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Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s decision in the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado enlists the nation’s highest court in the campaign to reform federal environmental enforcement.
A new chapter opened for one of the country’s most important environmental laws this week.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court transformed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, an environmental permitting law that affects virtually every decision that the federal government makes. The quasi-unanimous ruling limits the law’s scope and cuts off future avenues for challenging energy and infrastructure projects under the law.
It could reshape the scale of legal challenges that projects could face in the future, giving the Trump administration — and any successive administration — greater leeway to approve energy projects.
Under NEPA, federal agencies must study the environmental impacts of their decisions before they make them. The strictest studies can run into the hundreds of pages, and they can take years to complete.
But in what was essentially an 8-0 decision, the Court ruled that federal agencies almost never need to analyze the second-order environmental effects of their decisions. In other words, an agency need only study the environmental impact of a project itself — be it a pipeline, a solar farm, or, in the case at issue, a railroad — and not its metaphorically downstream consequences. That remains the case even if a given project might indirectly make it much easier to do something with a big environmental footprint, such as drilling for oil or natural gas.
That is the clearest effect of the ruling. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the court’s conservative majority, went much further than that summary alone suggests. In a broad and forceful ruling, he told lower courts that they should stop nitpicking the environmental studies that federal agencies must publish under NEPA to justify their own decision-making. Courts should, instead, defer to federal agencies as much as is reasonable when reviewing a NEPA study. “The goal of the law,” he writes, “is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.” (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because of his connection to an oil magnate who could have benefited from the ruling.)
That suggests a significant change is coming to how the court system interprets NEPA, a law that is little known to the general public but that plays a defining role in how federal agencies make decisions or approve infrastructure projects. NEPA creates a procedural requirement that federal agencies study the environmental impact of any “major decision,” but that category is so broad that it affects virtually everything the federal government does — spend money, write a new regulation, or approve a new project on federal land. The law and the yearslong lawsuits that it spawns have been blamed for delays in building solar farms and transmission lines, but also oil refineries and gas pipelines.
Kavanaugh’s ruling is “pretty striking for just how strident it is, and how assertively it tries to shut the door on further NEPA litigation,” Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor who studies the permitting system, told me. Kavanaugh’s message to lower courts is, in essence, “We keep telling you to knock it off. You keep not listening. So knock it the fuck off,” Bagley said.
At the very least, the ruling suggests that a new phase in the effort to reform the country’s permitting laws has arrived. Now that movement has, in essence, been blessed by the Supreme Court.
The case in question — Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado — concerns an 88-mile railroad proposed to connect the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah to the national freight rail network. In 2021, the Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency that regulates railroads, approved the project after completing a roughly 3,600-page study of the railroad’s potential environmental impact.
Almost immediately, environmental groups argued that the board’s study did not go far enough. The ground beneath the Uinta Basin is rich in a waxy and particularly carbon-intensive crude oil; right now, very little of that oil is extracted because the only way to get it out is by truck, along windy mountain roads. The railroad, if built, would allow for much larger volumes of crude to be transported out of the basin and sent to Gulf Coast refineries. Building the railroad, in other words, would indirectly increase local oil extraction, and thereby raise global greenhouse gas emissions.
The board argued that its NEPA study did not need to consider these downstream effects because the board itself does not regulate oil extraction — that is, it regulates the building of railroads, not what gets moved on them.
The eight justices agreed that the board was right: It didn’t have to consider the effects of second-order oil drilling when it approved the railroad. (The railroad remains on hold for other reasons, Sambhav Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, told me.) But by going further in his ruling, Kavanaugh entered into a running debate about the role of NEPA and other permitting laws in the American economy.
NEPA was never meant to play the commanding role that it does today, Kavanaugh writes. When it was first signed into law in 1970, NEPA was meant to act as a “purely procedural” check on federal decision-making. Agencies were supposed to conduct environmental studies, make their decisions, then move on. But in a famous 1971 ruling concerning a proposed nuclear power plant in Maryland, Judge Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals transformed the law. He found that agencies had to carry out NEPA’s procedural requirements “to the fullest extent possible,” and crucially that courts could reject agencies’ analysis for lack of completeness.
