Environment

The city of Alto Hospicio, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is one of the driest places on Earth. And yet its population of 140,000 continues to balloon, putting mounting pressure on nearby aquifers that haven’t been recharged by rain in 10,000 years. But Alto Hospicio, like so many other coastal cities, is rich in an untapped water resource: fog.

New research finds that by deploying fog collectors — fine mesh stretched between two poles — in the mountains around Alto Hospicio, the city could harvest an average of 2.5 liters of water per square meter of netting each day. Large fog collectors cost between $1,000 and $4,500 and measure 40 square meters, so just one placed near Alto Hospicio could grab 36,500 liters of water a year without using any electricity, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

By placing the collectors above town — where the altitude is ideal for exploiting the region’s predictable band of fog — water would flow downhill in pipelines by the power of gravity. So that initial investment for collectors would keep paying liquid dividends year after year. “If you’re pumping water from the underground, you will need a lot of energy,” said Virginia Carter Gamberini, a geographer and assistant professor at Chile’s Universidad Mayor and co-lead author of the paper. “From that perspective, it’s a very cheap technology.”

https://archive.ph/GwEyL

By the time President Donald Trump retook office, lawmakers had announced nearly $700 billion in funding for infrastructure- and climate-related projects under two bills passed during Joe Biden’s administration — the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. That money was promised to all sorts of community and local projects, from clean energy initiatives to water system upgrades.

Some of these projects have received their funding. Indeed, some have been completed. But in light of the Trump administration’s freeze on many forms of federal funding, the future of as-yet-undistributed money is unclear.

What kinds of climate and infrastructure projects have been announced in your community and across the country? Which ones may now be at risk? Now you can use your ZIP code to find out.

To understand the stakes of these signature pieces of legislation, Grist developed a tool that combines information across multiple datasets to reveal where more than $300 billion of the funds promised under the two pieces of legislation have been awarded across the United States. Enter a ZIP code, city name, or other location in the search box below to discover projects within any radius of your chosen area.

Electric and gas utilities routinely charge ratepayers for costs related to political advocacy, ads to burnish their brand, and even luxury perks for executives and employees, according to a recent report by the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute, or EPI. Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. While charging customers for lobbying is banned in federal and state laws, consumer advocates say that existing policies are nowhere near rigorous enough to hold utilities accountable.

In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities. Customers in those states have already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars after regulators began enforcing the laws last year.

Consumer advocates say that as the impacts of these policies become clearer — and as utility bills continue to hike — more laws will be on the way. Last year, eight states introduced bills to rein in utility cost recovery. Last month, five more states followed suit, according to EPI.

To deliver gas to millions of homes and businesses in California, gas utilities operate more than 100,000 miles of transmission and distribution pipelines across the state. But maintaining that vast network of pipelines is expensive – $3 million per mile on average in California, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a non-profit advocacy group focused on eliminating fossil fuels from buildings.

Policymakers know California cannot meet its long-term climate targets unless the state's fossil gas dependency is broken. But if customers leave the gas system on a one-off, ad hoc basis by, for example, retrofitting their homes to run only on electric appliances like heat pumps, the customers who remain on the system will have to pick up a larger share of the cost of maintaining the sprawling gas distribution network.

This reality prompted then-state Senator Dave Min (D) to introduce legislation last year that aims to being the process of pruning branches from the gas network. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D) in September 2024, SB 1221 authorizes California’s gas utilities to launch up to 30 voluntary pilot projects – so-called "neighborhood decarbonization zones" – and retire aging gas pipeline sections over the next five years.

On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”

That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction. DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.

“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”

The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison. The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally. Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.

Construire des centres de données partout dans le monde, ça mobilise énormément de ressources (notamment minières) et ça émet un max de gaz à effet de serre 💨

https://les-enovateurs.com/breves/numerique-poids-environnemental-croissant-etude-bilan-alarmant

L'association GreenIT.fr confirme largement cette impression avec la publication de son rapport consacré aux impacts environnementaux du numérique dans le monde.

@cnnum @environment@beehaw.org @environment@newsmast.community #impact #numerique #numeriqueresponsable

For our stateside friends, a 20C delta is 36F. This is an order of magnitude beyond the less-aggressive Paris goals for the world as a whole.

Rahaman-Noronha hasn't just reforested his land; he is passionate about ensuring the buildings on his farm are sustainable too. As you enter the farm a concrete house greets you – one of the older buildings on the land. But every other structure has touches of the earth. Clay, harvested from the land nearby; timber from the trees further back on the farm; repurposed glass bottles of all colours that glitter as the light hits them; rounded formations that only hint at the old, upcycled tires buried underneath to provide structure; and textured walls containing patchworks of dried grasses.

The farmer is embracing the old Trinidadian ways of building, when residents would use what was available to them, rather than mass importing materials. Not only is he putting waste products that would otherwise end up in landfill to use, Rahaman-Noronha is employing building styles that provide resilience against the island's changing climate.

