A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Monday struck down a building code ordinance passed by Berkeley, California, which, with some exceptions, banned new residential and commercial buildings from installing methane gas piping.
Torrential storms soaked California and set off flooding across the state this weekend. The heavy rainfall was caused by one of the many atmospheric river events to hit the state this winter. Californians have seen hundreds of inches of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains and rain elsewhere in the state since January. Atmospheric rivers, long, narrow bands of moisture in the atmosphere that extend from the tropics, are responsible for most of the flood damage in the United States.
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.
The usually mild West Coast is seeing an unusually snowy winter, with flakes falling from Portland, Oregon to Phoenix. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for 13 counties Wednesday as back-to-back storms have buried mountain communities. “This rain and snow bucked the trend and it’s highly unexpected,” meteorologist and former National […]
The Laguna Beach, California, city council has voted to ban the sale and public use of balloons — inflated with helium or not — in order to stop a major source of marine trash and reduce the risk of wildfires. Starting next year, all balloons in the community of 23,000 will be prohibited from being […]
A new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects 54% of new electric-generating capacity in the U.S. to come from solar energy for 2023. Developers are planning to add 54.5 gigawatts of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the country’s power grid this year, most of it being solar, according to EIA’s Preliminary Monthly Electric […]
It can be tempting to think that the recent wildfire disasters in communities across the West were unlucky, one-off events, but evidence is accumulating that points to a trend.
In a new study, we found a 246% increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western U.S. between the past two decades, 1999-2009 and 2010-2020.
The race to decarbonize passenger cars and light-duty trucks in the U.S. is accelerating. Battery electric vehicles accounted for almost 6% of all new vehicle sales in 2022, up from close to 3% in 2021, and demand is outstripping supply, even as manufacturers roll out new models and designs. The Biden administration is spending billions of dollars to build out EV charging networks and providing incentives for purchasing new and used EVs.
By Daniel Sperling California is embarking on an audacious new climate plan that aims to eliminate the state’s greenhouse gas footprint by 2045, and in the process, slash emissions far beyond its borders. The blueprint calls for massive transformations in industry, energy and transportation, as well as changes in institutions and human behaviors. These transformations […]
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