Over the years, as hundreds of cases following Wright’s have added up, NEPA has turned into a “fearsome project killer,” Bagley said. Agencies spend decades of person-power and hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare fastidious environmental reviews of their decisions. Any new infrastructure project or new policy change — even New York City’s congestion charge — requires some form of NEPA study.
Many conservatives have long opposed the modern NEPA process. But in recent years, some liberals have joined them, arguing that the law primarily slows down clean energy infrastructure and encourages NIMBYism. In practice, they say, NEPA acts as more of hindrance to the clean economy than the old fossil fuel economy: Because of a 2005 law, most oil and gas drilling has been exempt from the NEPA process, while wind farms, solar plants, and other forms of zero-carbon energy infrastructure still have to face it. Environmental groups rebut that the law is a useful tool to slow down fossil fuel pipelines, which do not generally get a NEPA exemption.
Data supports the idea that NEPA holds back clean energy projects, but that is partly because it holds back so many kinds of projects. The R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, has found that 42% of projects stalled by NEPA involved green infrastructure or conservation. Another analysis from the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University found that it takes more than two years on average for federal agencies to complete environmental reviews of solar and wind projects. Reviews for new hydroelectric or nuclear power plants take even longer.
Kavanaugh, in essence, rejects all of this. NEPA was never supposed to block or hinder large-scale energy or infrastructure projects, he writes; it was meant to “inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.”
“A 1970 legislative acorn has grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development ‘under the guise’ of just a little more process,” he says. When federal agencies write environmental studies under NEPA, courts should broadly defer to the decisions that they make. And even if an agency gets something wrong in its study or omits something important, that does not mean the entire study — and the decision that it justifies — should be thrown out. (There’s some irony to Kavanaugh’s call for deference to agencies here, given that the Supreme Court rejected the idea that agency regulations deserve deference last year.)
“What’s notable for me is that they didn’t just rule on the case,” Sankar, the Earthjustice lawyer told me. (Earthjustice participated in the case.) “They decided to take a broad swipe at NEPA itself, really unnecessarily.”
Alexander Mechanick, a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center and former White House regulatory official, agreed with Sankar about the scope of the ruling. The court’s decision “does communicate over and over again, with a heavy hand, a real desire to get lower courts out of the business of fly specking the environmental impact assessments,” he told me.
It’s this forthrightness that seems to announce a new era of NEPA jurisprudence — one where the courts will accept a level of environmental review that they may have once rejected. In a way, Kavanaugh’s ruling is a fitting sequel to Wright’s 1971 decision in that both set the tone and capture the overarching environmental concerns of their respective eras, Bagley said.
Half a century ago, Judge Wright wanted to make sure that the American public could slow the wave of infrastructure that threatened to overwhelm the country’s landscape. NEPA represented “the commitment of the government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress,’” he wrote, asserting that judges must make sure the law’s goals are not “lost or misdirected in the vast hallways of the federal bureaucracy.”
Now, Kavanaugh seems to fear that progress itself has been held up. He writes that the modern NEPA process, with its cycles of “speculation and consultation and estimation and litigation,” has slowed down infrastructure projects and driven up their cost. He can sound more like an op-ed writer than a legal scholar as he lays out the law’s consequences in the ruling:
Fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line. Those that survive often end up costing much more than is anticipated or necessary, both for the agency preparing the EIS and for the builder of the project. And that in turn means fewer and more expensive railroads, airports, wind turbines, transmission lines, dams, housing developments, highways, bridges, subways, stadiums, arenas, data centers, and the like. And that also means fewer jobs, as new projects become difficult to finance and build in a timely fashion.
In this declaration, Kavanaugh seems to put himself on the side of a growing and tenuously bipartisan movement to reform NEPA. A 2023 debt ceiling bill, signed by President Biden, included modest reforms to the NEPA process, imposing page limits and deadlines on the strictest forms of environmental studies. A more sweeping bipartisan effort to change the law failed last year. Now, House Republicans are taking their own crack at revising NEPA, creating an optional and more expensive permitting “fast track” for developers in the reconciliation bill.
