Tag Archives: environment

I’ve got a complicated relationship with my Roomba, Keith, who sometimes refuses to charge but also works his wheels off ridding my home of dust. I hate dust, both because I’ve got allergies and because a good chunk of the particulates are toxic microplastics. Modern humans wage an unwinnable battle …

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, …

George Saliba didn’t get it: Why were all these people from the Bronx suddenly crowding his electric vehicle dealership in Ewing, New Jersey? Why did they all want Tesla’s black-on-black Model Y? And why did they keep coming? Other electric vehicle sellers in the tri-state area were equally busy. The …

As gearheads and auto industry suits streamed into the Los Angeles Convention Center Saturday for the LA Auto Show, they found themselves in the middle of a scene out of Squid Games. Demonstrators clad in the Netflix show’s red jumpsuits and black guard masks splayed across the showroom floor like …

Next week, world leaders will head to Dubai for the Conference of the Parties—the United Nations’ annual climate meeting—to finalize the first “global stocktake,” assessing progress toward the Paris Agreement’s goals. The UN Environment Programme is not mincing words about how far from those goals nations are. Today, ahead of …

SpaceX’s Starship failed its test flight this morning when the automated flight termination system triggered, and engineers lost contact with the craft about 10 minutes into its journey. This marks the company’s second attempt at sending a Starship on a near-orbital trip, a 90-minute voyage that would have gone almost …

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2015 a lightning strike started what became known as the Rough Fire, which eventually burned more than 150,000 acres of forest east of Fresno and just west of Kings Canyon National Park. The …

If the human ear could hear impending seismic activity, this is what people across Iceland would be hearing right now. A jarring symphony, reminiscent of the sounds of slamming doors and thunderstorms,can be listened to in full on Northwestern University’s Earthtunes app, which transforms seismic frequencies into audible pitches. Potent …

Solar panels and wind turbines get all the attention, but an underappreciated device is helping slash emissions in a big way: the heat pump. Instead of generating heat by burning natural gas, like a furnace does, an electric heat pump extracts warmth from outdoor air and transfers it inside. In …

Shortly after a massive fire under the Interstate 10 freeway in downtown Los Angeles last weekend closed a 1-mile stretch normally traversed by 300,000 vehicles daily, California’s fire marshal announced that it was being investigated as possible arson. Some locals have been eager to blame the homeless encampments that are …