More than 3,000 solar panels power Jack’s Solar Garden, cool the land and help it turn a profit
The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent
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© Photograph: Thalia Juarez/The Guardian
© Photograph: Thalia Juarez/The Guardian
© Photograph: Thalia Juarez/The Guardian
From Nevada to Manchester, developers are trialling innovative solutions to clean energy’s biggest challenge
In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates a sprawling clean energy project, stretching across an area roughly the size of 12,600 football fields, will play host to a breakthrough allowing solar energy to power the equivalent of half a million homes through the night.
The Gulf state has been steadily combining 5.2GW of solar power capacity with 19GWh of battery storage to create the largest battery scheme in the world.
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© Photograph: UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
© Photograph: UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
© Photograph: UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Campaigners hope move will force commercial banks to rethink holding assets linked to the fossil fuel
Climate campaigners have declared a victory after the Bank of England said it would no longer accept bonds linked to one of the most polluting industries on the planet for key loan arrangements.
The ban, which comes into force in October, marks a fresh crackdown on thermal coal, which is burned in power plants to create electricity, and has long been a target of green policy activists.
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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Party manifesto pledged to honour existing North Sea exploration licences but not issue new ones
Andy Burnham risks his first confrontation with Labour MPs if he announces new oil and gas drilling licences when he becomes prime minister, insiders have warned.
Speculation is rife that Burnham will unveil fresh plans for drilling in the North Sea after he is installed in Downing Street.
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© Photograph: Jack Taylor/Reuters
© Photograph: Jack Taylor/Reuters
© Photograph: Jack Taylor/Reuters
Apartment living can be a barrier to solar and battery adoption. Here’s how to navigate the hurdles and practicalities
Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint
Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com
Australia is a world leader in household solar, but the benefits of rooftop renewables are unevenly distributed – and many of the 2.5 million people living in apartments or units are missing out.
About 39% of Australians living in detached or semi-detached houses have solar, compared with 6% of those in apartments or units, research by Energy Consumers Australia (ECA) finds. A gap also exists in the take-up of batteries, installed in 7% of houses but only in 3% of apartments or units.
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© Photograph: Allume Energy
© Photograph: Allume Energy
© Photograph: Allume Energy
The predicted £264bn cost by 2050 could be even higher, plus renewables avoid a far higher total of emissions than can be captured, writes Andrew Boswell, while Simon Oldridge calls out vested interests
Prof Myles Allen and colleagues, in their letter (12 July) on carbon capture and storage (CCS), propose licensing gasfields on condition that producers store an increasing proportion of “the carbon dioxide their products generate”. Their proposal only considers CO2. Methane is excluded by choice although it leaks throughout global fossil-fuel supply chains, including during extraction, processing, liquefaction and shipping.
A growing academic literature, supported by satellite observations of major methane plumes, shows that these emissions can be very substantial, and are the dominant near-term climate impact for gas supplied as liquefied natural gas.
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© Photograph: Peter Cade/Getty Images
© Photograph: Peter Cade/Getty Images
Campaigners say field will bring minimal benefit for UK economy, as industry lobbies Burnham for go-ahead
More people can fit on to the top deck of a standard London bus than will be directly employed on the new Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea, industry documents show.
Only 27 direct full-time jobs would be created by Jackdaw, one of the biggest gasfields remaining in the North Sea, according to an environmental impact assessment filed publicly by its owner, Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Norway’s Equinor.
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© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Heatwaves, high energy prices, calls for reindustrialisation and North Sea drilling are all high on the to-do list
Wildfires cast a pall of smoke this week over Greater Manchester, whose former mayor Andy Burnham stands on the threshold of No 10. Amid three UK heatwaves so far this year, which have killed thousands of people in England and Wales, damaged harvests and left children crying in classrooms, the new prime minister’s plans for the climate crisis remain as shrouded as his city.
“Burnham has been very quiet about the climate [crisis] so far,” says Chris Venables, an environmental campaigner and fellow at the Green Alliance thinktank. “I don’t think [it] is at the forefront of his mind, but that does not mean he will water down this agenda.”