For a quick build, there isn't as much time put into observing the environment: patterns of rainfall, plant and animal life, where the wind blows. "It's these things that we have been disconnected from." Instead, she says, it's common to level the ground, remove any trees and start the build with a blank slate, without considering what is already there and how that can be integrated into the design. With deforestation and loss of native species being a widespread environmental issue, the practice of clearing what exists and creating something entirely new can have wider ripple effects on the land, like causing increased land slippage on slopes.

This disconnection from the environment is a feature of the "concrete culture" that became prevalent in Trinidad in the 1900s. Asad Mohammed, director of the Caribbean Network for Urban and Land Management, attributes this to "the impact of Western architectural inputs that have little relevance to the context we live in". He describes a "modernistic style of square buildings" that are not climate-adapted to the intense heat of the dry season or the hurricanes and flooding of the wet season.

“The combination of accelerating clean energy growth and moderating power demand growth promises to bend China’s emissions down further from the current plateau,” Myllyvirta said in a post.

That’s despite coal- and gas-fired power capacity additions of 54GW in 2024, a slight decline from the prior year.

Myllyvirta said energy capacity additions tend to accelerate towards the end of each year, which means last year’s new installations will only fully show up in generation statistics from 2025.

“So the record additions in the end of 2024 are highly relevant for the 2025 emission trend,” Myllyvirta said.

Close to half of the experts surveyed by CREA last year said China’s carbon dioxide emissions had probably already peaked, or would do so in 2025, thanks in large part to its unprecedented wind and solar boom.

However, it’s still too soon to call the top. China’s fossil fuel power plants generated 1.5% more electricity in 2024 than the previous year, per the National Bureau of Statistics. This indicates that electricity consumption continued to grow faster than clean energy output.

Now, Blue Lake Rancheria is set to greatly expand its microgrid system through the Tribal Energy Resilience and Sovereignty project, a $177 million initiative that will add 20,000 kilowatts of solar capacity and will connect Blue Lake to the land of three other communities — comprising Hoopa, Yurok and Karuk Indians — with a 142-mile-long distribution circuit to increase regional resiliency between the tribes. Moreover, the expanded grid system will enable staff to choose between five priority levels for energy usage, allowing the operators to turn off non-essential power during outages — which will in turn allow the system to operate indefinitely during extended emergencies. Altogether, the expanded microgrid will “radically expand” the capacity of microgrids to “provide energy reliability in high-risk locations,” says Schatz Center director Arne Jacobson. “These tribes are already leading the field in dam removal, healthy fire on the land, middle and last-mile telecommunications access, and renewable energy systems deployment — and will now support development of what we hope will be a game-changing climate resilience solution.”

In expanding its microgrid capacity, Blue Lake Rancheria is not alone. Across the United States, communities, hospitals, companies and more are turning to microgrids to expand stable and clean electric power — for reliability, affordability and flexibility — to new frontiers. According to the Department of Energy, there are some 1,100 active microgrid installations in the U.S., with new installations planned everywhere from Maine to Hawaii. These installations boast a total generating capacity of over five million kilowatts — a 170 percent increase from a decade ago — and over two million kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.

It’s time to salute the herder conservationists of Africa. Once, the term would have seemed an oxymoron. The people shepherding livestock across the continent’s great open grasslands have been widely seen as the enemies of its charismatic wild mammals — to be fenced out of protected areas and policed by armed rangers. But that image is outdated.

Today, in hundreds of community-run “conservancies” being established across tens of millions of acres of Africa, herders and their cattle are sharing the unfenced land with elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, and buffalo. Armed only with mobile phones, the herders keep their livestock safe while protecting wildlife — by alerting their fellows to marauding lions and driving off poachers in places that rangers in four-wheel drives rarely venture — and accompany high-rolling tourists who fund their conservation endeavors.

The scale and success of these community conservancies on the only continent where large mammals still run free across huge stretches of land is still a largely untold story. But a new analysis from Maliasili, a Vermont-based NGO dedicated to bolstering local African conservation initiatives, demonstrates for the first time the full extent to which wildlife is often more effectively protected within conservancies than within state-run national parks.

Maliasili found that 16 percent of Kenya’s total land mass is managed by the 230 conservancies that cover more than 22 million acres, an area the size of Indiana. In Namibia the figure is 20 percent and in Zimbabwe 12 percent. Tanzania has an area equivalent to seven Yellowstones managed for wildlife by herders, farmers, and hunter-gatherers.

Insurance generally operates by pooling risks. Most property owners buy home and vehicle insurance policies, and from that large pool of customers, insurance companies only have to make payouts to the few who experience costly damages. When climate change increases the frequency and intensity of disasters, insurance companies will spread the costs across the customer pool in the form of higher rates.

So even if you haven’t been directly harmed by extreme weather, you’re paying for some of the costs of those climate-worsened disasters. According to realtor.com, average U.S. home insurance rates rose nearly 34% from 2018 to 2023 – and over 11% in 2023 alone.

Some of those higher prices are related to rising inflation because repairing damaged homes has become more costly. But both home and auto insurance rates have consistently risen much faster than the rate of inflation over the past 15 years.