Sankar, whose organization has championed NEPA, argues that the ruling’s practical upshot will be to allow the Trump administration greater leeway to build fossil fuel infrastructure. Kavanaugh’s ruling exhibits “a shocking disregard for the realpolitik of what's going on with this administration in particular,” he said.
“As we’ve been saying all along, NEPA gets demonized as the problem,” Sankar said. With the law’s role reduced, “I think people will see that there are a lot of other things that are the problem here, and taking federal agency expertise out of the equation is not going to hurry things up.” He added that state and local governments often rely on federal NEPA reports for their own analyses, and now those reviews may be less trustworthy.
Bagley, who has generally supported permitting reform efforts, agreed that NEPA is just one of several laws holding back clean energy projects nationwide. But it is an important one, he said, and reducing its scope will likely allow more projects to happen. He added that by changing it, advocates will learn of additional bottlenecks that are holding back construction — including laws that nobody has noticed yet because they were previously less important than NEPA. Advocates can also now focus their attention on state and local barriers to building.
“If you want to look at the permitting burdens across the United States, probably 80% to 90% of them are state and local. This [ruling] isn’t going to inaugurate a new era of American dynamism,” Bagley said. “It’s a small step in the right direction.”
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Republicans have blamed Democrats for unleashing Russ Vought on federal spending. But it doesn’t take much to see a bigger plan at work.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been waiting for this moment his whole adult life — or that’s what President Trump and the Republican Congressional leadership would like you to believe. As they put it, Vought is a fanatical budget cutter who, once unleashed, cannot be controlled. Who knows what he’ll cut if the Democrats continue to keep the government shut down?
Substantial staffing cuts that go beyond the typical shutdown furloughs are “the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Politico on Thursday. “We don’t control what he’s going to do.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Thursday morning that Democrats “have now, effectively, turned off the legislative branch,” and have “turned it over to the executive.”
“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.”
In short, any cuts — even ones some Republicans might find distasteful — are the Democrats’ fault, according to Republican leadership.
This is not the first time we’ve seen an eager budget cutter ascend to power in this administration. Let’s take a moment to flash back to the very first days and months of Trump’s second presidency, when young staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency were marching into government offices, demanding data and deleting programs.
Though he operated at the time with the full support of the president and spurred on by the enthusiasm of his supporters, Musk quickly ran into conflict with the people actually running the departments he had essentially appointed himself to oversee.
Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got into “a heated shouting match in earshot of President Trump and other officials in the White House,” according to Axios, over leadership of the IRS. Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio got into an argument in front of Trump, The New York Times reported, when Musk accused Rubio of not firing enough people. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has gone public with his own account of a dispute with Musk over who had the authority to make staffing decisions in the Transportation Department, during which Duffy insisted that “we are not going to fire air traffic controllers,” he told the New York Post in August.
Musk also stirred up conflict with Vought himself. The Times reported that the OMB director “could barely contain his frustration” when Musk’s team exceeded his own plans for federal staffing cuts.
Bessent, Rubio, Duffy, and Vought are all still around. Musk is not. The cabinet secretaries and congressional leadership wrested back their prerogatives over federal spending and staffing, and some staffers that were let go have been hired back.
But the shutdown threatens to introduce a volatile new dynamic, in which another aggressive budget cutter in the highest echelons of the government — in this case, Vought — gets the upper hand without the intra-party blowback.
That’s because unlike Musk, the space entrepreneur and car manufacturer who had only recently become a Republican, Vought is a career conservative, whose command of the levers of power has been honed over years of experience in government. This may be Vought’s moment to make permanent changes in the size and structure of the federal government — or at least credibly threaten to do so — with particular attention to programs he views as a “cartel” between Congress and the federal bureaucracy, as well as spending programs that tend to advance progressive ends, including mitigating or preventing climate change.
Vought has been teeing up dramatic budget cuts and aggressive defunding maneuvers since the first Trump administration — it was his move to delay aid to Ukraine that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. He then spent his four years in exile from power at a think tank he founded, expanding on his vision of a budgetary process more controlled by the executive branch.
But as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote back in January, during the first Trump administration Vought would regularly draw up budgets that would feature dramatic cuts and then Republicans in Congress would undo them and spending would continue on in a bipartisan manner.