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© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Guy Bell/Shutterstock
Fresh off a month that saw all but five states mired in severe drought, the US is reeling from multiple crises of national proportions.
First, there’s the record-breaking heat dome which is currently baking most of the continental US. According to the Guardian, over 100 million Americans are currently living under extreme heat warnings, forecasted to persist well into the weekend.
At the same time, the country is being smoked out by dozens of wildfires across North America, a situation the heat wave isn’t exactly helping. On top of that, smoke from over 800 blazes in Canada is helping choke out the US Midwest and North-East, making the air hazardous to breathe.
Things aren’t necessarily any prettier outside of the smoke-zone — just wetter. Communities situated around the Guadalupe River in Texas are reeling after near endless rainfall triggered massive floods across the state for the second year in a row.
So far, at least one person is dead, while thousands have been forced to evacuate. At least 57 counties representing over six million people were placed under flood watches over the past few days. With even more rain on the horizon, it remains to be seen when Texas will get relief from the torrential downfalls.
Stepping back, it’s clear this cascade of extremes isn’t happening in a vacuum. The overlapping wildfires, floods, and heat waves are all being amplified by the same climate forces: a rapidly warming planet, fueled in no small part by skyrocketing carbon emissions from the US itself.
All in all, it’s been an action-packed summer as the El Niño cycle rolls on — and unfortunately, the devastation is far from over.
More on climate disaster: Scientists Propose Dimming Sun to Combat El Niño
The post As Much of the East Coast Is Choking on Wildfire Smoke, Texas Is Drowning in Life-Threatening Floods appeared first on Futurism.
A new study finds plantations respond strongly to carbon dioxide, especially while young.
More than 800 wildfires are currently active
The post Radar Map Shows Wildfires in Canada Blanketing the US with Smoke appeared first on Nautilus.
When Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE boys started snipping wires across DC, they took out critical programs like the government’s premier climate research website and the hurricane-hunter aircraft gathering data on dangerous storms.
While they were at it, the Trump administration also ripped up a project that would have vastly improved the country’s ability to monitor wildfires. The GeoXO program was a project originally encompassing six satellites that would greatly improve the resolution available to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor atmospheric conditions like wildfire smoke, as well as weather events like lightning strikes, and climate observations such as color changes in the ocean’s surface.
The six satellites were meant to encompass three regions split between the US West, Central, and East. Starting in April 2025, however, the Trump administration directed the NOAA to make drastic cuts to GeoXO. These included cutting two satellites from the mission altogether — scrapping the central observation region entirely — and canceling major contracts for existing GeoXO instruments. The purported goal was to refocus the program on a “core weather mission,” as opposed to long-term climate monitoring, following the administration’s broader attacks on any effort to mitigate or even mention climate change.
One of those cancelled instruments, the GeoXO Atmospheric Composition device, was a high-resolution spectrometer designed to give the NOAA advanced capabilities to monitor air pollutants, like ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and excess particulate matter. In the long term, the tool would have helped scientists paint a clearer picture of how particular weather events relate to broader climate shifts, an NOAA report explains.
Of course, the timing of the cancellation couldn’t have been worse. Huge swaths of the United States and Canada are currently being smoked out by noxious fumes emanating from hundreds of wildfires across North America.
Though the GeoXO program wouldn’t have gone live until the 2030s, Trump’s decision represents a devastating loss for our future ability to monitor this exact phenomenon, which is becoming something of an annual tradition for millions of people.
As Susan Anenberg, chair of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University observed, the NOAA “had spent years planning an air pollution instrument on the GeoXO satellite which would provide near-real-time, location-specific data on smoke levels, giving people the information they need to avoid exposure.”
Anenberg explained that the public health benefits this kind of monitoring would provide “could amount to about $13 billion per year.”
“As smoke events happen more often,” Anenberg continued, “we need more data, not less.”
More on Trump: Prices Already Spiking at Trump’s Mysterious Gas Stations That Promised Cheap Fuel
The post Trump Decimated a Satellite Program That Would’ve Vastly Improved Wildfire Smoke Monitoring appeared first on Futurism.
For centuries, ancient seafarers have told tales of fabled lost lands. They have been known by many names—Ultima Thule, Hy-Brasil, the Fortunate Isles, and of course, the legendary lost city of Atlantis.
