Finally, some good news from the frontlines of the beeapocalypse: Significantly fewer honey bees died in the winter of 2013-2014 in the US than in previous years, according to a survey released today. Better yet, scientists think they know a simple way to minimize the devastation that has led to a $10 billion die-off of bees that pollinate one-third of the world’s food supply.
Airplane pilots reported that they were blinded by the intense sunlight reflecting off some of the 340,000 mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System on the California-Nevada border. Yet six months elapsed before their reports reached the regulator that oversees the plant, which is located near the Las Vegas airport.
Forget the Tesla Model S. Another car of the future is finally hitting the highway.
Australian scientists have devised a way to pinpoint the causes of the global die-off of bees that pollinate a third of the world’s crops: Attach tiny sensors to 5,000 honey bees, and follow where they fly.
Solar panel installer SolarCity has relied on big banks and corporate investors to finance solar arrays for homeowners that let them cut the cord to their utility. Now the US’s largest photovoltaic panel installer wants to crowdsource additional billions of dollars by letting mom-and-pop investors buy solar asset-backed securities through its website.
The great bee die-off in the US and Europe has been known about for a while. A shortage of honeybees, it’s feared, threatens various crops that depend on them as pollinators. But now some research has put numbers on just how bad the bee deficit is in Europe. And the numbers are alarming, to say the least.
If electric cars are bad news for the oil industry, solar-powered electric cars are bad for utility executives. Take the C-MAX Solar Energi Concept that Ford unveiled today. The version of the automaker’s popular plug-in electric hybrid hatchback is equipped with 1.5 square meters (16 square feet) of photovoltaic panels that charge the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery pack. No fossil fuel power plants needed.
Back in 2009 when China announced it would build the world’s largest photovoltaic power plant in the Mongolian desert, it choose a US company, First Solar, to construct the 2,000-megawatt (MW) project. Yesterday, China unveiled plans for another huge solar power plant, a 1,000 MW project in the remote Xinjiang Region. This time, though, a homegrown company, Trina Solar, won the contract.
Right now there’s a potentially deadly tiger shark cruising the ocean 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) off a popular surf beach in Scarborough, Western Australia. How do I know that? The shark tweeted its location. A radio transmitter embedded in the shark’s stomach transmitted its coordinates to the state government’s Shark Monitoring Network, which passed it on to the Twitter feed of the Surf Life Saving Western Australia (SLSWA).
In the run-up to the holidays, few noticed a rather horrifying number California water managers released last week: 5%.
As scientists race to pinpoint the cause of the global collapse of honey bee populations that pollinate a third of the world’s crops, environmental groups have indentified one culprit: US authorities who continue to approve pesticides implicated in the apian apocalypse.
The solar industry is on track for another record year in the US. In November solar accounted for 45% of all new electricity generating capacity that came online in the US (none was from fossil fuels.) So far this year, 21% of all new capacity has come from solar, second only to natural gas. Coal’s share? 12%.
One of the most contentious climate change debates is whether wildlife will adapt or die when threatened by global warming, and what humans should do to save them. Now a new study suggests that one of the critters most at risk from climate change could indeed survive by adapting a rather unappetizing diet.
Bruce McFarland’s San Diego office is just a skateboard ride from some of California’s prime surf spots. And right now, McFarland is gazing at the perfect wave—a glassy, barreling wall of water. But it’s breaking inside his building, and McFarland, an engineer and surfer, is controlling the wave with an iPad.
China’s insatiable demand for energy has triggered a coal-mine building boom in Australia, which now supplies China with a third of its coal. With plans for 10 massive Australian coal mines worth more than $45 billion under way, investors are counting on China to keep burning the black stuff at a rapid clip to make those projects profitable. But that would a bad bet.
Nearly 40% of the world’s countries suffer from high or extreme levels of “water stress,” according to a first of-its-kind study that evaluated water-related risks in 181 countries and 100 river basins. As climate change and growing populations lead to an increasingly dry world, these countries could learn something from Singapore.
The current crop of electric cars may be hobbled by their limited range and high price but they still suit the needs of nearly half of American drivers, according to a new survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Shimizu, a Japanese architectural and engineering firm, has a solution for the climate crisis: Simply build a band of solar panels 400 kilometers (249 miles) wide (pdf) running all the way around the Moon’s 11,000-kilometer (6,835 mile) equator and beam the carbon-free energy back to Earth in the form of microwaves, which are converted into electricity at ground stations.
Millions of California homeowners and businesses have installed solar panels on their roofs to generate their own electricity. Now a small but growing number of them want to pull the plug on their utilities by storing that energy in batteries and tap that power when the sun isn’t shining. And that has set off a fight over who will ultimately control the state’s power grid—California’s three big monopoly utilities or their customers empowered by companies like SolarCity and Tesla Motors.
Weapons-grade uranium isn’t the only thing Iran may be hiding. The country does not report its fishing catch to the United Nations, which is problematic given that the Persian Gulf, like other areas of the world, suffers from overfishing. But thanks to Google Earth, scientists now know that Iran hauls in more than 12,000 tonnes a year from 728 weirs, large structures built in intertidal zones to trap fish.
The boom in solar energy in the US in recent years? You haven’t seen anything yet. The pipeline of photovoltaic projects has grown 7% over the past 12 months and now stands at 2,400 solar installations that would generate 43,000 megawatts (MW), according to a report released today by market research firm NPD Solarbuzz. If all these projects are built, their peak electricity output would be equivalent to that of 43 big nuclear power plants, and enough to keep the lights on in six million American homes.
As the UN Climate Change Conference winds down today in Warsaw, an acrimonious dispute stands in the way of an accord on reducing global carbon emissions. Developing nations insist that industrial countries, which grew rich by spewing most of the extra carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere, bear the burden of compensating those most at risk from rising sea levels and catastrophic weather. The wealthy countries counter that their citizens should not have to pay for the actions of their ancestors.
If it seems like nothing fazes Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk—not three Model S fires in six weeks, a federal investigation into the incidents, nor the automaker’s sliding stock—it may be because his customers have his back. The automaker’s luxury electric sports sedan took the top spot today in Consumer Reports’s annual owner-satisfaction survey, with the Model S scoring 99 out of 100 possible points and beating out Audi, BMW and Mercedes.
Representatives from 134 nations are gathered in Warsaw this week for the biannual exercise in dithering on the environment—otherwise known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference. But a glance at greenhouse gas emissions data collected by the Global Carbon Project, a non-profit research organization, shows that a summit of the Big Five polluters—China, the US, India, Russia and Japan—might be more effective at reaching a carbon accord. Those countries spewed 20,049 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2), into the atmosphere in 2012, or nearly 57% of total global emissions.