This time, Trump has gotten Voughtier, and Republicans in Congress have gotten more compliant. Vought has already said he wants to take the normally bipartisan appropriations process and turn into a partisan one, in part by letting the president control spending that’s authorized by Congress. Though the president and Republican leadership in Congress might want the public to see a budget director run amok, it’s clear that all of the above relish the prospect of Vought as a kind of wildcard, unleashed with a red pen on the federal budget.
Echoes of Vought’s ideology have made their way into policymaking across branches of government. The White House has already struck some foreign aid programs authorized by Congress, and the Supreme Court recently allowed those cuts to stand. Republicans in Congress passed a rescissions package that cut previously appropriated funding for public broadcasting and other foreign aid. Vought also effectively shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a formerly independent agency, while cuts to the Department of Education have left it a shell of itself.
The cuts Vought has announced so far during the shutdown, including funding for a bunch of clean energy and sustainability projects largely in blue states and transit projects in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, aren’t entirely shutdown-related. It doesn’t take a tremendous leap to arrive at the idea that they might have been planned all along and timed to punish Democrats.
At least some of the cuts seem to be intended to be permanent and would not revert when the shutdown inevitably ends. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told CNN on Thursday that the grant cancellation decisions were made by the Department of Energy, and that “projects will not be restored” once the government is funded again.
It remains unclear the full extent of the cuts Vought will attempt to make, and how the judicial process will ultimately handle them. But the prospect of further major cuts — especially in contrast to the Republican offer of a continuing resolution to resolve the spending standoff — has raised eyebrows among at least a few congressional Republicans.
Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator from North Dakota, told Semafor that Vought is “less politically in tune than the president,” and that by using the shutdown to pursue large cuts, Republicans risk ceding the “moral high ground” in the shutdown fight. Susan Collins, the Maine moderate who chairs the Appropriations Committee, has also criticized some legally aggressive cuts.
But most in the majority, especially in leadership, have expressed no problem with Vought’s prospective cuts, or see them purely as something Democrats are responsible for due to failing to vote yes on their continuing resolution. Which could mean the cuts, if they come, could prove more enduring than Musk’s more slapdash efforts.
The shutdown could cement a shift in the balance of power between Vought and figures in the administration or Congress who are more cautious about the slash and burn approach. This may overwhelm any sense of caution from Cabinet secretaries or congressional leaders defending their turf. They’re all still Republicans at the end of the day.
A review of Heatmap Pro data reveals a troubling new trend in data center development.
Data centers are being built in places that restrict renewable energy. There are significant implications for our future energy grid – but it’s unclear if this behavior will lead to tech companies eschewing renewables or finding novel ways to still meet their clean energy commitments.
In the previous edition of The Fight, I began chronicling the data center boom and a nascent backlash to it by talking about Google and what would’ve been its second data center in southern Indianapolis, if the city had not rejected it last Monday. As I learned about Google’s practices in Indiana, I focused on the company’s first project – a $2 billion facility in Fort Wayne, because it is being built in a county where officials have instituted a cumbersome restrictive ordinance on large-scale solar energy. The county commission recently voted to make the ordinance more restrictive, unanimously agreeing to institute a 1,000-foot setback to take effect in early November, pending final approval from the county’s planning commission.
As it turns out, the Fort Wayne data center is not an exception: Approximately 44% of all data centers proposed in Indiana are in counties that have restricted or banned new renewable energy projects. This is according to a review of Heatmap Pro data in which we cross-referenced the county bans and ordinances we track against a list of proposed data centers prepared by an Indiana energy advocacy group, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the power going to these data centers is consistently fossil. Data centers can take years to construct and often rely on power fed to them from a distributed regional energy grid. But this does mean it would be exceptionally costly for any of these projects to build renewable generation on site, as a rising number of projects choose to do – not to mention that on a macro level, data centers may increasingly run up against the same cultural dynamics that are leading to solar and wind project denials. (See: this local news article about the Fort Wayne data center campus).
