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“I pulled the data for the past 18 years, and it’s almost off the charts.”
Air pollution in New York and across the eastern United States, driven by an outbreak of wildfires across Quebec and Nova Scotia, has reached the worst level since 2005, when modern records began, according to a Stanford economist.
“I pulled the data for the past 18 years, and it’s almost off the charts,” Marshall Burke, an economist who specializes in climate change and an associate professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, told me.
Surveying the dangerous haze that stretched across the country on Tuesday, he said it could conceivably be one of the worst days for air pollution even before the 2000s. Rarely have so many people been exposed to so much particulate matter, or PM2.5, a toxic haze of microscopic soot and ash that is linked to early death and can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. (It’s called PM2.5 because it measures 2.5 or fewer microns across.)
New York City’s air pollution index — which spiked to more than 200 on Tuesday, a level considered “very unhealthy” for all groups — was comparable to a “pretty bad event that we’d get on the West Coast,” he said. But it is unheard of for such toxic air to afflict such a densely populated part of the country. In the late evening, New York briefly had the worst air quality of any city on Earth, beating Delhi, India, and Doha, Qatar.
Burke has published widely on climate change’s costs, studying how rising temperatures might affect crop yields, suicide, and the outbreak of wars. But on Tuesday evening, he said that the economic impacts of wildfires — and their voluminous smoke output — might be one of the biggest unknown dangers of climate. Our conversation also touched on the heinous health effects of wildfire smoke, especially for women and children. It has been edited and condensed for clarity and readability.
That’s a great question. We’ll have to see how long it lasts. A lot of the West in 2020 — really, in California — basically had what you guys are having but for a month. Sometimes it wasn’t quite as acute, but often we got days and days of stuff about as bad as what you guys are having. So I think it’s a hopefully very short-run vision of what some of the rest of the country has dealt with.
But the important part here is the number of people getting exposed. You get days in the West where, like, Missoula, Montana, is hit pretty hard. Or in the 2020 event, we had parts of California get hit pretty hard for weeks. But today we’re talking about the most populated parts of the country just getting hammered. So in that sense, it’s pretty anomalous — it’s different from the Western events where you have unpopulated areas getting dosed.
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People have been studying the health impacts of wildfire smoke for a while — and it’s interesting. You would think we would have a pretty precise answer, but we still don't have a great one.
That’s mainly because these levels of air pollution are so high they induce some weird behaviors. So people actually notice the smoke, and they respond in a way that shapes health outcomes.
So you see some things you would expect. Respiratory hospitalizations or emergency department visits go way up — that’s been shown by a lot of groups. And that’s caused by asthma, that’s COPD, that’s bad stuff.
But other stuff changes — car wrecks go down, there are fewer fractures, people don’t break their legs playing soccer. Basically, what economists would call avoidance behavior pushes back in the other direction pretty substantially. So on really bad days, it’s this funny mix of worsened respiratory outcomes and declines in other, “non-smoke-related” visits.
That said, there are demonstrable negative health impacts for vulnerable groups. And all the research suggests we should draw the circle wider and wider in terms of what we call “vulnerable groups.”
Any pregnant moms — if my wife or anyone I knew was pregnant right now — I would be texting them to stay inside and sit by an air filter. We see very large impacts on preterm birth for moms who are exposed while their kids were in utero. Like I said, my daughter has asthma, so on days like this, she gets to blow it out on the iPad sitting next to the air filter.
So part of the story is not nuanced. If you’re a vulnerable group, it’s a good time to protect yourself.
There is also an ongoing debate about whether wildfire-sourced PM2.5 is better, worse, or the same as PM2.5 from fossil fuel combustion. Some early evidence suggests it’s maybe a lot worse for respiratory function — I’m not fully convinced myself but it could be true. We see a lot of nasty stuff in wildfire smoke. We see heavy metals that get aerosolized, all this stuff that’s in your sink when houses burn, that gets aerosolized. But I think broadly, the PM2.5 literature is a good guide for what’s happening.