Now, scientists say Earth’s hidden plumbing system may be feeding one of its strangest ecosystems—an area on the Atlantic seafloor that conjures images of such legendary landscapes lost to time and memory.
Known as the Lost City hydrothermal field, this ancient Atlantic oddity is doing more than just broadening our view on how extremophiles thrive in some of our planet’s least hospitable environments: it offers a potential model for how extraterrestrial life may thrive elsewhere in our solar system.
In a recent paper published in Geophysics, Geochemistry, and Geosystems, an international team of researchers finally discovered the system behind these hydrogen- and methane-rich alkaline hot springs that feed the Lost City ecosystem.
The white carbonate chimneys that emit these gases provide an alternative to sunlight as the Lost City’s primary energy source, allowing life to thrive in a challenging deep ocean environment.
Those precious nutrients coming from these vents were created by underground reactions. It turns out that the water feeding the Lost City is likely part of a larger underground system, where extreme processes imbue the liquid with essential nutrients.
The discovery came from nearly a mile below the Atlantis Massif, a large block of Earth’s crust that forms an underwater mountain range. This dome-shaped region stretches for 10 miles and rises 14,000 feet above the ocean floor.
Geologists believe this formation originated between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, as tectonic plate movement pulled it out from beneath the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, forming a new feature on the ocean floor.
From aboard the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) ship Resolution, scientists drilled their 4,160-foot-deep hole about 2,600 feet north of the Lost City. They were intrigued to find that the water recovered from the hole had a chemical composition extremely similar to that of water emerging from the Lost City vents.
From their drill site, they pumped water from varying depths up to the surface for examination.
Roughly the first 1,500 feet consisted primarily of seawater and freshwater from the drilling process, yet at lower depths, they found water that had risen from beneath the rock. At the deepest depths, up to 80% of the sample came from these subterranean regions.
Their detailed analyses revealed that the water had reacted with the surrounding minerals to gain calcium while losing magnesium, a reaction that would require prolonged exposure to rocks at a temperature of at least 572°F. Despite this finding, the hole was much cooler when the team took their samples.
Typically, a water-rock reaction with gabbroic and ultramafic rock would produce such results that are high in calcium, yet with no magnesium. Other components, such as lithium, rubidium, cesium, and strontium, were found in the water at both the bore site and Lost City.
The findings are consequential for providing the first direct evidence of this extremely hot water circulating beneath the Atlantis Massif through gabbroic and ultramafic rock. In this hidden plumbing system, seawater reaches deep within oceanic plates, providing energy to these deep-sea environments and potentially supporting their microbial life.
As researchers have now demonstrated that hydrogen-enriched water can naturally form deep within the Earth through rock reactions, researchers say there are major implications for our understanding of the Earth and beyond.
For one, it adds a new element to Earth’s energy cycles, explaining how life persists under such difficult, dark conditions. Secondly, it offers intriguing new ideas about how life might persist in extraterrestrial environments, as humans continue to search for it elsewhere in the cosmos. The strange conditions of the Lost City ecosystem are thought to be a potential model for how life could persist in the global oceans of ice-covered worlds such as Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
However, some uncertainty about the samples does remain. Seawater, freshwater, and drilling contaminants were present in the samples, and the exact proportions attributable to gabbro or ultramafic rock are unknown. Also, while this is evidence for an underground connection between the borehole and the Lost City chimneys, it is not conclusive proof that they are connected.
Plans are already underway to return once the borehole has stabilized to collect pristine samples that will allow researchers to answer questions about where and how these reactions occur, as well as the amount of energy they add to the water. From the most inhospitable regions on Earth to the quest for organisms among the stars, the research underway deep within our oceans is providing new answers to how such life persists.
The recent paper, “Borehole Waters From Hole U1601C (Atlantis Massif) Provide Constraints for a Deep-Sourced Formation Water That (Could) Feed the Lost City Hydrothermal Field,” appeared in Geophysics, Geochemistry, and Geosystems on July 12, 2026.
Micah Hanks, Editor in Chief of The Debrief, also contributed to this reporting.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
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