Pollution | Environment.org

Wildfire smoke is an emerging nationwide crisis for the United States. Supercharged by climate change, blazes are swelling into monsters that consume vast landscapes and entire towns. A growing body of evidence reveals that these conflagrations are killing far more people than previously known, as smoke travels hundreds or even thousands of miles, aggravating conditions like asthma and heart disease. One study, for instance, estimated that last January’s infernos in Los Angeles didn’t kill 30 people, as the official tally reckons, but 440 or more once you factor in the smoke. Another recent study estimated that wildfire haze already kills 40,000 Americans a year, which could increase to 71,000 by 2050.

Two additional studies published last month paint an even grimmer picture of the crisis in the U.S. and elsewhere. The first finds that emissions of greenhouse gases and …

The country’s largest magnesium supplier shut down. Now what?

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Only a few years ago, if you popped open a can of soda anywhere in the United States, the container you held more likely than not contained bits of magnesium harvested from the Great Salt Lake.

Now, the country’s supply of the critical mineral looks uncertain. The largest producer, US Magnesium, filed for bankruptcy in September. Its half-century-old Rowley smelting plant on the west shore of Utah’s famed lake could shutter for good.

The news comes as a relief for many environmental and Great Salt Lake advocates, but it also stokes broader anxieties over the supply chain for a material used in all kinds of products from car parts to wind turbines to solar-panel scaffolding and missiles.

“If we remove any [magnesium production] capacity we have here, that means that we’re wholly dependent, essentially, on imports,” said Simon Jowitt, Nevada’s …

What happens when disaster recovery becomes a luxury good

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Every year at the Oscars, attendees leave with gift bags so elaborate they have to be reported as income to the IRS. Luxury skincare, personal training sessions, designer apples that never brown, and extravagant trips are standard issue. But in 2025, Academy Award guests also received a grimmer gift: a yearlong subscription to a white-glove disaster recovery service called Bright Harbor, which has grown popular in the wake of the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles last January.

If your house is destroyed in a fire or flood, the basic logistics of righting your upturned life understandably consume your full attention, even if you’re a movie star. Under this level of stress, navigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s byzantine requirements for recovery assistance quickly becomes “a full-time job,” according to Bright Harbor’s chief growth officer, Emily Bush. “We help you understand …

Ford is retreating from EVs — but embracing grid batteries

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Ford, a century after it launched the modern automotive era, has given up on its early ambitions to charge into the electrified future.

The company announced that it will delete nearly $ 20 billion in book value to extricate itself from its EV investments, an eye-popping loss that amounts to one of the biggest corporate impairments ever.

The company, of course, views it differently: The move is a “decisive redeployment of capital,” it said on Monday, as it rolled out a string of related strategic changes alongside the write-down.

The pivot hits particularly hard in the southeastern Battery Belt, where Ford had invested in multibillion-dollar BlueOval plants to produce batteries and electric vehicles. The EV battery facility in Glendale, Kentucky, will lay off about 1,600 employees, and the local outlet Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that a Ford factory in Tennessee will …

Oh, great: Rat populations are surging as cities heat up

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Rats are in many ways better adapted to cities than the humans that built them. While urbanites struggle with crowds, sparse parking spaces, and their upstairs neighbors stomping around at 4 a.m., rats are living their best lives. Huddled safely underground, they pop up at night to chew through heaps of food waste in dumpsters and hot dogs left on stoops.

Now scientists have found yet another gnawing advantage for rats. A study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances found that as temperatures climb in cities, rat populations are growing, even as city dwellers suffer. “In cities that have experienced the fastest warming temperatures, they tended to have faster increases in their rat numbers as well,” said Jonathan Richardson, an urban ecologist at the University of Richmond and lead author of the paper. “Females will reach sexual …

We’re all at risk if Trump dismantles this legendary lab

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You may not know it, but you’ve benefited from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

For more than half a century, the federally funded lab has been instrumental in the development of weather models that have improved the forecasting of extreme events like hurricanes, thus saving lives. Your go-to weather app can predict the future thanks in large part to the lab, also known as NCAR. Its researchers also study atmospheric pollutants like wildfire smoke by flying planes through plumes, helping protect public health. More broadly, NCAR has been a towering leader in the advancement of climate science, gathering reams of data and developing sophisticated models of Earth systems.

That last bit is why Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, announced that the Trump administration plans to dismantle the operation. “This facility …

10 years after the Paris Agreement, world leaders are letting go of its most famous goal

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On the first day of this year’s United Nations climate summit, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised attendees that this conference would be different. The 30th annual Conference of the Parties, or COP30, would be the “COP of truth,” he said.

The Brazilian president’s forceful remarks at the outset of negotiations in the Amazonian city of Belém were meant to set the stage for a new chapter in international climate diplomacy. On the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the time had come, according to Lula, to stop arguing about what the historic agreement requires and instead focus on implementation — actually taking the steps required to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect countries against the coming economic and public health consequences wrought by climate change.

In the same speech, Lula called for a “road map” for …

At COP30 in Brazil, countries plan to armor themselves against a warming world

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Bill Gates scandalized much of the climate advocacy world late last month when he called for a “strategic pivot” in climate action. The Microsoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist argued for shifting attention away from global temperature targets and toward the work of preparing for the consequences of global warming. Or, in United Nations parlance, a shift from climate mitigation to adaptation.

While Gates’ call stirred controversy among those who want to see faster global decarbonization, there is already a broad consensus that adaptation — building the infrastructure that will help especially the poorest nations weather supercharged fires, floods, and droughts — is dramatically underfunded. The 2015 Paris Agreement promotes both mitigation and adaptation, but the latter has proven consistently harder to fund than the former: 64 percent of international climate-related financing has gone to mitigation, with only 17 …

Environment.org

Category: Pollution

Wildfire smoke is a national crisis, and it’s worse than you think

The country’s largest magnesium supplier shut down. Now what?

What happens when disaster recovery becomes a luxury good

Ford is retreating from EVs — but embracing grid batteries

Oh, great: Rat populations are surging as cities heat up

We’re all at risk if Trump dismantles this legendary lab

10 years after the Paris Agreement, world leaders are letting go of its most famous goal

At COP30 in Brazil, countries plan to armor themselves against a warming world