Enlarge / Aerial view of a subdivision in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale. (credit: dszc via Getty)

The nation’s fifth-largest city and surrounding metropolitan area is officially tapped out of groundwater, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs announced Thursday, adding another item to the state’s long list of water woes.

By 2121, the Phoenix metro area will be short of nearly 5 million acre feet of water—enough water for around 17 million homes—under a new groundwater model released Thursday by the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

That means any new development in the region that hasn’t had its water guaranteed will have to rely on another source of water, such as the Colorado River and other local rivers, or on yet-to-be developed sources like desalinated ocean water, recycled wastewater, or groundwater pumped from other basins in the state, to ensure existing homes and developments have the water they need in the future.

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Enlarge / Aerial view of an abandoned boat on a desert at the site of former Lake Poopó, near Punaca Tinta Maria, Bolivia, taken on October 15, 2022. (credit: Martin Silva/AFP via Getty Images)

Water storage in many of the world’s biggest lakes has declined sharply in the last 30 years, according to a new study, with a cumulative drop of about 21.5 gigatons per year, an amount equal to the annual water consumption of the United States.

The loss of water in natural lakes can “largely be attributed to climate warming,” a team of scientists said as they published research today in Science that analyzed satellite data from 1,980 lakes and reservoirs between 1992 and 2020. When they combined the satellite images with climate data and hydrological models, they found “significant storage declines” in more than half of the bodies of water.

The combination of information from different sources also enabled the scientists to determine if the declines are related to climate factors, like increased evaporation and reduced river flows, or other impacts, including water diversions for agriculture or cities. A quarter of the world’s population lives in basins where lakes are drying up, they warned.

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Enlarge / Wildfire smoke hovers over the Pacific coast of northern New South Wales, Australia in September 2019. (credit: Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data/Gallo Images via Getty Images)

The aerosol fallout from wildfires that burned across more than 70,000 square miles of Australia in 2019 and 2020 was so persistent and widespread that it brightened a vast area of clouds above the subtropical Pacific Ocean.

Beneath those clouds, the ocean surface and the atmosphere cooled, shifting a key tropical rainfall belt northward and nudging the Equatorial Pacific toward an unexpected and long-lasting cool phase of the La Niña-El Niño cycle, according to research published today in Science Advances.

Aerosols from wildfires are basically fire dust—microscopic bits of charred mineral or organic matter that can ride super-heated wildfire clouds up to the stratosphere and spread across hemispheres with varied climatic effects, depending on where they’re produced and where they end up.

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(credit: Joe Ravi (CC-BY-SA 3.0))

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear five appeals from the fossil fuel industry seeking to move climate change lawsuits it faces to the federal courts. The decision opens the door for Baltimore and other cities, states, and counties to pursue their claims for damages from climate-related extreme weather events, flooding, and sea-level rise in state courts.

Since the localities began filing their climate suits six years ago, they have, for the most part, seen state courts as the appropriate, and more advantageous, jurisdiction for seeking damages caused by climate change using product liability, deceptive advertising, and nuisance statutes.

They have contended that the industry has known for decades that burning fossil fuels produces greenhouse gases that warm the planet—harming local jurisdictions, their infrastructure, and, ultimately, their citizens.

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Enlarge / A protester wearing a mask holds an anti-fossil fuels banner during the demonstration outside the Bank of England. (credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

If money makes the world go round, it should be no surprise that fossil fuel still powers the global economy. Ever since world leaders reached the Paris climate agreement in 2015 to limit warming and slash the pollution driving it, environmental groups have chronicled the continued flow of finance from the wealthiest banks to the oil and gas industry.

Climate advocates have been increasing the pressure on banks to change course, and many lenders have responded by adopting policies to reduce the climate pollution generated by their vast portfolios. Some have also pledged to stop financing certain types of fossil fuel extraction altogether, such as coal mining and Arctic drilling. But have those policies made any difference?

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Enlarge / Westlands Solar Park, near the town of Lemoore in the San Joaquin Valley of California, is the largest solar power plant in the United States and could become one of the largest in the world. (credit: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty)

California’s San Joaquin Valley, a strip of land between the Diablo Range and the Sierra Nevada, accounts for a significant portion of the state’s crop production and agricultural revenues. But with the state facing uncertain and uneven water supply due to climate change, some local governments and clean energy advocates hope solar energy installations could provide economic reliability where agriculture falters due to possible water shortages.

