Environment

“Emissions of greenhouse gasses trap heat,” Lee Zeldin, said during today’s Senate confirmation hearing when pressed about climate science. Whether he’ll take action is another issue.

The US Supreme Court denied petitions from fossil fuel companies seeking to thwart a climate lawsuit filed against them — allowing the case to go to trial.

The LA-based tech company has 150 employees who have been displaced from the wildfires, Spiegel wrote in a letter published on the company’s website. Snap has donated $5 million to local relief efforts and “will do more,” he says.

Two people have been arrested in California for flying unauthorized drones in areas impacted by the LA wildfires, according to a police report seen by Deadline.

As expected. Insert smiling cartoon dog sitting at a table, coffee mug in hand, as Los Angeles goes up in flames. This is fine.

Watch Duty: Wildfire Maps, a crowdsourced app that tracks nearby fires, evacuation notices, and other key information, was more popular than ChatGPT, Threads, and Temu today as wildfires burn out of control across Southern California.

Hundreds of thousands of people are without power, and tens of thousands are under evacuation orders with blazes out of control in Southern California.

More than 625 million acres of the US oceans are now protected after Biden prohibited all future oil and gas leasing.

When I heard tell of the connected oysters here at CES Unveiled, I thought they were going to be some silly rich people nonsense. They actually help companies monitor water quality by keeping tabs on the health of the mollusks. That’s super cool! And they get to throw around the phrase “happy as a clam” and really mean it.

The Montana Supreme Court upheld a district judge’s 2023 ruling that the state violated young people’s right to a clean and healthy environment.

It’s the latest example of the Biden team approving massive loans for clean energy, battery, and electric vehicle projects as the clock winds down on the president’s time in office. The PG&E loan is the biggest to-date and will go toward investments in “hydroelectric power generation, batteries and power lines,” according to the New York Times.

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) published its top 10 priorities for the incoming Trump administration and managed to omit any reference to climate change, Reuters reports. President-elect Donald Trump has called climate change a scam.

Carrboro, NC is suing for damages it expects to incur as climate change leads to more extreme weather. It alleges that Duke Energy has delayed a transition from the fossil fuels to renewable energy as part of a “campaign of deception.”

Google DeepMind researchers say their machine learning model “better predicts extreme weather, tropical cyclone tracks and wind power production” in a paper published today in the journal Nature.

The FBI is investigating, Reuters reports. Hackers allegedly targeted US nonprofits and activists who have spoken out against ExxonMobil. Lawyers for ExxonMobil wielded hacked documents to fight lawsuits filed against the company, according to Reuters.

A treaty could potentially put a cap on plastic production. Recycling just isn’t enough to stop the flood of plastic pollution building up in landfills, waterways, in marine life, and that’s even found in baby poop.

We’ve been saying this for a while at The Verge: filtering CO2 out of the air is absurdly expensive and not a realistic alternative to fighting climate change by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.