It was clear before the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season started that it was going to be busy.
Six months later, we're looking back at a trail of broken records, and the storms may still not be over even though the season officially ended on Nov. 30.
This season had the most named storms, with 30, taking the record from the calamitous 2005 season that brought Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans. It was only the second time the list of storm names was exhausted since naming began in the 1950s.
Ten storms underwent rapid intensification, a number not seen since 1995. Twelve made landfall in the U.S., also setting a new record. Six of those landfalling storms were hurricane strength, tying yet another record.
Tropical storm tracks show how busy the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was. (Credit: Brian McNoldy, CC BY-ND)
Here's what research tells us about the 2020 season and what may be ahead.
Why did 2020 have so many storms?
An unfortunate combination of two key factors made this season ripe for tropical storms.
First, a La Niña pattern of cool surface waters developed in the equatorial Pacific, and it was stronger than anticipated.
Ironically, cooling in the equatorial Pacific makes it easier for tropical storms to form and gain strength in the Atlantic. That's because La Niña weakens the vertical wind shear over the tropical Atlantic. Vertical wind shear – a change in wind speeds with altitude – is highly disruptive to storm development.
As the La Niña pattern became established this season, it made the tropical Atlantic much more hospitable for storms to form and intensify.
Atlantic sea surface temperatures in September 2020 were warmer than the 1981-2010 average. (Credit: NOAA)
The second critical factor was the extremely warm temperatures in the Atlantic, including the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
Hurricanes are powered by the transfer of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. The sea surface temperature therefore dictates the maximum potential intensity a storm can attain under perfect conditions – it's like a thermodynamic "speed limit" on hurricane intensity.
The sea surface temperature approached record levels in the Atlantic hurricane basin this season, including in September, the most active Atlantic storm month on record.
What does climate change have to do with it?
An important part of this season's story is the Atlantic warming trend we're witnessing, which is unprecedented going back at least several millennia.
The oceans store much of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. With greenhouse gas concentrations still increasing due to human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, average sea surface temperatures are likely to continue rising over the coming decades. Whether climate change caused the extremely high number of storms this season is unclear. There is no detectable trend in global hurricane frequency, and computer modeling studies have had conflicting results.
However, the warming climate is increasing the threat posed by hurricanes in other ways.
Ten storms this season underwent rapid intensification – a 35 mph increase in maximum winds within 24 hours. Rapidly intensifying storms are especially dangerous because 1) they are challenging to accurately predict, and 2) they provide minimal time for evacuations when they intensify just before making landfall.
Satellite instruments capture Hurricane Iota making landfall in Nicaragua on Nov. 16. The image shows the temperature of cloud tops, which tells scientists how tall the clouds are. (Credit: NOAA; James H. Ruppert Jr.)
Hurricanes Laura and Sally both rapidly intensified just before making landfall on the Gulf Coast this season. Eta rapidly intensified to a Category 4 just before hitting Nicaragua, and just two weeks later, Iota essentially repeated the act in the same location.
Forecasts for the tracks or paths of tropical cyclones have dramatically improved in recent decades, as much as five days in advance. However, forecasts of storm formation and intensification have improved very little by comparison.
The forecasts for hurricane rapid intensification are especially poor.
While the official forecasts issued by the National Hurricane Center are issued by human forecasters, they depend on the guidance of prediction models, which aren't very accurate when it comes to rapid intensification.
The complexity of weather models makes this a daunting challenge. However, it becomes more tractable as researchers learn more about how hurricanes form and intensify and identify the root causes for errors in computer model predictions.
Our latest research explores how clouds create their own greenhouse effect, trapping heat that causes hurricanes to form and intensify more quickly. Improving how numerical models account for this cloud feedback may ultimately hold promise for more accurate forecasts. Innovative ways of collecting new measurements in developing storms, down to their smallest scales, will also be necessary for guiding these improvements.
Given the upward trend in high-intensity storms, the risks from these storms will only grow. The ability to accurately predict how and when they will form, intensify and threaten coastal populations is crucial.
James H. Ruppert Jr. is an assistant research professor at Penn State. Allison Wing is an assistant professor of meteorology at Florida State University.
Peter Dykstra – newsman, provocateur, friend and former publisher of The Daily Climate – passed away Wednesday.
Peter Dykstra – newsman, provocateur, friend and former publisher of The Daily Climate – passed away Wednesday.
“Are you a Tigers fan?”