In the next two decades, the Valley could accommodate the majority of the state’s estimated buildout of solar energy under a state plan forecasting transmission needs [PDF], adding enough capacity to power 10 million homes as California strives to reach 100 percent clean electricity by 2045. The influx of solar development would come at a time when the historically agriculture-rich valley is coping with new restrictions on groundwater pumping. Growers may need to fallow land. And some clean energy boosters see solar as an ideal alternative land use.

But a significant technological hurdle stands in the way: California needs to plan and build more long-distance power lines to carry all the electricity produced there to different parts of the state, and development can take nearly a decade. Transmission has become a significant tension point for clean energy developers across the US, as the number of project proposals balloons and lines to connect to the grid grow ever longer.

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Enlarge / Magnified view of Vibrio vulnificus bacteria. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)

Cases of a potentially fatal infection from a seawater-borne pathogen have increased off the US Atlantic coast as ocean waters warmed over the last 30 years and are expected to rise further in future because of climate change, according to a study published on Thursday by Scientific Reports, an open-access journal for research on the natural sciences and other topics.

The incidence of infections from Vibrio vulnificus, a pathogen that thrives in shallow, brackish water, was eight times greater in the Eastern US in 2018 than it was in 1988, and its range shifted northward to areas where waters were previously too cold to support it, according to the paper, “Climate Warming and Increasing Vibrio Vulnificus Infections in North America,” by academic researchers in the US, England, and Spain.

By the middle of the 21^st century, the pathogen is expected to become more common in major population centers, including New York City, and by the end of the century, infections may be present in every US Atlantic coast state if carbon emissions follow a medium- to high-level trajectory, the report said.

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Enlarge / A field of solar panels and windmills in the desert. (credit: Getty)

A new study finds that houses within a half-mile of a utility-scale solar farm have resale prices that are, on average, 1.5 percent less than houses that are just a little farther away.

The research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helps to refute some of the assertions of solar opponents who stoke resistance to projects with talk of huge drops in property values. But it also drives a hole through the argument made by people in the solar industry who say there is no clear connection between solar and a drop in values.

The authors analyzed 1.8 million home sales near solar farms in six states and found diminished property values in Minnesota (4 percent), North Carolina (5.8 percent), and New Jersey (5.6 percent). The three other states—California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—had price changes that were within their margins of error, which means the price effects were too close to zero to be meaningful. The paper was published in the journal Energy Policy.

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Electric vehicle batteries keep getting larger, and the typical driving range between charges keeps growing.

The shift is partly a response to “range anxiety”—the fear of being stranded because EV batteries don’t have enough power to get to the next charging station—an idea so familiar in discussions of electric vehicles that it was spoofed in a Ram Super Bowl ad last month.

But this concern is unwarranted for a large share of EV customers, according to research from the University of Delaware, published February 21 in the journal Energies.

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Enlarge / Iceberg A-74 calved from Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf in February 2021. (credit: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2021)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here. 

Research scientists on ships along Antarctica’s west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage—extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average.

Despite “that extraordinary change, what we’ve seen this year is dramatic,” said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program.

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Enlarge / A view of the Colorado River from the Navajo Bridge in Marble Canyon, Arizona on Aug. 31, 2022. (credit: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

In 2007, the seven states that rely on the Colorado River for water reached an agreement on a plan to minimize the water shortages plaguing the basin. Drought had gripped the region since 1999 and could soon threaten Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the largest reservoirs in the nation.

Now, that future has come to pass and the states are again attempting to reach an agreement. The Colorado River faces a crisis brought on by more than 20 years of drought, decades of overallocation and the increasing challenge of climate change, and Lake Mead and Lake Powell, its largest reservoirs, have fallen so low that their ability to provide water and generate electricity in the Southwest is at risk. But reaching consensus on how to avoid that is proving to be more challenging than last time.

“The magnitude of the problem is so much bigger this time, and it’s also so much more immediate,” said Elizabeth Koebele, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.

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Enlarge / A train carrying cars loaded with coal leaving a nearby coal mine is seen in front of Dry Fork Station, a coal-fired power plant operated by Basin Electric Power Cooperative, on Monday May 8, 2017, in Gillette, Wyoming. (credit: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A coal-fired plant near Gillette, Wyoming, stands alone in the nation on one measure of economic viability—a positive distinction for that plant, but a damning one for coal-fired electricity in general.

Dry Fork Station, with generating capacity of 405 megawatts, is the only coal plant in the country that costs less to operate than it would take to replace the plant’s output by building new wind or solar plants in the same communities or regions, according to a new report issued today by the think tank Energy Innovation.

