SCIENCE
- Tropical flowers are blooming months earlier or
later than they used to because of climate breakdown, with potentially
“cascading impacts across ecosystems”, according to a study of 8,000
plants dating back 200 years. Researchers
looked at flowers from a range of countries, including Brazil, Ecuador,
Ghana and Thailand, home to the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, but
also the most understudied. It was previously thought that tropical regions – where temperatures
fluctuate less over the course of the year – would not be so affected by
the climate crisis in terms of the timing of flowering. This hypothesis
has been proved wrong, said the lead researcher Skylar Graves from the
University of Colorado Boulder, who added that “nowhere on Earth is
unaffected by climate change”. - Southern right whales—once driven to near-extinction by industrial hunting in the 19th and 20th centuries—have long been regarded as a conservation success. But southern right whales are no longer reproducing at normal rates, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports, which Brownell co-authored with research partners in Australia and South Africa. The study found a much-extended calving interval has been evident since about 2015, with climate change identified as a primary cause because of changes on ocean food webs.
GREENING
- EV maker Rivian and distributed energy giant EnergyHub today announced a strategic partnership to embed utility-managed charging directly into Rivian vehicles across the country. Under the partnership, Rivians will be available as controllable resources to more than 150 utilities on EnergyHub’s distributed energy resource management platform, giving system operators dispatchable flexibility during times of grid stress. The move isn’t just about plugging the Rivian ecosystem into EnergyHub’s DERMS platform, but rather about unlocking near-term headroom on constrained local grids, said Jeff Huron, EnergyHub’s head of EV strategy.
- Iberdrola says it has installed 60 of 62 turbines at its Vineyard Wind project on the Massachusetts coast, and the last two will likely be completed in a matter of days. (E&E News)
- California energy regulators on Thursday ordered the state’s utilities to sign more power contracts for renewables in a bid to boost renewable energy development before federal tax credits sunset.
- Ford Motor Co.’s massive EV battery plant in Michigan is on track to start production this summer after favorable court rulings quashed citizen-led efforts to block the project. (MLive)
- US utilities generated a record amount of energy from renewable sources last year, even as the Trump administration implemented a range of policies to stymie green energy. Some 1,162 terrawatt-hours of the country’s electricity was generated from renewable sources in 2025, a 10% increase over the prior year, according to federal data released this week. That represents 26% of all US electricity made — enough to power about 108 million US homes for a year.
- David Wallace Wells’ doomsaying book “The Uninhabitable Earth” was influential in 2019. His latest NYTimes column shows he is now something of an optimist. It is full of facts like: “At a comparable level of electrification, India is using just one-sixth as much coal as China did.” You can read it here with no pay wall.
CLIMATE DESPOLIATION
- The U.S. government is accelerating coral reef collapse around Guam,
alleges a team of international researchers in a letter released this
month in Science.
They warn administration pressures to prioritize national
security—through dredging projects, increased military infrastructure
and live firing ranges—will cause harm to endangered habitats. - What the International Olympics Committee report on sustainability of the Olympics won’t say: It won’t say that the climate crisis has caused the average
February temperatures in Cortina to rise by 3.6C since the Olympics were
last in Italy,
20 years ago, that the average February snow depth has fallen by 15cm
in the past 50 years and that they had to build four high altitude
reservoirs to provide the 2.3m cubic metres of artificial snow they need
to fluff up the ski runs to the required depth of 1.5m. Or that most of
the water being used to fill those reservoirs has to be pumped all the
way up the mountains after being extracted from the local rivers, which
are already in drought for large parts of the year. - An aerial monitoring effort finds oil and gas facilities in Colorado emit at least twice the amount of methane reported by operators. (Capital & Main)
DARK AGE CLIMATE POLITICS
- The California Independent System
Operator earmarked $1.3 billion less for transmission development in its
2024-2025 transmission plan than in the previous year’s plan as it
focused more on reliability-driven projects and less on policy-driven
projects such as those intended to connect offshore wind farms, according a report CAISO prepared for the governor and legislature. - The One Big Beautiful Bill subsidizes fossil fuels by an average of $3.5 billion each year, an analysis from Senate Democrats finds. (The Hill)
- A North Dakota judge has said he will order Greenpeace to pay damages expected to total $345m to the pipeline company Energy Transfer. It relates to protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in 2016 and 2017. A jury found Greenpeace USA liable on counts including conspiracy, trespass, nuisance and tortious interference. Greenpeace says the lawsuit was intended to silence activists.
- The DOE announces a $26.5 billion loan, its largest ever, to help Southern Co.’s Georgia and Alabama subsidiaries build new gas plants and transmission lines and upgrade existing power plants. (Associated Press)
- The DOE offers $171.5 million to support advanced geothermal exploration and development. (news release)
TAKE ACTION!
Recently we asked people to send comments to BOEM opposing offshore drilling. These were apparently ignored and BOEM is now asking for comments on the next step in the process: a kind of generic Environmental Impact Report (PEIS) that then gets filled in with details from each project. They are asking what should go in this report.
It is perfectly ok to just tell them that there should be no offshore drilling. (They are planning to open a billion square miles to drilling.) But you could also add some detail to suggest the costs vs. benefits don’t pencil out:
- “California’s coastal economy supports roughly 511,000 jobs and
generates over $51.3 billion in GDP from marine-economy activities —
largely in tourism and recreation — meaning that new offshore drilling
could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of working families.” [From Legislators’ letter to BOEM.] The PEIS must quantify this. - The PEIS must also quantify and then assess the social cost of carbon and social cost of methane emissions from offshore oil.
- You can also point to the risk of oil spells like to past oil spills like the significant 1969 spill in Santa Barbara, CA.
Written comments can be submitted through the regulations.gov web portal: Navigate to https://www.regulations.gov
and search for Docket BOEM-2025-0681, or “Pacific Region Outer
Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Programmatic Environmental Impact
Statement, California Program Areas”, and click on the “Comment” button.
Enter your information and comment, and then click “Submit.”