That was the first thing Peter Dykstra said to me when we finally met in person at a Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference in 2013. He had a blue sportcoat with a mustard stain on it, a Red Sox baseball hat slightly askew, and command of the room.
Peter, publisher of Environmental Health News at the time, had hired me as a staff writer, my first professional journalism job. I was anxious, suffering the kind of impostor syndrome anyone young and unproven feels at a professional conference.
But Peter wanted to talk about baseball.
I was — and am — a lifelong Detroit Tigers fan. So instead of talking about toxics, glacial melt or our editorial calendar, we talked baseball. “Let me tell you about the time I met Jim Leyland in Florida at spring training … he was smoking a cigarette by the bleachers …” Peter said of the Tigers’ manager at the time. And off he went.
He later made a point to introduce me to other baseball fans at the conference — Chuck Quirmbach, Michael Hawthorne, Seth Borenstein — people I knew as journalism giants and, just months earlier, were only bylines to me. Anxiety gone, I felt accepted.
Peter passed away this week and the environmental world, the journalism world, and, well, the world lost one of the good ones. He was 67. Peter dedicated his career to environmental communication but, just like he showed me at a conference 11 years ago, he never let serious work or the curveballs that life threw him get in the way of a good joke or the opportunity to be kind.
Peter was born in 1957 in New Jersey and had the mafia jokes to show for it. He went to Boston University and in late 1978 started volunteering at Greenpeace, where he would work for the next 13 years, developing the organization’s U.S. media program. He then became an executive producer at CNN focusing on science, environment, weather and technology.
He won awards – an Emmy, the DuPont Columbia Award and a Peabody among them – and was pivotal in making climate change news more mainstream on TV, something he would continue to push for throughout his life. As he wrote in one column for EHN, “Since the 1990’s, I’ve had a front row seat for TV news' abject failure in covering climate change.”
After a stint as deputy director of Pew Charitable Trusts, Peter became the publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate in 2011, a year before I was hired.
When asked years later in an interview with SEJ — an organization he loved and respected — about moving between key leadership roles in journalism and environmental advocacy, Peter said “many journalists tend to hold a theocratic view that these two fields are irreconcilable. That’s BS. They each have their own rules, and it’s not brain surgery to follow the rules for either. I’d like to think I’ve benefited from learning the rules for both.”
Without Peter’s leadership, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Peter was an early adopter of collaborations, encouraging other publications to republish our work and vice versa. The more environmental news floating around, the better, was his line of thinking. Up until the very end, in fact, he contributed a short roundup of the week's environmental news to the nationally syndicated radio show "Living on Earth."
He was also a key supporter of our internship program, and finding ways to elevate the work of young journalists, female journalists, and journalists of color.
When Peter started at EHN, I was making my way through journalism school, and I went to EHN daily to scour the pages for new environmental news. A year later, when getting into a car with my new colleagues Marla Cone and Peter Dykstra, I said, “I can’t believe I’m in a car with Marla Cone and Peter Dykstra.”
“I already hired you, there’s no need to suck up,” Peter said. He never let me live that one down.
As a remote newsroom, I spoke with Peter often, but didn’t see him nearly enough. In 2016 in Charlottesville, Virginia, he showed up a bit late for our meeting, and explained that he had been pulled out by airport security for his “Putin-Trump, Liberty is for Losers” shirt (worn ironically, of course). Apparently, the guards wanted to know where they could get one.
Peter was suffering with bad back pain on that trip. The seemingly innocuous ailment would, within the next year, turn into a near-fatal infection that cost Peter his ability to walk. He became, in his words, “hell on wheels.”
As Peter got used to his new normal, our roles shifted. I became senior editor, and Peter became our weekend editor and columnist. Peter was damn near unmanageable. His copy would come in late, unformatted, off-topic — but full of humor, snark, and with a keen eye for political and industry bullshit.
His brain was an encyclopedia. He could recite random department heads in administrations going back decades and then pivot to who gave up the winning run in game 6 of the 1975 World Series. His columns were a peek inside his mind — seeing climate change with seriousness and clarity, but still tickled by the absurdity and ineptitude behind the crises.
A great example: Peter’s back and forth with the late Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, infamous for lobbing a snowball on the Senate floor during a snowstorm in 2014 in one of his many climate denial speeches and stunts. In 2019, Peter wrote to the office of the senator, who was 85 at the time, to set up an interview in 15 years (when Inhofe turned 100) to check in on how his climate change denial was holding up.