For me, it's so important to mention the backdrop, which is just this remarkable policy success in improving air quality. And it was driven by bipartisan public policy that was really good and really worked. You can look at papers on this: You just don’t get bad air-pollution days anymore on the East Coast. They’re gone. They just don’t exist.
Yeah, the Clean Air Act, exactly. And that is being so quickly undone in the West by wildfires. Less so in the East — we saw fingerprints of it last year — but this is going to be a big event, and it’s going to change our estimates a lot. So this really nice progress that we had made is just being rapidly eroded now, and I thought that was just a West Coast story, but maybe now it’s happening in the East too.
Now, I don’t think this is going to happen every year for you guys on the East Coast. I don’t think the data suggests that yet. But it’s not going to happen never — it’s going to be more common.
They were never going to originate in the East Coast, almost surely. Wildfire smoke might affect the East Coast, but it was going to come from somewhere else.
Exactly. And I think honestly that’s what you should still expect. Although the forecast for the next couple of days suggests there’s pretty high fire risk across a bunch of the Northeast, so it’s not out of the question. We could see some starts in the Northeast that could contribute to the smoke, but certainly that's not the case right now.
I think that the modal case is going to be one that looks a lot more like what we’re seeing today, where you get big Canadian fires blowing in. But that just makes the air-pollution problem harder, because now we have a transboundary problem.
So what do we do? Do we sue the Canadians? Do we buy them off?
The way I think about it is that the Clean Air Act was built on one main fact, which is that local pollution concentrations depend on local emissions. So if you regulate local emissions, you improve local air quality. And that worked really well for a while.
But that logic no longer holds. Look at the Canadian fires — number one, it's not a point source, and number two, it doesn't stay locally. We’re not equipped to deal with this, and we have dug ourselves a massive hole in terms of a century of putting out fires that have just made this problem a monster.
My pitch for a while on the West Coast has been that wildfire smoke is going to be one of the main — if not the main way — we encounter climate change viscerally. I'm sure it’s going to get hot, but these episodic events that sit with us and really disrupt our activity, this is going to be one of the most widespread ways we encounter it.
But I would not have told that story for you guys on the East Coast. And this is still one very historic event, so I’m not ready to tell that story, but I’m going to draw the boundary a little wider next time I give a talk on this.
That’s exactly right. None of the existing monetized economic costs of climate change — like when we come up with the social cost of carbon or any of that stuff — wildfires are not in there at all. So this is fully un-costed in all the sort of headline climate-change cost numbers that we have.
Certainly, folks are making the links, and if you read the National Climate Assessment then wildfires are in there, but in terms of monetizing the cost, you're 100% right. We have not done that. Honestly, this is a big push in my groups to try to do it back to that, try to monetize these, and I think they're going to be really big.
When we've done back of the envelope estimates, they suggest the costs are at least as large as heat, potentially. Especially if we get more events like the one today.
The effects go beyond that too. There are all these papers now that show cognitive decline when exposed to air pollution and wildfire smoke. We can look at test-score data and in smokier years, kids do worse on tests. The effects are individually small, but you add them up across schools and across counties and they get pretty big.
The question is, is there catchup, right? In terms of learning losses, we would have to follow people for longer than we’re able to right now. But they certainly last within the year. So if I’m exposed in September, and I take a test in April, I can still see the effects of the wildfire.
We see that in our data. Now, we can’t nail the cognitive channel [as being at fault here] — like, it could be because you didn't go to school. But mostly schools don't close during smoke events, and so it’s consistent with the cognitive channel. But maybe the next year you learn what you missed and, you know, we can’t rule that out.
I think the more proven long-term outcomes is the relationship between in utero exposure and later-in-life outcomes. That’s been shown for other air pollutants, and I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’s not true for wildfire as well. In-utero exposure has this lifelong, negative imprint, including on earnings and cognitive function.
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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.”