By Susan Kaplan

Your child could go to gym class on Monday morning and play soccer on a field that was sprayed over the weekend with 2,4-D, a toxic weedkiller that has been investigated as possibly causing cancer. Alternatively, the school grounds may have been treated with a lower-toxicity weedkiller. Or maybe the grounds were managed with safe, nontoxic products and techniques.

Which of these scenarios applies depends in large part on your states laws and regulations today more so than federal regulations.

For example, Texas requires all school districts to adopt an integrated pest management program for school buildings; IPM prioritizes nonchemical pest control methods and includes some protections regarding spraying of grounds. Massachusetts also restricts pesticide use on school grounds. Illinois requires IPM for school buildings only if economically feasible. States also vary greatly in the education and technical assistance they provide to implement these practices.

Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is involved in some baseline pesticide functions, shortcomings of the main pesticide law, along with industry influence, ca...

One of the greatest environmental challenges of the renewable energy transition is ensuring that the new energy-generating devices themselves from solar panels to wind turbines to lithium batteries are made and disposed of sustainably. 

Thats why its promising that recycled turbine blades are catching wind. Major turbine maker Siemens Gamesa announced Thursday that some of its recycled blades would find a home in the UKs Dogger Bank wind complex, one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world. 

Our industry-leading RecyclableBlade technology is now delivering even greater circularity of resources, CEO of Siemens Gamesas offshore business Marc Becker said in a press release. 

Wind turbine blades are typ...

With 161.5 million views and counting on TikTok alone, the #StopWillow social media campaign has left no question of the groundswell of opposition to the proposed oil development project Willow on Alaskas remote North Slope.

Social media users have been using the hashtag to voice their resistance to President Joe Bidens failure to keep his campaign pledges to reduce oil drilling.

With all of the progress that the U.S. government has made on climate change, it now feels like theyre turning their backs by allowing Willow to go through, said climate activist Hazel Thayer, who posted TikTok videos using the #StopWillow hashtag, as The Associated Press reported. I think a lot of young people are feeling a little bit betrayed by that.

Final approval of the Willow project lies with Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who opposed the Willow project and fought against it as a member of Congress. There is likely to be input on the final decision from top White House climate officials, as well as President Biden himself.

Climate activists have called the Willow project a carbon bomb, and a change.org petition had more than 3.1 million signatures, with a goal of 4.5 million.

According to ConocoPhillips Alaska, the Willow project which would be located on the Indiana-sized National Petroleum Reserve could produce about 1.5 percent of the total oil production in the U.S., or as much as 180,000 barrels of oil per day, reported The Associated Press.

Willow would emit more climate pollution annually than more than 99.7% of all single point sources in the country. Its estimated that the oil from Willow, when burned, would add more than 280 million metric tons of climate pollution to the atmosphere over the next 30 years equivalent to the annual...

Italy has joined the list of countries moving to restrict labels on plant-based meat products. The lawmakers proposing such labeling rules which include banning terms like burger or sausage argue that using traditional meat-related terms for plant-based foods could mislead consumers.

The proposed legislation says that use of terms like tofu steak or veg ham is an unfortunate and widespread phenomenon that misleads consumers by exploiting similarities between the products. The bill was also proposed to protect the livestock production of our country from those who want to offer consumption alternatives.

Further, in the introduction of the proposed bill, lawmakers said that using meat-related terms on plant-based products would lead consumers to incorrectly draw assumptions that the plant-based products had the same nutritional components as meats.

The question does not concern simple information to consumers, who are perfectly aware that there is no meat, for example, in a vegan mortadella, but the danger that they may be led to believe that the plant-based product has an exact nutritional equivalent (and perhaps that it has been processed with the same traditional techniques and care of the art of cured meat) of the meat product, the translated bill reads.

But studies have shown some promise in the nutrient density and potential health benefits of plant-based meat products, even in comparison to meat. One study noted multiple health and environmental benefits of plant-based meat over animal meat, and another study by Stanford Medical scientists found lower cardiovascular risk factors for people who swap red meat for plant-based meat.

In Italy, only about 17% of people in a 2021 study said they werent at all likely to ever consume plant-based meats, according to...

Two new studies highlight the vulnerability of California forests. Climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, has heated the atmosphere faster than conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains can adapt, shifting their ideal elevation 600 feet above where it was nearly a century ago, according to a study published in PNAS Nexus.

That heating has left nearly one-fifth of conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada mountains mismatched to the current climate, including 8% that are severely mismatched. This mismatch makes the so-called zombie forests less, or even completely, unable to recover after wildfires, themselves supercharged by climate change while also releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Those findings come as a study published in PNAS finds climate-supercharged fires are so destructive that forests across 2.2 million acres across the West may be unable to regrow after fires a landmass that could more than triple by midcentury to 7 million acres.

Researchers say improved forest management, including low-intensity burns can help, so long as those actions are taken concurrently with action on climate change. But the longer you wait, the bigger the warming effect gets, study co-author Phil Higuera told Inside Climate News. Importantly, the projections only go through 2050, and that seems a lot closer than it used to.

For a Deeper Dive:

Zombie forests: New York Times, Fire intensity: Inside Climate News,...

Australia made a massive investment in renewable energy towards the end of 2022 channeling $4.3 billion towards large scale carbon-free electricity generation and storage developments. 

This is the highest quarterly investment since 2018,  according to data reported Thursday by the nonprofit renewable industry group the Clean Energy Council. But more is still needed for the country to meet its climate commitments. 

