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Climate Point: Antarctica is melting faster


Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate change, energy and the environment. My name is Sammy Roth, and I'm a reporter based in Southern California. It's been frustratingly hot in the Southwest this spring, following a frustrating dry winter, and you can guess what that means: wildfires. Paste BN's Trevor Hughes reports that thousands of square miles of national forest in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico have been preemptively shut down to prevent humans from accidentally starting fires. It's an unprecedented step, but unfortunately it makes all the sense in the world: Several big wildfires are already raging, and the landscape is basically primed to burn right now.

This is what climate change looks like.

Here are some other things you might want to know:

MUST-READ STORIES:

Antarctic ice loss has tripled in the last decade: I hate it as a journalist when I feel like I'm just scaring people, but sometimes the news is scary and you need to know it. Case in point: A comprehensive new study finds that the global warming-driven melting of Antarctica is speeding up, with three times as much ice loss in recent years as there was a decade ago, as Paste BN's Doyle Rice reports. I hardly need to tell you that is not good, even if the rate of melting doesn't keep rising. The Washington Post's Chris Mooney explains that the new research on Antarctic ice loss "reinforces that nations have a short window — perhaps no more than a decade — to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if they hope to avert some of the worst consequences of climate change."

Coral reefs save billions of dollars by preventing floods: The first and most important thing to know about coral reefs is they provide tremendous ecosystem value, making possible an abundance of undersea life. But they also provide economic value to humans by acting as natural flood protection from powerful ocean storms, as Paste BN's Doyle Rice reports. New research values that flood protection service at $4 billion annually. Unfortunately, climate change is heating up the oceans, which in turn has led to widespread coral bleaching episodes that can kill these fragile ecosystems.

ALL ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY:

Cheapest solar ever: Now that I've tossed some bad news at you, let's do some good news...which is that somehow, solar power is still getting cheaper. Greentech Media's Julian Spector reports that the main electric utility in Nevada will buy solar energy from a private developer for a record-low 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is something like five or six times cheaper than solar was a decade ago (and also cheaper that new gas-fired power plants). And all signs point to continued price declines. China, meanwhile, is testing a technology that could totally revolutionize the renewable energy sector: roads paved with solar panels. Here's the story from Keith Bradsher at the New York Times.

Tesla cuts thousands of jobs: Elon Musk says his electric car company is still on track to produce 5,000 mass-market vehicles per week by the end of this month. But in the meantime, Musk finally seems to be facing real pressure to turn a profit, which Tesla has never done. The company announced this week it would lay off about 9 percent of its workforce, or roughly 3,400 employees, as Paste BN's Nathan Bomey reports.

POLITICAL CLIMATE:

Trump abandons U.S. allies on climate change, again: A year after Donald Trump thumbed his nose at nearly every other country on Earth by ditching the Paris climate agreement, the president did basically the same thing, only this time the insult was directed specifically at America's closest allies. At the Group of Seven (G7) summit, InsideClimate news reports, Trump skipped the discussion on global warming and refused to join a communique committing the G7 countries to continuing to fight climate change. Instead, U.S. negotiators "wrote their own paragraph for the climate section that focused on promoting the burning of fossil fuels," InsideClimate News reports.

Scott Pruitt's ethics problems aren't going away: If anything, they're getting worse. Paste BN's Ledyard King reports House Democrats have asked the FBI and the Justice Department for a criminal probe into the EPA chief's activities, including his use of government resources to try to get his wife a job as a Chick-fil-A franchisee. But it's not just Democrats unhappy with Pruitt. The conservative National Review is now calling for him to resign, and even Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe — a staunch Pruitt supporter — thinks it might be time for him to go, as Evan Halper reports for the Los Angeles Times. (One person who doesn't seem to care: Paul Ryan. Here's what the House Speaker had to say about Pruitt, per Paste BN's Deirdre Shesgreen: "Frankly I haven't paid that much attention to it…I don't know enough about what Pruitt has or has not done.")

AND ANOTHER THING:

Amid a sea of misinformation and bad-faith argumentation on climate change, one voice has stood out as eminently reasonable: Pope Francis. The leader of the Catholic Church convened a group of global oil executives and told them, in no uncertain terms, what's at stake: "Civilization requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilization."

Here's the story from Eric J. Lyman, writing for Paste BN.

Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels set another record last month, per Paste BN's Doyle Rice. As one scientist told Doyle, "The emissions that we are causing today will still be in the atmosphere-ocean system thousands of years from now...We are as a global society making an extremely long climate-change commitment."

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.