“I met Senator Inhofe just about ten years ago at Eastern Market in DC, wearing a bomber jacket and looking nowhere near his then-age of 75. So I think there's a good chance he'll be with us for another fifteen years. As you know, the Senator's views on climate change are in opposition to many scientists and political leaders. Fifteen years from now, we'll have a pretty clear idea who was right, and who was wrong.”
Inhofe’s people got back to Peter. “Sure! How is 10 am on Friday, November 17, 2034?"
Peter with Environmental Health Sciences executive director, Douglas Fischer.
The last few years for Peter were hard. And hard might be an understatement. He was at the mercy of our broken health care system and in need of 24-hour care.
But you wouldn’t have known it. When we spoke, I could hear the cable news blaring. I’d scoff at the latest political scandal or environmental crises, and he’d pull out a historical comparison and tell me he’d seen it before. (“You should’ve seen Ann Gorsuch.”)
In recent years, I’d sometimes go months without hearing from him, but then I’d see him light up my phone, one of the last people I know that would leave lengthy, detailed voicemails including his name and what time he called.
Like clockwork, I’d hear from him in February when he’d be excited about Georgia Tech baseball starting up. He’d ask me how much snow I was dealing with here in the North, and brag that he was gearing up for opening day.
I didn’t think I’d be writing a note about my friend’s passing today. I already find myself wondering what Peter would have said about the latest election nonsense and the baseball trades that happened this week. The world was a better place with Peter’s voice in it. He spent a career on the most serious of topics — the health of our planet — and never let it break him. He went from a volunteer to a newsroom leader, but never lost the ability to poke fun at himself and treated esteemed veteran reporters the same as student interns.
Just two weeks ago Peter gave me a call about a column he was working on.
Before he let me go, we talked about the latest player the Detroit Tigers were sending down to their minor league team in Toledo, which also happens to be downstream of Detroit, a city notorious for its sewage overflows.
“It’s just the latest crap Detroit is sending down to Toledo,” he said.
An environmental reference wrapped in a baseball joke .. or is it the other way around?
“You can use that one if you want,” he added, and then we hung up.
CAMERON PARISH, La. — Late into the night, John Allaire watches the facility next to his home shoot 300-foot flares from stacks.
He lives within eyesight of southwest Louisiana’s salty shores, where, for decades, he’s witnessed nearly 200 feet of land between it and his property line disappear into the sea. Two-thirds of the land was rebuilt to aid the oil and gas industry’s LNG expansion. LNG — shorthand for liquified natural gas – is natural gas that's cooled to liquid form for easier storage or transport; it equates to 1/600th the volume of natural gas in a gaseous state. It’s used to generate electricity, or fuel stove tops and home heaters, and in industrial processes like manufacturing fertilizer.
In the U.S., at least 30 new LNG terminal facilities have been constructed or proposed since 2016, according to the
Oil and Gas Watch project. Louisiana and Texas’ Gulf Coast, where five facilities are already operating, will host roughly two-thirds of the new LNG terminals – meaning at least 22 Gulf Coast LNG facilities are currently under construction, were recently approved to break ground or are under further regulatory review.
Although the U.S. didn’t ship LNG until 2016, when a freight tanker left, a few miles from where Cameron Parish’s LNG plants are today, last year the country became the global leader in LNG production and export volume, leapfrogging exporters like Qatar and Australia. The
EIA’s most recent annual outlook estimated that between the current year and 2050, U.S. LNG exports will increase by 152%.
Allaire, 68, watches how saltwater collects where rainwater once fed the area’s diminishing coastal wetlands. “We still come down here with the kids and set out the fishing rods. It's not as nice as it used to be,” he told
Environmental Health News (EHN).
That intimacy with nature drew Allaire to the area when he purchased 311 acres in 1998. An environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran, he helped lead environmental assessments and manage clean-ups, and although retired, he still works part-time as an environmental consultant with major petroleum companies. With a lifetime of oil and gas industry expertise, he’s watched the industry's footprint spread across Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile shores and beyond. Now that the footprints are at the edge of his backyard, Allaire is among a cohort of organizers, residents and fisher-folk in the region mobilizing to stop LNG facility construction. For him, the industry’s expansion usurps the right-or-wrong ethics he carried across his consulting career. For anglers, oil and gas infrastructure has destroyed fishing grounds and prevented smaller vessels from accessing the seafood-rich waters of the Calcasieu River.