While the uptick is encouraging, one quarter doesnt mean a trend, Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Kane Thornton said in a statement. Australia is deploying new large-scale generation wind and solar farms more slowly than needed to reach the 82 per cent target for renewable energy on the National Electricity Market.

The increase in investments came at the close of the year in which Australia elected a new government that promised increased action on the climate crisis. The government of Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese promised to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030 and achieve net zero emissions by 2050, which means ensuring 82 percent of the nations electricity comes from renewable sources by the end of the current decade.

Thornton said the change in political leadership had clearly incentivized investors. Overall, renewable energy investment in 2022 was up 17 percent from 2021, for a yearly total of $6.2 billion, according to the Clean Energy Councils Renewable Projects Quarterly Report for Q4 2022. 

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When wastewater from coal-fired plants is released into wider waterways, it can have serious consequences. Environmental toxins including mercury, arsenic, bromide and chloride can pollute drinking water and aquatic habitats, causing cancer and other ailments in humans and making it harder for wildlife to reproduce.

Thats why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) moved on Wednesday to propose the countrys toughest standards yet for controlling this type of pollution. 

Ensuring the health and safety of all people is EPAs top priority, and this proposed rule represents an ambitious step toward protecting communities from harmful pollution while providing greater certainty for industry, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a press release. EPAs proposed science-based limits will reduce water contamination from coal-fired power plants and help deliver clean air, clean water, and healthy land for all. 

Humans have been drinking coffee for hundreds of years, and in that time the rich, aromatic beverage has become not only a way to start the day, but part of culture all over the world.

Coffee is so much a part of some peoples routine that they couldnt imagine the day without it. But with rising global temperatures due to climate change, the worlds coffee supply is becoming less reliable.

Climate conditions that interfere with coffee yield have become more common in the past forty years, and a new study suggests that global heating is likely to result in interference with worldwide coffee production, The Guardian reported.

With climate change projections showing a continued rise in temperatures in the tropics is likely, we suggest that coffee production can expect ongoing systemic shocks, the authors of the study wrote. As with other crops, a systemic risk to the global coffee trade is posed by synchronised crop failures.

In the study, Synchronous climate hazards pose an increasing challenge to global coffee production, published in the journal PLOS Climate, the researchers looked at how climate factors like rainfall, temperature and humidity affected the dozen biggest coffee-producing countries in the world between 1980 and 2020.

The research team found that the occurrence of climate hazards causing less than ideal growing conditions had increased in all coffee growing regions during the study timeframe. The team also found that five out of six of the most challenging years for coffee cultivation happened between 2010 and 2020.

During any given year, climate hazards such as heatwaves, droughts, frosts and floods can each affect coffee yield, the study authors wrote.

About 90 percent of global coffee production comes from the top 12 coffee growers, including Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Ethiopia, U...

A new study led by chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that wildfire smoke particles, which can remain in the stratosphere for a year, can cause chemical reactions that deplete the protective ozone layer. The findings occurred during the megafire in Australia in December 2019 to January 2020.

The study, published in the journal Nature, analyzed the atmospheric chemical composition over the Southern Hemisphere at mid-latitudes, including regions over Australia and New Zealand and parts of Africa and South America. 

The researchers noted that the wildfire smoke particles created chemical reactions in the stratosphere. They estimated that these reactions caused the megafire to contribute to a 3% to 5% depletion in the ozone in the area studied.

The study model also estimated that the wildfires impacted the ozone layer over Antarctica, widening the hole over the Antarctic by 2.5 million square kilometers by the end of 2020, or widening by 10% of its area in comparison to 2019.

The Australian fires of 2020 were really a wake-up call for the science community, Susan Solomon, study author and professor of environmental studies at M.I.T., said in a statement. The effect of wildfires was not previously accounted for in [projections of] ozone recovery. And I think that effect may depend on whether fires become more frequent and intense as the planet warms.

The wildfires analyzed in the study were the worst ever recorded in Australia, burning tens of millions of acres and emitting 1 million tons of smoke into the atmosphere, as M.I.T. reported.

Solomon and her colleagues previously identified a chemical reaction between chlorine-containing compounds, typically chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and fire aerosols that produced chlorine monoxide, which is known to deplete ozone. So the researchers came back to analyze molecules in the stratosphere following the megafire in Australia.

While the team found that wildfire smoke reactions with hydrochloric acid (HCl) in the stratosphere could deplete ozone, they suspect wildfire smoke could react to other chlorine-containing compounds in the atmosphere, especially wh...

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy initiated the Waves to Water Prize. The contests goal was to encourage the development of small desalination systems which could help coastal communities in times of climate disaster and recovery and also to help provide clean drinking water to areas where water is scarce. In April of 2022, after 114 teams entered the contest, a winner was crowned: Oneka.  

But as competitors were creating their boats, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) was building its own small craft, called the hydraulic and electric reverse osmosis (HERO) wave energy converter (WEC) device, intended in part to mitigate the risk of wave energy tech. 

Wave energy is a fairly nascent technology with a very aggressive learning curve, said Scott Jenne, multi-disciplinary research engineer at NREL. By providing it as an open-source design it will give others something to build off of and reduce the learning curve.

The purpose of the competition was to help design a floatable desalination craft that, in times of crisis, can turn salt water into drinkable water using wave energy, and that can be put into action quickly. With 114 entrants, the desalination market is robust. 

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