At the northern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where rugged cliffs jut out toward Lake Superior, Keweenaw County is known for its rich biodiversity and opportunities for outdoor recreation. One of the region’s most remarkable qualities, though, is its darkness.

Far from large city centers, the county has embraced its lack of light pollution, or excessive artificial light that bleeds into outdoor spaces.

This weekend, a new event—the Great Lakes Aurora Dark Sky Jamboree (GLAD JAM)—welcomes visitors to the park to stargaze while learning more about the dark sky movement and its campaign to end light pollution for the health of humans and wildlife alike.

The region’s first “Dark Sky Park” was designated in 2022. The dark sky movement has been supported by a growing body of research suggesting light pollution can disrupt the migration patterns and circadian rhythms of animals, putting fragile ecosystems around the world at risk.

To all the challenges the solar industry is facing today, add one more: cultivating a domestic market for lamb meat. It may seem an unlikely mission for clean-energy developers, but in many states, including Illinois, grazing sheep between rows of photovoltaic panels is considered the most efficient form of agrivoltaics — the combination of solar and farming on the same land.

Solar advocates, researchers, and developers have given much attention to agrivoltaics. The practice includes growing crops like blueberries, tomatoes, or peppers in the shade of solar panels and letting cows or sheep graze around the arrays.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of agrivoltaics is that land is not being taken out of agricultural production in favor of clean energy, a concern that has stoked intense opposition to solar. The Trump administration codified this sentiment when the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on Aug. 19 that the agency ​“will no longer fund taxpayer dollars for solar panels on productive farmland.”

Illinois’ sprawling fields of corn and soybeans don’t coexist well with solar panels, but sheep do, making grazing a promising type of agrivoltaics for the state, proponents say.

• Numerous villages in Indonesia’s Halmahera Island face extensive compulsory purchase actions for farming land by mining companies with extraction permits issued by the government.
• One farmer said he faced sustained pressure from local authorities to accept offers of $1.22 per square meter of land, which did not account for the recurring revenues earned from multiple coconut harvests per year.
• The South Wasile’s police chief sent an emphatic denial to Mongabay Indonesia when asked whether local police were involved in company efforts to persuade farmers to sign contracts of sale.
• Mongabay has reported this year from Halmahera on a rise in respiratory disease and high levels of mercury present in blood samples in communities living alongside Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP), the giant nickel smelting center on Halmahera.

archived (Wayback Machine)

As Spain takes a breath after yet another brutal summer heatwave, with temperatures above 40C in many parts of the country, the residents of the sherry-making town of Jerez de la Frontera have come up with a novel way to keep the streets cool.

Green canopies of grapevines festoon the town, reducing street-level temperatures by as much as 8C. “We’re planting vines in the old city because we hope that in two or three years we’ll be able to brag that this has put an end to stifling temperatures,” said Jesús Rodríguez, president of Los Emparrados, a group of residents who aim to beautify and green the city’s streets.

For decades the local sherry producers have kept their wineries cool with emparrados (vine arbours) but now the practice has been extended to a cluster of streets in the old town.

Not only are vines part of the essence of Jerez, they also have several advantages over trees. They need to be watered only in the first two years and they are deciduous, letting in the winter sun between November and March. Within three years of planting they will form a complete canopy over a narrow street.

Just a single vine stem growing up the side of a house can offer a lot of shade. In the sherry houses, where this has been the practice for more than 60 years, the leaves from a single vine form a canopy of 60 sq metres.

The variety chosen is Vitis riparia, cultivated to produce few grapes, avoiding streets made sticky by fallen fruit.

On a patch of paddock in West Gippsland stands a small forest, which wasn’t there before.

Flowering gums and she-oaks reach up nine metres tall, birds nest in their branches, while a giant tiger snake slides through the grass below.

All it took was one day of “bloody hard” work.

About four years ago the Australian film-maker and outdoorsman Beau Miles set out to plant 1,440 trees and shrubs in 24 hours – enough to turn a blanket of rolling Victorian hills back into bush.

Miles decided he was done with the kind of modern-day adventures that burned through money and carbon, delivering little in the way of tangible outcomes except for photos and a great story. Instead, he says, he began looking for physical challenges that offer more “bang-for-buck”.

Story includes a YouTube video.

Earlier this summer, access to climate.gov – one of the most widely used portals of climate information on the internet – was thwarted by the Trump administration, and its production team was fired in the process.

The website offered years’ worth of accessibly written material on climate science. The site is technically still online but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Now, a team of climate communication experts – including many members of the former climate.gov team – is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission.

Their effort’s new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change.

Country’s hottest days are, in fact, more likely to produce hail.

Clean-energy growth helped China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fall by 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024.

The CO2 output of the nation’s power sector – its dominant source of emissions – fell by 3% in the first half of the year, as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that record solar capacity additions are putting China’s CO2 emissions on track to fall across 2025 as a whole.

