Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and President Donald Trump during the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images
At an AI and fossil fuel lovefest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump - flanked by cabinet members and executives from major tech and energy giants like Google and ExxonMobil - said that "the most important man of the day" was Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. "He's gonna get you a permit for the largest electric producing plant in the world in about a week, would you say?" Trump said to chuckles in the audience. Later that week, the Trump administration exempted coal-fired power plants, facilities that make chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, and certain other industrial sites from Biden-era a …
An aerial view of flash flood damage along the banks of the Guadalupe River on July 11th in Kerrville, Texas. | Photo: Getty Images
Flash floods have wrought more havoc in the US this week, from the Northeast to the Midwest, just weeks after swollen rivers took more than 130 lives across central Texas earlier this month. Frustrations have grown in the aftermath of that catastrophe over why more wasn't done to warn people in advance.
Local officials face mounting questions over whether they sent too many or sent too few mobile phone alerts to people. Some Texans have accused the state of sending out too many alerts for injured police officers in the months leading up to the floods, which may have led to residents opting out of receiving warnings. And hard-hit Kerr County …
Microsoft's data center boom has been imperiling its 2030 carbon negative pledge, so the tech giant is turning to Vaulted Deep, which operates like a reverse oil company.
GM will send batteries — new and old — to Redwood Materials, which will assemble them into large packs capable of supporting data centers and the grid.
London-based Seabound has developed a carbon capture system that transforms CO2 from a ship's engine into limestone, which Heidelberg Materials will use to make cement.
As The Verge's resident disaster writer, I'm tired of this nonsense. So let's just get into it.
What is cloud seeding?
Cloud seeding is basically an attempt to make precipitation fall from clouds. It targets clouds that have water droplets that are essentially too light to fall. Scientists at MIT learned in the 1940s that if you inject a mineral into the cloud that's similar to the crystalline structure of ice - typically silver iodide or salt - those small water droplets start to freeze to the mineral. This creates heavier ice particles that can eventually fall down to the ground. These days, researchers can use radar and satellite image …
Scorching hot days tend to hit certain neighborhoods harder than others, a problem that becomes more dangerous during record-breaking heat like swathes of the US experienced over the past week. A new online dashboard shows how Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately affected in California.
“We want to provide facts, reliable data sources. We don’t want this to be something that gets erased from the policy sphere,” says Arturo Vargas Bustamante, faculty research director at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI).
“We don’t want this to be something that gets erased”
The Latino Climate & Health Dashboard includes data on extreme heat and air pollution, as well as asthma rates and other health conditions — issues that are linked to each other. High temperatures can speed up the chemical reactions that create smog. Chronic exposure to fine particle pollution, or soot, can increase the risk of a child developing asthma. Having asthma or another respiratory illness can then make someone more vulnerable to poor air quality and heat stress. Burning fossil fuels — whether in nearby factories, power plants, or internal combustion vehicles — makes all of these problems worse.
Latino neighborhoods have to cope with 23 more days of extreme heat a year compared to non-Latino white neighborhoods in California, the dashboard shows. LPPI defined extreme heat as days when temperatures climbed to 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher.
If you’ve ever heard about a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect, big differences in temperature from neighborhood to neighborhood probably wouldn’t come as a surprise. Areas with less greenery and more dark, paved surfaces and waste heat from industrial facilities or vehicles generally tend to trap heat. Around 1 in 10 Americans lives in a place where the built environment makes it feel at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it would without that urban sprawl according to one study of 65 cities from last year. And after years of redlining that bolstered segregation and disinvestment in certain neighborhoods in the US, neighborhoods with more residents of color are often hotter than others.
The dashboard includes fact sheets by county to show what factors might raise temperatures in certain areas. In Los Angeles County, for example, only four percent of land in majority-Latino neighborhoods is shaded by tree canopy compared to nine percent in non-Latino white neighborhoods. Conversely, impervious surfaces like asphalt and concrete that hold heat span 68 percent of land in Latino neighborhoods compared to 47 percent in majority non-Latino white areas in LA County.
For this dashboard, LPPI defines a Latino neighborhood as a census tract where more than 70 percent of residents identify as Latino. It used the same 70 percent threshold to define non-Latino white neighborhoods.
Latino neighborhoods in California are also exposed to twice as much air pollution and have twice as many asthma-related ER visits as non-latino white neighborhoods, according to the dashboard. It brings together data from the Census Bureau, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state’s environmental health screening tool called CalEnviroScreen, and other publicly-available sources.
Efforts to keep these kinds of studies going are just as vital, so that people don’t have to rely on outdated information that no longer reflects current conditions on the ground. And other researchers have launched new initiatives to document the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks. The Environmental Defense Fund and other advocacy groups, for instance, launched a mapping tool in April that shows 500 facilities across the US that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently invited to apply for exemptions to air pollution limits.
UCLA’s dashboard adds to the patchwork of more locally-led research campaigns, although it can’t replace the breadth of data that federal agencies have historically collected. “Of course, we don’t have the resources that our federal government has,” Bustamante says. “But with what we are able to do, I think that one of the main aims is to keep this issue [at the top of] the agenda and provide reliable information that will be useful for community change.”
Data like this is a powerful tool for ending the kinds of disparities the dashboard exposes. It can inform efforts to plant trees where they’re needed most. Or it can show public health officials and community advocates where they need to check in with people to make sure they can find a safe place to cool down during the next heatwave.
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From a struggling family tea estate to an innovative climate venture, Alt Carbon has raised $12 million in a seed round as it plans to scale its carbon dioxide removal work in the South Asian nation. The climate-tech startup, which locks away carbon for thousands of years through enhanced rock weathering on farmlands, attracted investment […]
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