Dave Levitan

This week, Canadian company Capital Power announced that it will stop development of a $2.4 billion carbon capture and storage project at its Genesee power plant, a coal-turning-to-gas behemoth that is among the larger generating stations in the country. This is less a failure and more a return to normalcy.

Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar was charged along with his wife Imelda on Friday in what federal authorities said was a years-long scheme to accept bribes and influence Congressional activity on behalf of foreign entities. I swear this is a climate change story.

If pollsters had asked San Francisco residents how worried they were about earthquakes in April of 1906, they might have gotten somewhat different answers on the 17th of the month versus the 19th.

The U.K.-based climate think tank Ember released its Global Electricity Review 2024 on Wednesday, and it was filled with good news. The world generated 30 percent of its electricity from renewable sources last year, for one. “With record construction of solar and wind in 2023, a new era of falling fossil generation is imminent,” its authors wrote, calling 2023 a “pivot point” where power sector emissions likely peaked.

The Washington Post has an exclusive today on a meeting between Donald Trump and a cabal of oil industry executives that took place at Mar-A-Lago in April. The meeting seems to have gone about how you might expect.

Swiss company Climeworks announced this week that their signature carbon capture facility, known as Mammoth, has been switched on in Iceland. The plant grabs carbon dioxide out of the air and sends it underground where it interacts with basaltic rock, storing it permanently. It is the biggest such facility on the planet. Great news! And now we just need 27 more of them on our way to net-zero!

At around 1 pm on Monday, Minneapolis had the seventh-worst air quality of any city in the world, just behind Dhaka, Bangladesh. Various spots in the area had Air Quality Index scores in the 150 or higher range, high enough to fall into the “unhealthy” category where outdoor activity should be kept to a minimum. This is what is known as “summer” now.

We’re deep into the second round of the NBA Playoffs, which means every fan has now seen the same extremely limited set of commercials running on ESPN, TNT, and ABC approximately 45,000 times. Many of these are designed in a lab to commit atrocities against viewers. These are the worst of them.

Florida governor and normal stander Ron DeSantis has fixed climate change, saving the country’s most vulnerable state from the rising seas, scorching heat, and powerful hurricanes. He did so with the simple flourish of a pen, signing into law a groundbreaking bill that, uh, removes most mentions of climate change from state law.

Climate change is expensive. This is confirmed over and over, in study after study, in projections and in analyses of money already spent. But all those analyses might still be underselling the issue.