The report joins prior editions in 2019 and 2021 that, when viewed together, show how the economics of coal power are deteriorating. In 2019, the authors found that more than 70 percent of coal plants were more expensive to operate compared to the alternative of building new wind or solar. That share has now grown to 99 percent, with only the plant in Wyoming stopping it from being 100 percent.

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Enlarge / Environmental activists rally for accountability for fossil fuel companies outside of New York Supreme Court on October 22, 2019 in New York City. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

ExxonMobil has been the prime target of activists and politicians angered by the oil industry’s efforts to block action on climate change. Now, newly disclosed documents confirm that the oil company’s reputational woes have extended into the industry itself and threatened to derail Exxon’s biggest climate proposal to date.

Last year, Exxon struggled to gain support from its peers when it proposed a cross-industry effort to build a carbon capture and storage hub in Houston, according to documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which has been investigating the oil industry. Top executives at Shell, in particular, worried that joining with Exxon would present an “unacceptable risk” to the European oil major’s reputation.

“I am not interested in participating with any advocacy effort led by” Exxon, wrote Krista Johnson, Shell’s head of US government relations, in a July 2021 email to Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell USA. Johnson said their competitor was continuing to draw negative headlines and that “zero companies” were prepared to join an Exxon-led consortium at that time.

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The only statewide climate measure on California’s ballot Tuesday failed, even though it would have raised billions to help meet the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by subsidizing electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, among other things. Its downfall resulted largely from the high-profile opposition of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has arguably worked harder than any other governor to position himself as a climate leader.

Official ballot materials said Proposition 30 would provide funding for programs to reduce air pollution and prevent wildfires by increasing tax on personal income over $2 million. The roughly 35,000 Californians who make more than $2 million would have been required to pay an additional 1.75 percent on income above that amount.

The tax on these high-income earners—0.08 percent of Californians—would raise about $3.5 billion to $5 billion annually, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

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Enlarge / People fish in front of defunct oil drilling rigs in the Corpus Christi Ship Channel at Aransas Pass on March 11, 2019, in Port Aransas, Texas. (credit: Loren Elliot/AFP via Getty Images)

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas—Five years ago, when ExxonMobil came calling, city officials eagerly signed over a large portion of their water supply so the oil giant could build a $10 billion plant to make plastics out of methane gas.

A year later, they did the same for Steel Dynamics to build a rolled-steel factory.

Never mind that Corpus Christi, a mid-sized city on the semi-arid South Texas coast, had just raced through its 50-year water plan 13 years ahead of schedule. Planners believed they had a solution: large-scale seawater desalination.

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Enlarge / A technician removes a battery cell from a testing vault at the "Volkswagen Group Center of Excellence" battery cell research center in Salzgitter, Germany, on May 18, 2022. (credit: John MacDougall/Getty)

How much does an electric vehicle’s battery performance change in hot weather? How about cold?

If someone drives aggressively in an EV, how does that affect the battery life?

How much do variations in battery materials make a difference in how an EV performs in various conditions?

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Enlarge / On the last day of summer, fall colors contrast with the burnt landscape of the Cameron Peak Fire on Sept. 21, 2021, in Larimer County, Colorado. (credit: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

When Stephanie Kampf visited one of her wildfire test plots near Colorado’s Joe Wright Reservoir in June of 2021, the charred remains of what had been a cool, shady spruce and fir forest before the Cameron Peak Fire incinerated it nearly took her breath away.

“We would walk through these burned areas and they were just black, nothing growing and already getting kind of hot,” she said. “And then you walk into an unburned patch, and there’d still be snow on the ground. You could almost breathe more.”

The surveys, up at about 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains west of Fort Collins, were part of a rapid response science assessment to measure just how much the extreme 2020 wildfire season in the West disrupted the water-snow cycle in the critical late-snowmelt zone that serves as a huge natural reservoir. The snowmelt sustains river flows that nurture ecosystems, fills irrigation ditches for crops, and delivers supplies of industrial and drinking water to communities.

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The United States gets about 40 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources, including renewables and nuclear, and researchers have a pretty good idea of how to cost-effectively get to about 90 percent.

But that last 10 percent? It gets expensive, and there is little agreement about how to do it.

A new paper in the journal Joule identifies six approaches for achieving that last 10 percent, including a reliance on wind and solar, a build-out of nuclear power, and development of long-term energy storage using hydrogen.

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