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This Is a Bad Year to Go Apple Picking in Virginia

A drought has hit the state’s mountainous west, putting orchards in jeopardy.

Apple picking.
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I tried going apple-picking in Virginia over the weekend, but when we pulled up to the farm one of my friends had found online — a small family-run place called Paugh's Orchard — the owner told us a drought in the region had pretty much rendered the apples useless.

“If they don’t get any bigger than they are right now I can’t imagine anyone would want to pick them,” the orchard’s owner told a local news station back in August. That prediction came true; by the time we pulled up at her farm a month later, she’d started bringing in apples from other areas to sell to customers.

Drought.gov map of Virginia drought.Drought.gov



Virginia is the country’s sixth biggest producer of apples, with most of its orchards in its mountainous western region. According to the Daily News-Record, another local outlet, the apples that have grown in this part of the state are smaller than last year, which makes them harder to pick, which in turn increases labor costs for farms that hire seasonal apple-pickers. And orchards that rely on income from people like me rolling up to pick their own apples are finding themselves without apples worth picking. That is, as my colleague Matthew noted, bad for the Instagram grids of influencers who live in the region and thrive on fall content, but more importantly it’s another example of the ways climate change is making small-scale farming — a hard enough business already — tougher than ever.

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Sparks

How Hurricane Melissa Got So Strong So Fast

The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.

Hurricane Melissa.
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As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.

The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”

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New York’s Largest Battery Project Has Been Canceled

Fullmark Energy quietly shuttered Swiftsure, a planned 650-megawatt energy storage system on Staten Island.

Curtis Sliwa.
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The biggest battery project in New York has been canceled in a major victory for the nascent nationwide grassroots movement against energy storage development.

It’s still a mystery why exactly the developer of Staten Island’s Swiftsure project, Fullmark Energy (formerly known as Hecate), pulled the plug. We do know a few key details: First, Fullmark did not announce publicly that it was killing the project, instead quietly submitting a short, one-page withdrawal letter to the New York State Department of Public Service. That letter, which is publicly available, is dated August 18 of this year, meaning that the move formally occurred two months ago. Still, nobody in Staten Island seems to have known until late Friday afternoon when local publication SI Advance first reported the withdrawal.

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Major Renewables Nonprofit Cuts a Third of Staff After Trump Slashes Funding

The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.

The DOE wrecking ball.
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The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.

IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)

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