A 201-million-year-old climate catastrophe turned Europe into a landscape of fern savannahs that repeatedly caught fire, according to new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The post Fern-Fueled Wildfires Raged across Europe for Millennia during End-Triassic Mass Extinction appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
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
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Paleontologists in China have discovered what they say is the earliest confirmed pieces of amber ever found, a fossilized resin roughly 385 million years old (Middle Devonian epoch) that predates the previous record-holder by about 65 million years.
The post 385-Million-Year-Old Amber Found in China appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
There are far better ways to tackle climate breakdown, but successive governments have chosen to listen to the fossil fuel companies instead
The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here’s £21.7bn lying on the ground. The government could cancel its deranged, disastrous carbon capture and storage (CCS) programme at no cost to public welfare: in fact, it would greatly reduce the harm we will suffer.
Sorry, did I say £21.7bn? That’s the figure the government has been putting in its press releases for spending on this programme between now and 2050. But this covers only the first phase of the project. The climate experts Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge worked through the data produced by the government’s Climate Change Committee, which was scattered across different spreadsheets, and discovered that the projected cost of the full CCS programme between now and 2050 is £264bn.
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© Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare/The Guardian
© Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare/The Guardian
© Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare/The Guardian
Lanchester Wines in north-east England uses heat from a disused coalmine to maintain wine temperatures and with 23,000 flooded mines in the UK, there’s huge potential for more businesses and homes to follow its lead
Shove them in a fridge, stash them in a cellar – this is how most people store their favourite bottles of wine. But if you have warehouses full of thousands of vintages, you have to think a little differently.
For the last eight winters, Lanchester Wines has used heat from a disused coalmine to maintain ideal storage temperatures at its facilities in the north-east of England, helping to prevent freezing or spoilage.
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© Photograph: Posed by models; The Good Brigade/Getty Images
© Photograph: Posed by models; The Good Brigade/Getty Images
© Photograph: Posed by models; The Good Brigade/Getty Images
Solar provides more than twice the share of electricity it did five years ago.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced his administration's latest attempt to prop up the US coal industry during an incoherent press event that randomly oscillated between energy issues and Trump's fixation with building and renovating monuments in DC. The energy portion of the events was also frequently disconnected from reality.
"Today we're taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal," said Trump, apparently unaware that coal is one of the most expensive means of generating electricity in the US.
With wind and solar power getting cheaper, coal has become the second-most expensive way of producing electricity, trailing only the cost of building a new nuclear plant. As a result, no new coal plants have been completed in over a decade, and coal has gone from powering over half the electrical grid to producing only about 15 percent of the nation's electricity. That's before the indirect costs of coal use are considered. It produces the most greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy, releases dangerous particulates and chemicals into the atmosphere, and leaves behind ash that has high levels of toxic metals.
© Douglas Sacha
© Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
US president announces plans for two new coal plants, in Alaska and West Virginia, using Defense Production Act
Donald Trump is using wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he called “clean, beautiful coal”, despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.
“Today, we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” he said at a press conference on Thursday.
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© Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters
© Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters
© Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters
Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge in coal, interrupting what had been a long downward trend. But over the course of the year, both trends slowed considerably.
A year later, all of that seems to be in the past, as the US has returned to its normal pattern: slow growth, with renewables pushing coal off the grid. The one oddity is that hydroelectric production has surged without a corresponding increase in capacity, likely due to unusually warm weather in the western US causing the snowpack to melt early. That may have consequences later in the year.
Overall demand in the US grew by only 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period the year before. Often, changes in demand during this part of the year are driven by weather-related heating demand. But the US had an unusual combination set of weather conditions to start 2026, with the western half baking in unseasonal warm temperatures, while the eastern half suffered a deep freeze. So we'll probably need data from more of the year before we read too much into the small rise in demand we've seen so far.
© Getty Images
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