Chrissy Moy, a Google spokesperson, told me the Fort Wayne facility will get its power off of the PJM grid, and sent me links to solar projects and hydroelectric facilities in other states on the PJM it has power purchase agreements with. I’d note the company claims it “already matches” all of its global annual electricity demand with “renewable energy purchases.” What this means is that if Google can’t generate renewable energy for a data center directly, it will try to procure renewable energy at the same time from the same grid, even if it can’t literally use that clean power at that data center. And if that's not possible, it will search farther afield or at different times. (Google is one of the more aggressive big tech companies in this regard, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo details.) Google has also boasted that it will provide an undisclosed amount of excess clean electricity through rights transfers to Indiana Michigan Power when the tech company’s load is low and demand on the broader grid is peaking, as part of Google’s broader commitment to grid flexibility.
I reached out to Tom Wilson, an energy systems technical executive at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-focused organization that studies modern power and works with tech companies on flexible data center energy use, including Google. Wilson told me that in Indiana, many of the siting decisions for data centers were made before counties enacted moratoria against renewable energy and that tech companies may not always be knowingly siting projects in places where significant solar or wind generation would be impractical or even impossible. (We would just note that Fort Wayne, Indiana, has an opposition risk score of 84 in Heatmap Pro, meaning it would have been a very risky place to build a renewable energy project even without that restrictive ordinance.) It also indicates some areas may be laying down renewables restrictions after seeing data center development, which is in line with a potential land use techlash.
Wilson told me that two thirds of data centers rely on power from the existing energy grid whereas surveys indicate about a third choose to have at least some electricity generation on site. In at least the latter case, land use constraints and permitting problems really can be a hurdle for building renewable energy close to where data is processed. This is a problem exacerbated when centers are developed near population centers, which Wilson said is frequently the case because companies want to reduce “latency” for customers. In other words, they want to “reduce the time it takes to get answers to people” via artificial intelligence or other data products.
“The primary challenges are the size of the data center and the amount of space it takes to build renewables,” he said. “They are moving from 20 megawatt or 40 megawatt data centers to 100, 200, 300 megawatt data centers. It’s really hard to locate that much renewable [energy] right near a population center. So that requires transmission, and unfortunately right now in the U.S. and in many other countries, transmission takes a significant amount of time to build.”
The majority of data centers are served by regional power grids, Wilson told me. Companies like Google, Meta, and others continue to invest in renewable energy procurement while building facilities in areas that have restricted new solar or wind power infrastructure. In some cases, companies may feel they’re forced to seek these places out because the land is just plain cheap and has existing fiber optic cable networks.
At the same time, there are large data centers getting energy generated on site, and how they each approach their energy sources varies. It’s also not always consistent.
For instance, Meta’s new Prometheus supercluster complex in New Albany, Ohio — potentially the world’s first 1 gigawatt data center — will reportedly have a significant amount of new gas power generation constructed at the facility, even though the company also struck a deal with Invenergy over the summer to procure at least 400 megawatts of solar from two projects in Ohio that already have their permits. One is in Clinton County and was fully permitted but resulted in a years-long fight before the Ohio Power Siting Board and included conservative media backlash. The other is in Franklin County and got its permits in 2021, before a recent wave of opposition against solar projects. Prometheus itself will be sited on the Licking County side of New Albany, where solar has been extremely difficult to build, even though most of this Columbus suburb is in solar-supporting Franklin.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI data center notoriously relies on a polluting gas plant in Memphis, Tennessee. The surrounding Shelby County had a solar moratorium until mere months ago that residents want to bring back. An affiliate company of xAI used for the project’s real estate is subleasing land near the data center for a solar farm, but it is unclear right now if it’ll power the data center.
In the end, it really does seem like data centers are being sited in places with renewable energy restrictions. What the data center developers plan to do about it — if anything — is still an open question.
Current conditions: After walloping Bermuda with winds of up to 100 miles per hour, Hurricane Imelda is veering northeast away from the United States • While downgraded from a hurricane, Humberto is set to soak Ireland and the United Kingdom as Storm Amy in the coming days and bring winds of up to 90 miles per hour • Typhoon Matmo is strengthening as it hits the Philippines and barrels toward China.
The Department of Energy is canceling two regional hydrogen hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest as part of a broader rescinding of 321 grants worth $7.5 billion for projects nationwide. Going after the hydrogen hubs, which the oil and gas industry lobbied to keep open after President Donald Trump came back to office, “leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday.
