Happy Nice Mall

Climate disasters have been brutal this summer. Hurricane Ida downed the power grid in New Orleans on Wednesday, leaving more than 300,000 households without power. A few days later, 7 inches of rain fell on Ida New York, drowning people in their basements and paralyzing subways. Deadly heat waves scorched the Pacific Northwest, Forest fire encouraged residents to evacuate South Lake Tahoe, and floods devastated Tennessee.

There are two major lessons from these uninterrupted extreme weather events, As Christopher Flavelle, Anne Barnard, Michael Kimmelman and I wrote last week. First, the United States is not prepared for the climate shocks we are seeing today. Adapting to extreme weather conditions will be a difficult and costly task: power grids need to be strengthened, sewage systems need to be renewed, forests need to be cleared of combustible bushes.

But second: There are limits to how much the country can adapt. Unless nations do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the driver of climate change, they could soon run against the outer edges of resilience as heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires become more extreme than ever before.

We’ll see how the US reacts. as Coral Davenport and me wrote recentlyThere are currently two major bills in Congress that aim to address climate change risks.

One would provide the largest ever infusion of federal money for climate change adaptation programs. The other will include the most ambitious policies to date to reduce planet-warming emissions, including a program that will force utilities to switch to cleaner energy sources.

Some Democrats are betting that disasters this summer could spur the passing of both bills. But political obstacles remain.

quotation: “These events tell us we’re not prepared,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw climate risks planning at the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “We built our cities, our communities in a climate that no longer exists.”

Oil spills seen from space after Ida

Last Friday, my colleague Blacki Migliozzi and I were examining overhead images of the waters off the Louisiana coast with John Scott-Railton, a researcher at The Citizen Lab monitoring the devastation of Hurricane Ida.

We had noticed very small shifts in the water. Then Mr. Scott-Railton yelled in my ear.

Originating from a point outside of Port Fourchon, the main hub of Louisiana’s offshore oil and gas industry, it had identified a spill that experts would later describe as “significant”.

From there, we reviewed satellite imagery, reviewed ship tracking data, and interviewed scientists, local officials, and others involved in the cleanup to bring news of a leak and cleanup that has yet to be made public. The leak, thought to have originated from a damaged underwater pipe, is one of many currently detected in the Gulf. Read what we reported this week.

Numbers: A report published earlier this year The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that since the 1960s, federal regulators have allowed oil and gas producers in the Gulf to leave nearly 18,000 miles of pipelines on the seafloor, often abandoned without being cleaned or buried.

Bitcoin, by design, consumes energy. Could it be greener?

bitcoin. Litecoin. Bitcoin Gold. Ethereum. dogecoin.

Cryptocurrencies have emerged as one of the most fascinating, yet confusing, investments in the world. Their values ​​are rising. They crash. Its fans claim that they will change the world by replacing traditional currencies such as the dollar, rupee or ruble.

And simply in the process of existence, some of the most popular cryptocurrencies use a surprising amount of electricity. This week we explained how they work, why they’re so energy-intensive, and whether they could be greener. Here is the whole project By Jon Huang, Claire O’Neill and Hiroko Tabuchi.

Big picture: Managing a valuable digital currency without a central authority requires a lot of computing power.

Numbers: Bitcoin’s energy use is close to half of all electricity consumed in the world.

Why is it important: Bitcoin mining is digital, but still linked to the physical world of fossil fuels, power grids, and the climate crisis. What emerges as a forward-thinking currency has growing real-world implications.

quotation: Bitcoin mining means more than emissions. Miners who want the latest, fastest machines result in high turnover and create a new e-waste problem as unused hardware is thrown away and accumulated. “Bitcoin miners completely ignore this problem because they don’t have a solution,” said Alex de Vries, who runs Digiconomist, a site that monitors the sustainability of cryptocurrencies. “These machines were just thrown away.”

Also important this week:

A series of brutal storms across the country, The physical cost of climate change. But more frequent and severe disasters bring with them another type of threat, especially for small towns: the risk of long-term financial collapse.

This danger is particularly evident in North Carolina, where small coastal towns were hit by 2016’s Hurricane Matthew and 2018’s Hurricane Floyd. These storms didn’t just cause flooding; they also drove residents and businesses away, shrinking the tax base in already struggling towns. Now they are struggling to pay for essential services.

The plight of these towns is a cautionary tale of what climate change means for many of America’s small towns. And they illustrate the inherent contradictions in the federal government’s response to recurrent disasters—some people rebuild their homes while paying others to leave, often in the same town, further complicating these towns’ stalemate.

You can read more about what I found in North Carolina and what it says about the long-term effects of climate change on small towns. Here.

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