The US Environmental Protection Agency is considering keeping it alive, following news earlier this year that the Trump administration would shutter the money-saving program as part of its efforts to roll back energy and water efficiency standards.
[The New York TImes]
Coal-fired power plants pumped out as much as 20 percent more particle pollution during the last federal government shutdown in 2018 and 2019 as the US Environmental Protection Agency froze inspections.
The current shutdown has lasted nearly a month now, inching closer to the 2018-2019 record for the longest in history.
As much as two thirds of the climate benefits the project was supposed to provide for high-profile customers — including Volkswagen, Gucci, and Nestle — never materialized, according to a recent investigation. The failure casts even more doubt over whether sustainability claims companies make about offsetting their emissions are actually legitimate.
[Majority of Carbon Credits From Tarnished Project Deemed Bogus]
It’s supporting new solar and wind farms across Greece, Italy, Latvia, Poland, and Romania that are supposed to add 650 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to local power grids.
The company also shared that its suppliers jointly launched a new $150 million investment fund to support renewable energy infrastructure in China.
With the government still shut down, the Trump administration announced more layoffs across the already decimated federal workforce. That includes EPA employees who worked on battery recycling and safety, plastics reduction, recycling and composting programs, and collecting solid waste data, according to the EPA union.
That’s according to a recent Bloomberg analysis of wholesale electricity prices across the US, which has more data centers than any other country.
There are other factors aside from speculative electricity demand from data centers that are pushing up prices. Updating aging grids with new power lines and recovering from climate disasters is also costly.
Today’s the day to vote for the winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week, the annual March Madness-style popularity contest for Katmai National Park’s famous brown bears. (Personally, my money’s on Chunk.)
[explore.org]
The Verge received a Covering Climate Now award for this story about a quirky and determined community of scientists and locals bringing forests back to life in Costa Rica, despite new perils brought on by climate change. They were so fun to hang out with, hope this story feels like a trip into the forest with them!
Both Trump and Biden have sought to build up a domestic supply chain for uranium to lessen dependency on Russian imports and meet growing data center electricity demand with nuclear energy.
Along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Wright previously sat on the board of a company called Oklo that’s developing advanced nuclear reactors.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other polluting sites. The proposed rule change comes as the Trump administration attempts to get rid of the agency’s ability to regulate planet-heating pollution at all.
[The New York Times]
“They’re doing away with science,” Christine Todd Whitman, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and former Republican governor of New Jersey, tells Bloomberg. That only makes it harder to prepare for the consequences of a warming world, from eroding coastlines to more devastating wildfires across the US.
“If they overturn this, it would leave the public responsible for cleaning up, not the companies that knowingly polluted the land,” University of California, San Francisco professor Tracey Woodruff tells The New York Times, which first reported on the proposal.
There’s plenty of disinformation trying to blame the nascent offshore wind industry for whale deaths without evidence. Not only is that misleading, it also takes the focus away from solutions that might actually address the leading causes of death — vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear.
The US is saying ‘to hell with the international mining code.’
In local battles over who foots the bill for new energy infrastructure, it’s about “power in the literal sense — the electrons that keep the lights on and fuel modern technology — and power in the political sense,” Ivan Penn and Karen Weise write for the The New York Times.
[The New York Times]