The list of canceled projects that Emily got her hands on “does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit,” she wrote. But, she found, “many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds,” including a $20 million grant for a manufacturing plant in Texas that was slated to create 200 jobs.
Tesla’s global deliveries rose 7% in the third quarter, hitting a new record as Americans rushed to buy electric vehicles before the federal tax credit expired on September 30. The automaker delivered 497,099 vehicles in the three months leading up to that date, up from 462,890 in the same period last year, according to the Financial Times. That was well above analyst forecasts of 444,000.
That may do little to turn around the headwinds blasting the EV giant. While the company benefited from buyers scrambling to tap the federal EV tax credit, Tesla sank to its lowest-ever share of the electric vehicle market in August as drivers flocked to offerings from other automakers. It’s not just a problem in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote last month, “Thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s association with right wing politics in the U.S. and abroad, and to fierce competition from Chinese EV leader BYD, Tesla’s sales have fallen dramatically in Europe. Globally, BYD overtook Tesla in sales last year.”
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Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the British Conservatives, has vowed to repeal the United Kingdom’s landmark climate law if her party, colloquially known as the Tories, wins the next election. Eliminating the Climate Change Act, passed almost unanimously under a Tory government in 2008, would dismantle controls on greenhouse gas emissions and remove what The Guardian described as “the cornerstone of green and energy policy for successive governments” for the past 17 years.
The move rankled past Tory leaders. Former Prime Minister Theresa May condemned the campaign pledge as a “catastrophic mistake.” Calling it a “retrograde” step, she said that “while consensus is being tested, the science remains the same.” Alok Sharma, the former Tory minister who led the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, told The Guardian in a separate article that a repeal risked “many tens of billions of pounds of private sector investment and accompanying jobs.”
Sea ice in Antarctica reached its third-smallest winter peak extent since satellite records began 47 years ago, according to a new analysis by Carbon Brief. Provisional data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center showed Antarctic sea ice reaching a winter maximum of just under 6.9 million square miles as of September 17. That’s nearly 350,000 square miles below the average between 1981 and 2010, the historical baseline against which recent changes in sea ice extent are compared. The “lengthening trend of lower Antarctic sea ice poses real concerns regarding stability and melting of the ice sheet,” one expert told the publication.
The finding comes as a “groundbreaking” study the European Geosciences Union published Thursday in the journal Earth System Dynamics found that Antarctic sea ice has emerged as a key predictor of accelerated ocean warming. Using Earth system models and satellite images from 1980 to 2020, the researchers found higher sea ice extent enhances cloud cover, which has a cooling effect overall by reducing incoming solar radiation. As a result, ongoing sea ice loss is linked to larger reductions in clouds, stronger surface warming, and even more ocean heat uptake, accelerating the cycle.
Duke Energy plans to meet surging demand for electricity by increasing its natural gas and battery capacity, keeping coal plants open for up to four years longer than previously estimated, and evaluating new sites for nuclear reactors. The 100-page biennial proposal published this week dials back plans for more renewables such as wind and solar. It also pushed back the earliest start date for a new reactor to 2037, declined to commit to either small modular reactors or large traditional units, and said the utility still needs extra protections against cost overruns before embarking on construction.
In the meantime, the added years of coal burning “will result in millions of tons in additional greenhouse gases over the next decade when combined with other proposed changes to the utility’s fuel mix,” Inside Climate News reported. In a statement to Axios, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, called on the state’s utilities commission to “require significant changes” and condemned Duke for “retreating from the state’s clean energy future.”
New research by a team of scientists from the U.K. and New Zealand has found that new analytical methods could bolster conservation breeding programs by offering a better understanding of why eggs don’t hatch. The researchers used fluorescent dyes to discover that nearly 66% of 174 unhatched eggs examined in the study had been fertilized, whereas previous methods suggested that only 5.2% had been fertilized. “There are many different factors that contribute to breeding success,” Gary Ward, a co-author from the London-based ZSL Institute of Zoology, said in a statement, “and the more understanding we can have into why an egg might not hatch, the more we can refine our care for these birds and the better chance of recovery we can give them.”