Environment

El Niño is a natural climate pattern during which sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean become significantly warmer than average. This drives hotter weather around the world. Since the world is already warming, El Niño only amplifies that warming. The El Niño of 2023 and 2024 resulted in the hottest years ever recorded. The strong El Niño currently taking place is shattering temperature records from Europe to Asia.

Coal-fired power plants emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and toxic heavy metals like mercury. The plants drive global climate change, create smog and acid rain, and produce millions of tons of toxic ash that can pollute local water supplies.

The largest solar energy project in the United States is under construction in Arkansas. The Steel River Energy Center will eventually include 2.5 GW of solar and 2.9 GWh of battery energy storage.

Fusion power is how the sun works. Light atomic nuclei (like hydrogen) fuse together at super high temperatures to form heavier nuclei (like helium). The process releases massive amounts of energy without producing radioactive waste or greenhouse gases. Fusion is considered to be the holy grail of clean energy. But even after many decades of intensive research, there is not yet a way to maintain the temperature, density, and confinement to have a fusion reaction go on long enough to produce continuous net-positive energy output.

During the past year, there has been growing interest in the U.S. in balcony solar: small solar panel systems that are hung up outside and send power straight into wall sockets to partially offset people’s utility bills. These systems first appeared in Germany in the late 2010s and spread through Europe when energy prices spiked because of the war in Ukraine. German households had installed more than four million systems as of last year.

The water covering most of our planet is slowly losing something essential to life: oxygen. Scientists are raising the alarm about declining oxygen levels in lakes, rivers, and oceans around the world.

July saw dangerously hot and humid temperatures over much of the eastern United States. Two offshore wind projects near New England delivered hundreds of megawatts of electric power to the grid as residents cranked up their air conditioners. Thanks to the recently added wind power, utilities did not need to rely as much on dirty, expensive oil-burning peaker plants – the kind that only operate when electricity demand is very high.

A heat pump is a kind of HVAC appliance that handles both heating and cooling. It doesn’t burn fuel to generate heat. Instead, it uses electricity to move heat around. In the winter, it extracts warmth from outside air, the ground, or water and transfers it indoors. In the summer, it reverses the process to provide cooling. Heat pumps are far more efficient than conventional heaters and air conditioners.

A space mirror satellite is an orbiting spacecraft that features a large deployable reflective surface. Its purpose is to redirect sunlight and beam it down to a specific location on Earth. It would basically provide sunlight on demand.

The federal government started promoting energy efficiency in the 1970s in the wake of the Arab oil embargo. Since that time, successive administrations, both Republican and Democratic, instituted regulations about energy efficiency that have transformed the US economy. Energy efficiency has been pretty much the most bipartisan issue in the country. As a result, today’s refrigerators use about one-third the electricity of those from the 70s. Stricter fuel-economy standards for cars have saved Americans about $5 trillion in gasoline costs.