From the view of Allaire’s white pickup truck as he drives across his property to the ocean’s shore, he points to where a new LNG facility will replace marshlands. Commonwealth LNG intends to clear the land of trees and then backfill the remaining low-lying field.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.”
Community bands together
John Allaire, left, purchased 311 acres in Cameron Parish in 1998, and has watched the oil and gas industry's footprint spread to his property.
Credit: John Allaire
During an Earth Day rally in April, community members gathered in the urban center of Lake Charles to demand local oil and gas industries help deliver a safer, healthier future for all. In between live acts by artists performing south Louisiana’s quintessential zydeco musical style, speakers like James Hiatt, a Calcasieu Parish native with ties to Cameron Parish and a Healthy Gulf organizer, and RISE St. James organizer Sharon Lavigne, who’s fighting against LNG development in rural Plaquemines Parish near the city of New Orleans, asked the nearly 100 in attendance to imagine a day in which the skyline isn’t dotted by oil and gas infrastructure.
Not long ago, it was hard to imagine an Earth Day rally in southwest Louisiana at all. For decades, the area has been decorated with fossil fuel infrastructure. Sunsets on some days are highlighted by the chemicals in the air; at night, thousands of facilities’ lights dot the dark sky.
“It takes a lot of balls for people to start speaking up,” Shreyas Vasudevan, a campaign researcher with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told EHN in the days after the rally. In a region with its history and economy intertwined with oil and gas production, “you can get a lot of social criticism – or ostracization, as well – even threats to your life.”
Many are involved in local, regional and national advocacy groups, including the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Healthy Gulf, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Audubon Society.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.” - John Allaire, environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran
But environmental organizers are fighting a multi-billion-dollar industry with federal and state winds at its back. And LNG’s federal support is coupled with existing state initiatives.
Under outgoing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a term-limited Democrat — the state pledged a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050. Natural gas, which the LNG industry markets as a cleaner-burning alternative, is cited as one of the state’s solutions. Louisiana is the only state that produces a majority of its carbon emissions through fossil fuels refining industries, like LNG, rather than energy production or transportation. Governor Edwards’ office did not return EHN’s request for comment.
This accommodating attitude towards oil and gas industries has resulted in a workforce that’s trained to work in LNG refining facilities across much of the rural Gulf region, said Steven Miles, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP and a fellow at the Baker Institute’s Center on Energy Studies. Simultaneously, anti-industrialization pushback is lacking. It’s good news for industries like LNG.
“The bad news,” Miles added. “[LNG facilities] are all being jammed in the same areas.”
One rallying cry for opponents is local health. The Environmental Integrity Project found that LNG export terminals emit chemicals like carbon monoxide –potentially deadly– and sulfur dioxide, of which the American Lung Association says long-term exposure can lead to heart disease, cancer, and damage to internal or female reproductive organs.
An analysis of emissions monitoring reports by the advocacy group the Louisiana Bucket Brigade found that Venture Global’s existing Calcasieu Pass facility had more than 2,000 permit violations.That includes exceeding the permit’s authorized air emissions limit to release nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds 286 out of its first 343 days of operation.
The Marvel Crane, the first liquid natural gas carrier to transport natural gas from the Southwest Louisiana LNG facility, transits a channel in Hackberry, Louisiana, May 28, 2019.
“This is just one facility,” at a time when three more facilities have been proposed in the region and state, Vasudevan said. Venture Global’s operational LNG facility — also known as Calcasieu Pass — “is much smaller than the other facility they’ve proposed.”
In an area that experienced 18 feet of storm surge during Hurricane Laura in 2020 — and just weeks later, struck by Hurricane Delta — Venture Global is planning to build a second export terminal Known as “CP2,” it’s the largest of the roughly two dozen proposed Gulf LNG export terminals, and a key focal point for the region’s local organizing effort.
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” Hiatt told EHN of locals’ nostalgia for a community before storms like Rita in 2005 brought up to 15 feet of storm surge, only for Laura to repeat the damage in 2020. Throughout that time, the parish’s population dipped from roughly 10,000 to 5,000. “But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG. Folks in Cameron think that's going to bring back community, bring back the schools, bring back this time before we had all these storms — when Cameron was pretty prosperous.”
“Clearly,” for the oil and gas industry, “the idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports,” Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana, told EHN.
