Environment

AI eats up a lot of electricity, and that’s driving up data centers’ energy use. It’s also changing the physical footprint of data centers and making it harder for companies to hit their sustainability goals, the New York Times reports. With the AI-fueled boom in new data centers, sites under construction in North America could eventually use as much power each year as the San Francisco metro area, according to a real estate report published yesterday.

The blaze is still tearing through the Texas Panhandle after scorching 500,000 acres. The Smokehouse Creek Fire is now the second largest in state history, with 0 percent contained as of Wednesday morning. The facility responsible for disassembling a majority of the nation’s nuclear weapons shuttered briefly Tuesday night as flames drew near.

Warren has been urging federal agencies to scrutinize energy-hungry Bitcoin mines. But crypto groups secured a temporary pause on the Department of Energy’s survey of their electricity consumption.

The Department of Energy announced $366 million for 17 clean energy projects across 30 Tribal Nations and 20 states. All of them are connected to “disadvantaged communities that are disproportionally overburdened by pollution and historically underserved.” That includes off-grid solar and battery storage for the Hopi and Navajo Nations, aiming to give 300 rural homes electricity for the first time. More than one-fifth of Navajo homes and one third of Hopi homes lacks electricity, according to the DOE.

The largely conservative Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday for Ohio v. EPA, and it sounds like SCOTUS is sympathetic to plaintiffs fighting the agency’s Good Neighbor Plan. The plan would force states, including Ohio, to prevent smog-forming pollution from drifting downwind to other states. More than a dozen states are fighting the plan in lower courts, and Ohio wants SCOTUS to force the EPA to pause the plan entirely while those legal battles are ongoing. Whether SCOTUS sides with Ohio now likely points to how it would rule later if any of those cases in lower courts ultimately make their way to SCOTUS.

Not yet, but there have been some gains since Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act into law — two huge investments in clean energy and transportation. EV sales and clean energy additions to the power grid hit record highs last year, according to an analysis by researchers from Princeton, MIT, and Rhodium Group. But progress is expected to slow down unless the US can get rid of red tape that’s getting in the way.

The Supreme Court of the US will hear arguments today over an Environmental Protection Agency plan that would force states to curb smog-forming pollution before it can drift over to their neighbors. Ohio and other plaintiffs want SCOTUS to stay the EPA’s ‘Good Neighbor Plan’ while their case challenging the agency’s legal authority to impose the plan works through lower courts. You can listen in on oral arguments in Ohio v. EPA at 10 AM EST.

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.