Other key findings include:

• The growth in clean power generation, some 270 terawatt hours (TWh) excluding hydro, significantly outpaced demand growth of 170TWh in the first half of the year.
• Solar capacity additions set new records due to a rush before a June policy change, with 212 gigawatts (GW) added in the first half of the year.
• This rush means solar is likely to set an annual record for growth in 2025, becoming China’s single-largest source of clean power generation in the process.
• Coal-power capacity could surge by as much as 80-100GW this year, potentially setting a new annual record, even as coal-fired electricity generation declines.
• The use of coal to make synthetic fuels and chemicals is growing rapidly, climbing 20% in the first half of the year and helping add 3% to China’s CO2 since 2020.
• The coal-chemical industry is planning further expansion, which could add another 2% to China’s CO2 by 2029, making the 2030 deadline for peaking harder to meet.

Even if its emissions fall in 2025 as expected, however, China is bound to miss multiple important climate targets this year.

[...]growing interest in the blue economy and blue growth in coastal communities, many of them Indigenous communities, masks ongoing social, political, and historical issues and is of concern for many researchers.

An article on marine policy entitled “Enabling Indigenous innovations to re-centre social licence to operate in the Blue Economy” notes “increasing economic activity in coastal areas and seas [...] creates opportunities and poses potential environmental and social risks and inequities, particularly relating to coastal communities and Indigenous societies.” In Canada, this has meant reduced opportunities for wild fishing, thus diminishing Indigenous communities’ ability to pass their cultural activities to successive generations; a tension between First Nations’ collective ownership and that of private companies; and government policies that have historically led to a loss of Indigenous communities’ access to resources. Consequently, this has fostered generalized distrust of government among First Nations and risks to culture and territorial sovereignty, particularly in the context of unresolved land claims, which are among the primary objections to aquaculture development in communities. An inclusive, sustainable, and equitable strategy, the article argues, includes Indigenous resource ownership and a proper distribution of benefits.

Another research paper, looking at how the development of a capitalist blue economy in the Caribbean led to subsequent inequalities, points out that establishing the foundations for shared ocean systems and regional development “will require confronting and redressing colonial and postcolonial histories of systematic underdevelopment.”

As Duhaime notes, sustainable use of ocean resources is already compatible with the Inuit worldview. The challenge is connecting these resources to an economic model without further limiting the social agency of Inuit.

“[Ocean management] is not a new thing – for decades Inuit have been saying ‘We know how to manage the resources ourselves. We know the animals. We know how much we can take and when, and when people among us take more, then they can distribute it,’” he says.

A soon-to-open facility located along Oregon's central coast aims to ease the industry's growing pains and to accelerate the development of devices that can withstand the punishment that comes with operating in the open ocean.

Sometime next year, the first tenant of Oregon State University's PacWave South testing facility will plug a wave energy converter into a connector waiting at one of four berths occupying two square nautical miles of ocean seven miles from shore. The event will mark a significant milestone in the U.S. and global push to commercialize wave energy. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the facility "will be the nation’s first accredited, grid-connected, pre-permitted, open-water wave energy test facility."

Last week, on a tour organized by the Pacific Ocean Energy Trust and the University Marine Energy Research Community, I visited the shoreside landing site of PacWave's four subsea cables as well as the facility where up to 20 megawatts (MW) of wave energy will be fed to the onshore grid and engineering teams will optimize their inventions for operation at sea.

Here's a look at the shoreside components of the new facility.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34740977

Daniel Rothman works on the top floor of the building that houses the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, a big concrete domino that overlooks the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rothman is a mathematician interested in the behaviour of complex systems, and in the Earth he has found a worthy subject. Specifically, Rothman studies the behaviour of the planet’s carbon cycle deep in the Earth’s past, especially in those rare times it was pushed over a threshold and spun out of control, regaining its equilibrium only after hundreds of thousands of years. Seeing as it’s all carbon-based life here on Earth, these extreme disruptions to the carbon cycle express themselves as, and are better known as, “mass extinctions”.

Worryingly, in the past few decades geologists have discovered that many, if not most, of the mass extinctions of Earth history – including the very worst ever by far – were caused not by asteroids as they had expected, but by continent-spanning volcanic eruptions that injected catastrophic amounts of CO2 into the air and oceans.

Put enough CO2 into the system all at once, and push the life-sustaining carbon cycle far enough out of equilibrium, and it might escape into a sort of planetary failure mode, where processes intrinsic to the Earth itself take over, acting as positive feedback to release dramatically more carbon into the system. This subsequent release of carbon would send the planet off on a devastating 100-millennia excursion before regaining its composure. And it wouldn’t matter if CO2 were higher or lower than it is today, or whether the Earth was warmer or cooler as a result. It’s the rate of change in CO2 that gets you to Armageddon.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

https://archive.is/EBq8V