Helping fishers’ impacted by LNG is about “actual survival of this unique culture,” Cooke said.
In a measure of organizers’ success, she pointed to a recent permit hearing for Venture Global’s CP2 proposal. Regionally, it’s the only project that’s received an environmental permit, but not its export permit, which remains under federal review. At the meeting, some spoke on the company’s behalf. As an organizer, it was a moment of clarity, Cooke explained. Venture Global officials “had obviously done a lot of coaching and organizing and getting people together in Cameron to speak out on their behalf,” Cooke said. “So, in a way, that was bad. But in another way, it shows that we really had an impact.”
“It also shows that we have a lot to do,” Cooke added.
Environmental organizers like Alyssa Portaro describe a sense of fortitude among activists — she and her husband to the region’s nearby town of Vinton near the Texas-Louisiana border. Since the families’ relocation to their farm, Portaro has worked with Cameron Parish fisher-folk.
“I’ve not witnessed ‘community’ anywhere like there is in Louisiana,” Portaro told EHN. But a New Jersey native, she understands the toll environmental pollution has on low-income communities. “This environment, it’s so at risk — and it’s currently getting sacrificed to big industries.”
“People don’t know what we’d do without oil and gas. It comes at a big price,” she added.
Southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish is one of the state’s most rural localities. Marine economies were the area’s economic drivers until natural disasters and LNG facilities began pushing locals out, commercial fishers claim.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” James Hiatt , a Healthy Gulf organizer, told EHN. "But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG."
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
For the most part, Cameron Parish’s life and economy has historically taken place at sea. As new LNG facilities are operational or in planning locally, locals claim the community they once knew is nearly unrecognizable.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
A disappearing parish
The stakes are seemingly higher for a region like southwest Louisiana, which is the epicenter of climate change impacts.
In nearly a century, the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion. In part driving the state’s erosion crisis is the compounding impacts of Mississippi River infrastructure and oil and gas industry activity, such as dredging canals for shipping purposes, according to a March study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said Cameron Parish could lose more land than other coastal parishes over the next 50 years. A recent Climate Central report says the parish will be underwater within that time frame.
On top of erosion and sea level rise impacts, in August, 2023, marshland across southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish burned. The fires were among at least 600 across the Bayou State this year. Statewide, roughly 60,000 acres burned — a more than six-fold increase of the state’s average acres burned per year in the past decade alone.
But while the blaze avoided coastal Louisiana communities like Cameron Parish, the fires represented a warning coming from a growing chorus of locals across the region — one that’s echoes by the local commercial fishing population, who claimed to have experienced unusually low yields during the same time, according to a statement from a local environmental group. At the site of the Cameron Parish fires are locations for two proposed LNG expansion projects.
"The idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports.” - Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana
It was an unusual occurrence for an area that’s more often itself underwater this time of year due to a storm surge from powerful storms. For LNG expansion’s local opposition, it was a red flag.
As the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has noted prior, the confluence of climate change’s raising of sea levels and the construction of LNG export terminals — some are proposed at the size of nearly 700 football fields — are wiping away the marshland folks like Allaire watched wither. Among their fears is that the future facilities won’t be able to withstand the power of another storm like Laura and its storm surge, which wiped away entire communities in 2020.
Amidst these regional climate impacts, LNG infrastructure has shown potential to exacerbate the accumulation of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. For the most part, LNG is made up of methane — a greenhouse gas that’s more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Among the 22 current LNG facility proposals, the advocacy group Sierra Club described a combined climate pollution output that would roughly equal to that of about 440 coal plants.
The climate impacts prompt some of the LNG industry’s uncertainty going forward. It isn’t clear if Asian countries, key importers of U.S. LNG, will “embrace these energy transition issues,” said David Dismuke, an energy consultant and the former executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. Likewise, European nations remain skeptical of embracing LNG as a future staple fuel source.
“They really don't want to have to pull the trigger,” Dismukes added, referring to Europe’s hesitation to commit more resources to exporting LNG from the American market. “They don't want to go down that road.”
While there will be a tapering down of natural gas supply, Miles explained, “we’re going to need natural gas for a long time,” as larger battery storage for renewables is still unavailable.
“I'm not one of these futurists that can tell you where we're going to be, but I just don't see everything being extreme,” Dismukes said. “I don't see what we've already built getting stranded and going away, either.”
