporting system. AI is energy-intensive, which is why it’s stirred up concerns about how it might impact the grid and contribute to climate change.

Solar power feeding into the Texas energy grid set two records on January 28th. Production hit 15,222 MW at around 10am, and at 3:10pm, solar power met 36.1 percent of electricity demand, a new peak. Solar met around a third of overall demand every hour from 11am to 4pm.

The mandate passed last year requires companies to share how much carbon dioxide pollution they create by 2026. But several industry groups have filed suit to try to stop California from implementing the law, the first of its kind in the nation. The SEC, facing similar industry pushback, has been dragging its feet on finalizing similar nationwide rules.

The industry has been navigating choppy waters lately with soaring costs forcing companies to cancel plans to develop offshore wind farms along the east coast of the US. In a big blow to the state’s clean energy plans, Ørsted nixed two major projects off the coast of New Jersey last October. Bouncing back, New Jersey just inked new deals with Leading Light Wind and Attentive Energy Two to develop a couple new offshore wind projects.

Without it, scientists wouldn’t have discovered four new emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica. Satellites were able to spot their guano from orbit — dark spots against the white ice. It’s a bit of good news after record low sea ice led to a “catastrophic breeding failure” in 2022. The penguins need stable sea ice to breed, which is harder to come by in a warming world. One of the colonies spotted from space might even be breeding site thought to have been lost that the penguins have actually re-established.

The OpenAI CEO said during an event in Davos this week that “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” which is expected to consume an enormous amount of electricity as it matures. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough. We need [nuclear] fusion or we need like radically cheaper solar plus storage or something at massive scale,” Altman said.