That’s in large part due to climate change. As one example, scientists estimated that climate change made Hurricane Helene twice as destructive and increased its rainfall by over 50% in some areas. Auto data company CARFAX estimated that the storm left as many as 138,000 vehicles flood-damaged across six states in addition to causing tens of billions of dollars in property damage.

Insurance companies themselves purchase reinsurance to make sure they can cover large losses, and reinsurance prices are rising fast to account for climate change. The world’s largest reinsurer, Munich Re, recently noted that 2024 was one of the most expensive years for weather disasters on record, with $320 billion in global losses, of which around $140 billion were insured.

I’ve watched the California fires over the last few days with the same horror as everyone else; we’re watching major parts of one of the nation’s major cities burn in real-time, in an event that’s best described as a fire-hurricane, an event all-but unthinkable not that long ago but one that is increasingly common as decades of misguided fire-management policies collide with expanding population in the so-called “wildland–urban interface,” all accelerated by changing, hotter, drier climate conditions. It is a literal recipe for epic disaster.

Unfortunately, California’s fires are a harbinger of what’s to come in a world where we increasingly feel the effects of climate change—but it’s also a warning about HOW our world is going to change in the years and decades ahead. I don’t pretend to be a climate scientist or to understand the precise feedback loops that may, for instance, cause the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or the melting of Greenland. However, I have in recent years spent a lot of time thinking about climate as a political threat.

Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

In that time tackling this as a tech and economic challenge, we’ve actually made substantial progress on a lot of these problems and have, so far, fundamentally altered the arc of our planet’s climate. As one leading climate thinker I spoke with last fall told me, “We were on a course to four-and-a-half to six degrees of warming. That is not a world that is livable. Today, maybe we’re on a path for two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half degrees of warming—still bad, but better. That trajectory is headed in the right direction.”

But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis.

Well, well, well ...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/172650

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Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17832023

Archived version

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that global coal demand is expected to reach unprecedented levels in 2024. In its latest report, "Coal 2024: Analysis and Forecast for 2024," the agency predicts coal consumption will climb to 877 crore tonnes, marking a new record.

The report notes that while global coal demand increased by 1% in 2023, the growth rate has slowed compared to previous years. In 2021, coal demand surged by 7.7% following the COVID-19 recovery, while growth rates moderated to 4.7% in 2022 and 2.4% in 2023.

[...]

China, the world's largest coal consumer, will significantly drive global demand. The IEA estimates China's coal consumption will grow by 1% in 2024, reaching 490 crore tonnes. India, the second-largest consumer, is expected to see a 5% increase, bringing its consumption to 130 crore metric tonnes—a level previously achieved only by China.

Conversely, coal demand in developed regions like the European Union and the United States continues to decline. The European Union’s demand is projected to drop by 12% in 2024, while the US is expected to see a 5% decline. However, these decreases are less steep compared to the significant drops in 2023.

[...]

Grassroots activists and marine scientists in Algeria are building artificial reefs to restore biodiversity and sustain fishing communities, but scaling up requires more than passion—it needs institutional support and political will.

In Algeria, the average quantity of fish taken out of sea has been recorded at a consistent 100,000 tons per annum over the last three decades. However, as Algeria’s population continues to grow, authorities estimate that they will need to rely on techniques such as fish farming to reach the 200,000 tons that will be necessary to meet domestic needs.

Artificial reefs at a larger scale might also provide support for fishing by promoting the reproduction of fish and other marine species close to the coast. But Algeria has a long way to go, since artificial reefs have only been immersed on an experimental level by diving associations helped by scientists the last ten years. “There has been a drop-off in the number of fish over the last few years. We have to go farther and farther into sea. In other countries fishing is halted for a few weeks every year so that the species can repopulate, but not here,” Fatah claims.

Thanks to their advocacy, Hippone Sub in coordination with the Probiom Foundation—Algeria’s network for marine biodiversity protection, created in 2009—managed to attract the attention of the highest authorities in Algeria. In 2017, just one year after the first reef was submerged by the association in Annaba, the government passed a law to regulate the immersion of artificial reefs.

“This law allows a local wilaya (provincial) commission to grant permission for the immersion of artificial reefs to project sponsors, whether they are associations, institutions, or others,” explains Emir Berkane, a doctor, environmental activist, and president of the Probiom Foundation. The legislation also enabled Hippone Sub and Probiom to begin their second project in 2021 with “two new pyramidal immersions that measure 33 m³ and 66 m³,” creating one of the largest reefs in Algeria, says Emir Berkane. In Annaba, “one of the two pyramids is still thriving, along with the first artificial reef,” the environmental activist notes.

Over the last decade, there has been a surge in activity surrounding this issue, observes Professor Grimes. Several artificial reefs have been submerged off the Algerian coast by associations and researchers, notably in Oran and Mostaganem, which are located 420 and 330 kilometers west of Algiers, respectively. Other projects are in preliminary stages, including one in Aïn Témouchent, 490 kilometers west of Algiers, which is being worked on by Professor Grimes, himself.