For now, LNG seems here to stay. From 2012 to 2022,U.S. natural gas demand — the sum of both domestic consumption and gross exports — rose by a whopping 43%, reported the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA. Meanwhile, in oil and gas hotbeds like Louisiana and Texas, natural gas demand grew by 116%.
Throughout 25 years, Allaire has witnessed southwest Louisiana’s land slowly fade, in part driven by the same industrial spread regionally. Near where the front door of his travel trailer sits underneath the aluminum awning, he points to a chenier ridge located near the end of the property. It’s disappearing, he said.
“See the sand washing over, in here?” Allaire says, as he points towards the stretches of his property. “This pond used to go down for a half mile. This is all that's left of it on this side.”
East Antarctica is experiencing a massive heat wave, with temperatures spiking 50 degrees above normal, highlighting the ongoing impacts of climate change on polar regions.
Ground temperatures in East Antarctica have soared more than 50 degrees (28°C) above normal, marking one of the largest anomalies on the planet.
The warming is linked to a weakened polar vortex, leading to a sudden stratospheric warming event that has disrupted typical weather patterns.
Scientists warn that the decreasing sea ice and warming oceans are contributing to more frequent and intense heat waves in Antarctica.
Key quote:
“It is likely that having less sea ice and a warmer Southern Ocean around the Antarctic continent ‘loads the dice’ for warmer winter weather over Antarctica.”
— Edward Blanchard, atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington
Wind and solar power have surpassed fossil fuels to generate 30% of the EU's electricity in the first half of 2024, reducing emissions by one-third since 2022.
EU power generation from coal, oil and gas fell 17% in early 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
13 EU member states, including Germany and Belgium, now produce more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels.
Despite progress, the wind industry faces high inflation and political resistance, hindering faster growth.
Key quote:
"We are witnessing a historic shift in the power sector, and it is happening rapidly."
— Chris Rosslowe, analyst at Ember
Why this matters:
Transitioning to renewable energy reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps combat climate change. By harnessing natural resources, we can significantly decrease the carbon footprint of electricity production. This shift not only addresses the immediate concern of lowering carbon emissions but also promotes long-term sustainability by preserving non-renewable resources.
Labor unions have endorsed Harris, viewing her as an advocate for progressive labor and economic policies.
Harris' focus is on public sector and service unions, emphasizing worker health and safety in climate policies.
Harris has supported climate initiatives that directly benefit union workers, such as heat protections for outdoor workers.
Key quote:
"I like to say show, don’t tell. And Kamala Harris has shown us that she supports farm workers, and she understands the struggles."
— Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers
Why this matters:
Labor unions' support for Harris' climate policies highlights a shift towards viewing climate action as integral to worker safety. This approach could shape future labor and environmental policies, bridging the gap between economic and environmental interests.
The Inflation Reduction Act provides clean energy grants and tax credits, enabling places of worship to install solar panels and save on electricity bills.
Churches like Watts-Willowbrook Church of Christ in Compton are using these savings to support community programs, such as food ministries and energy costs.
Solar installations in religious institutions are spreading to underserved communities, promoting environmental justice and economic savings.
Key quote:
“Installing solar panels gives them an opportunity for funding to use in other areas of ministries.”
— Linda Cleveland, Watts Clean Air and Energy Committee
Why this matters:
This move isn't just about cutting down on those hefty energy bills—it's a green leap towards sustainability, showing congregations how faith and eco-consciousness can coexist. By tapping into the cost, climate, and reliability perks of solar energy, religious institutions are setting an example that combines moral responsibility with financial savvy. Read more: House Speaker Mike Johnson’s climate change playbook — deny the science, take the funding.
Scientists are on the brink of launching a satellite-based system to monitor animal migrations, endangered species, and global changes through thousands of tiny tracking devices.
The ICARUS project, conceived by ornithologist Martin Wikelski, aims to create an "internet of animals" by attaching solar-powered tracking devices to wildlife and monitoring them via satellites.
The system will launch in 2025, using low-cost CubeSats, providing data on animal movements and environmental conditions, crucial for understanding global change.
The initiative promises to democratize ecological research, enabling more scientists to study animal behaviors and migrations with detailed, accessible data.
Key quote:
“These tags are so smart, they can tell us if a female is nesting and if the clutch disappears. Then we can link individuals to populations and understand the drivers of change.”
— Martin Wikelski, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Power shutoffs or wildfire evacuations can be deadly for disabled people, especially nondrivers who may not have a way to get to a cooling center or evacuation point.
