Climate Point: The diseases of climate change
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate change, energy and the environment. I'm Sammy Roth, here to tell you a bunch of things that will freak you out and ideally a few that will make you hopeful. On the hopeful side of the ledger: I wrote for the Desert Sun about an energy company's plan to build the world's largest battery here in Southern California, three times bigger than the record-setting battery that Tesla installed in Australia last year. Batteries are important because they can help store energy from solar and wind farms for times of day when it's not sunny or windy.
So yeah, batteries are cool.
Here are some other things you might want to know:
MUST-READ STORIES:
The diseases of climate change: One of the global warming impacts I'm most worried about personally is the spread of tropical illnesses to more northerly latitudes, in the U.S. and elsewhere, as temperatures rise. It's a topic I wrote about for Paste BN a few years ago, but the science keeps evolving in unpleasant directions. Here's the view from Indiana, where malaria, dengue fever and Zika virus could become commonplace by the end of the century, as Emily Hopkins reports for the Indianapolis Star.
Snow and water are getting hotter: As the atmosphere warms, some of the biggest changes are happening to the world's water resources, whether in solid or liquid form. Paste BN's Doyle Rice reports that one of America's tallest glaciers, in Denali National Park in Alaska, is melting at its fastest pace in 400 years. Doyle also reports that ocean heat waves are getting longer, and a major underwater current in the Atlantic Ocean is slowing down. That underwater current thing is actually a pretty big deal. The Washington Post's Chris Mooney explained how slowing ocean circulation could mess with global weather patterns, although it's not yet clear whether climate change is to blame.
ALL ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY:
Everyone is fighting over gas plants: I've told you a couple times about arguments in California over whether to build new gas-fired power plants. But this is a battle that's happening all over the country. In New York, the Indian Point nuclear plant is slated for closure, and a company wants to replace some of that zero-emission power with a huge gas plant in an environmentally sensitive part of New Jersey, as Scott Fallon reports for the Record in Bergen County. In Michigan, too, environmentalists say a utility's plan to build a billion-dollar gas plant would be costlier and more polluting than using renewable resources like solar and wind, as Leonard F. Fleming reports for the Detroit News.
Google and Apple are extremely green: The world's two most valuable companies both announced this week that they've bought enough renewable energy to cover 100 percent of their electricity use. Here are the details on Google, from Julia Pyper at Greentech Media; Brian Kahn at Earther breaks down Apple's announcement. Critically, Google and Apple have invested in a ton of new solar and wind farms, meaning they're actually creating projects that displace fossil fuels, not just buying energy that's already on the market. More broadly, the world built twice as much new renewable energy capacity as it did fossil fuels last year, per Reuters' Nina Chestney and Alister Doyle.
POLITICAL CLIMATE:
Shell also knew: ExxonMobil has faced legal scrutiny in recent years after a series of investigative reports showed the company knew about climate change decades ago, and undertook a deliberate effort to obscure the public's understanding. Now, newly revealed documents show another oil giant, Shell, also knew about climate change in the 1980s, as John H. Cushman Jr. reports for InsideClimate News. To me, the craziest part of this story is that Shell realized as far back as 1998 that oil companies might get sued for causing climate change. That's exactly what's happening now, as some cities and counties try to hold the oil industry accountable for climate impacts like rising seas.
Scott Pruitt, still in hot water: I spent most of last week's newsletter talking about EPA chief Scott Pruitt, so I mostly wanted to move on to other topics this week. But one new development bears mentioning...the EPA claims it spent $3 million on Pruitt's personal security detail because of an "unprecedented" number of death threats. But a career EPA staffer undermined that narrative, saying the agency hadn't received *any* credible threats to Pruitt — and, lo and behold, that staffer has now been fired, as Paste BN's William Cummings reports. Meanwhile, even some Republicans are turning on Pruitt. Three House Republicans have urged him to resign, per Paste BN's Ledyard King.
AND ANOTHER THING:
OK, just a little bit more on Pruitt...
There's been a lot of talk that Pruitt has stayed in Trump's favor because he's carrying out the president's anti-regulatory agenda so successfully. I said as much in last week's newsletter. But many of Pruitt's policy victories may not last. Some legal experts say EPA is rolling back environmental rules so fast and so sloppily that the rollbacks won't hold up in court, as the New York Times' Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman report.
It's one of those stories that only time will tell.
That's all for this week. For more climate, energy and environment news, follow me on Twitter @Sammy_Roth. You can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox here.