we want climate action now

Excerpt:

In March, a developer working on a Meta data center in El Paso applied to power the site with a gas-burning plant large enough to supply electricity to 300,000 homes.

Typically, approving a big power plant might require public hearings and months of detailed vetting. But Texas environmental regulators signed off in just 20 days.

They approved another project in three days. And an even larger data center power plant, also gas-burning, won approval in just two days.

All without public notice.

In the debate over data centers that is roiling the country, water use and noise are often cited as objections by neighbors and environmentalists. Less mentioned has been the pollution from the scores of gas-burning plants that will power these data centers.

When the El Paso facility’s power plant is complete, it could emit as much planet-warming carbon dioxide in a year as 360,000 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles, each driven for the average distance logged by American drivers in a year.

With encouragement from the Trump administration, data center developers are building their own power plants, instead of plugging into an electric grid. Nationwide, at least 82 gas-burning power plants are being built or have been proposed to power data centers, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonpartisan research organization. Most were announced or granted permits within the past 18 months.

​If built as planned, the gas burning plants — scattered across states including Texas, Ohio and Wyoming — could release as much planet-warming pollution in a year as roughly half of all the passenger vehicles in the United States, according to estimates based on permits, regulatory filings and other data compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project.

They would also produce harmful pollutants including particulate matter, formaldehyde and smog-forming nitrogen oxides that can contribute to heart disease, asthma, lung cancer, strokes and other ailments in people living nearby.

For data centers, the motivation to build their own power plants is simple. It can take years to connect to an electric grid. And data centers face growing pressure to generate their own power so they don’t tap into local grids and drive up electricity prices. Hunger for gas power among data-center owners is so great, Elon Musk this spring bought a company that specializes in rapid-deployment gas and diesel turbines.

It’s a strategy endorsed by the president. “I’m telling them they can build their own plant,” President Trump said in February during his State of the Union address. “They’re going to produce their own electricity.”

And last month he doubled down. Speaking at the White House, Mr. Trump said that rapidly building more fossil-fuel-burning power plants was essential to America’s A.I. race with China, and that environmental protections should be rolled back because of that. “They build a lot of electric,” he said. “They don’t do environmental impact statements. They just say, ‘You want electric? We’ll build it.’”

Excerpt:

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Pentagon to lift its freeze on reviewing onshore wind projects and to end some of the delays that have brought U.S. wind power development to a standstill.

Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit that a coalition of renewable energy groups filed against the Defense Department. The groups argued that the Trump administration has unlawfully delayed dozens of wind projects across the country by halting military reviews that were once considered routine.

In her ruling, Judge Immergut, who was appointed by President Trump, said that the renewable energy groups were likely to prevail on the merits and that the Pentagon had violated legal deadlines when it stopped its reviews. She ordered the agency to resume reviewing wind projects and to report back to the court on its progress every 30 days while the broader legal case played out.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of people in France and Spain fled their homes, many in the dead of night, carrying only what they could. In the coming days and weeks, as evacuation orders lift, some will come home to partially destroyed towns. Others will only find ash. 

The fourth heat wave of a broiling summer is underway this week, and Europe has already seen one of its most destructive wildfire seasons on record, leading to one of the largest evacuation of people on the continent since World War II. It’s also the latest consequence of climate change, according to a study released on Thursday by World Weather Attribution, a scientific nonprofit that analyzes the role of global warming in extreme weather events. Human-induced climate change made the likelihood of fire-prone conditions in France at least twice as likely, and at least 20 times as likely in central Spain. 

For months leading up to the recent wildfires, Western Europe had been scorched by back-to-back heat waves and an extended drought that dried out trees, shrubs, and farmland, turning the landscape into a tinderbox. Climate change makes the confluence of these extremes more likely, scientists say.

Last year, similar conditions created Europe’s worst wildfire season in history, with more than 2 million hectares burned by September. This year could be on track to surpass that: Some 430,000 hectares have burned so far — roughly 100,000 more than this time last year with two months left to go. In Spain alone, the burned area is roughly equivalent to the size of London.

With heat waves projected to continue in the coming weeks, the risk of more fire looms over the continent. Other research on Southern Europe, also released on Thursday, found that summer days with conditions making them prone to extreme fires have more than doubled in recent decades.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Officials from the Trump administration and members of Congress last week walked along the burn scar from Utah’s devastating Cottonwood Fire and saw the damage from the rain and flood that followed the flames.

The wildfire is among the country’s largest, charring more than 97,000 acres. It started on June 22, and is only 95 percent contained as of late Thursday, according to Utah Fire Info.

After surveying the destruction, lawmakers laid blame on a lack of forestry management. If the forest had been thinned, with “a lot fewer trees per acre, and maybe even some controlled burns to take the underbrush out, there’s just not the fuel there when these fires start to make them catastrophic fires,” Representative Bruce Westerman, a Republican from Arkansas, told Salt Lake City’s FOX 13 News. 

But these traditional fire prevention methods may no longer work, one researcher cautions, with a changing climate that makes hot, dry weather increasingly the norm.

“Weather and climate override the effects of fuels in determining what happens in forested landscapes,” said Dominik Kulakowski, a professor of geography at Clark University in Massachusetts whose research focuses on climate and mountain ecosystems. “The implication of that is that we’re losing our ability to manage forest fires.”

Larissa Yocom, a professor of fire ecology at Utah State University, agrees that today’s extreme wildfires defy the usual approaches to prevention, but she doesn’t think they are the West’s “new normal — yet.”

Climate change, which stokes intense heat, longer droughts, and extreme weather, has been the primary driver of wildfire risk in the Western United States for the last two decades, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The severe snow drought that afflicted Utah over the winter is 14 times more likely in Utah and other Upper Colorado River Basin states compared to the start of the industrial period when humans began releasing climate-altering pollutants into the atmosphere, according to research published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Forests in the West evolved in response to fire, and fire has long been part of their normal ecological function, Kulakowski said. But fires are now changing faster than forests can adapt.