Climate & Environment

خلاصہ: New catalyst turns carbon dioxide into clean fuel sourceResearchers have found that manganese, an abundant and inexpensive metal, can be used to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into formate, a potential hydrogen source for fuel cells. The key was a clever redesign that made the catalyst last far longer than similar low-cost materials. Surprisingly, the improved manganese catalyst even beat many expensive precious-metal options. The discovery could help turn greenhouse gas into clean energy ingredients.Source InformationPublisher: All Top News -- ScienceDailyOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: Why the future of meat production is in vats, not farmsI recently ate a pig that’s alive and well at a sanctuary in upstate New York. Her name is Dawn, and she donated a bit of fat, which a company called Mission Barns grows in bioreactors, then blends with plant-based ingredients to create pork products (like the meatballs above) that taste darn near like the real thing . Its “cultivated” offerings join a herd of alternative meats — including those from mainstays like Impossible Foods and Eat Just — that are challenging the traditional livestock industry, which uses immense swaths of land and spews staggering quantities of greenhouse gas emissions. In his new book Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food — and Our Future , Bruce Friedrich, founder and president of the Good Food Institute , catalogs the extraordinary costs of conventional meat production and the vast potential for alternative culinary technologies. Grist sat down with Friedrich to talk about the progress, challenges, and potential of the fledgling industry. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Q. It’d be great to get a rundown on — if you’ll pardon the pun — your beef with meat. A. Conventional meat production has significant external costs. In 2006, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization released a more-than-400-page report called Livestock’s Long Shadow . It said that animal-product production is responsible for all of the most serious environmental harms at every scale, from local to global. It looked at deforestation, climate change, air pollution, water pollution, water depletion, loss of biodiversity, and said that the inefficiency and extra stages of production involved in producing animal products made meat, dairy, and eggs a significant contributor to all of those, including being the number one contributor to deforestation. All of those environmental consequences have gotten worse. If it takes 9 calories of feed to get 1 calorie of chicken, or 10 or more calories of feed to get a calorie of farmed fish or pork, and even more calories to get a calorie from a ruminant animal — a cow or a sheep or a goat — that’s an inherent inefficiency that really is 800 percent food waste, or more. All of the inefficiency adds up, and that’s why the latest numbers are that roughly 20 percent of climate emissions are attributable to animal agriculture. Q. We’re at an interesting point in which the technology has gotten extremely advanced when it comes to replicating what is grown in an animal in a field somewhere. What are the options for alternative meats? A. It’s very much similar to how we think about renewable energy or electric vehicles. There is a recognition that the world is going to consume more energy, the world is going to drive more miles. The world is also going to eat more meat. In the last 25 years, meat production is up about 65 percent. It will probably be up something like 65 percent again through 2050, and that means all of the external costs of meat production continue to get worse. Just like if you’re talking about energy, we need an all-of-the-above strategy. So we want everything from more energy-efficient light bulbs to houses, but we do need renewable energy as one of the tools in the toolkit. Here, the solution is to figure out how we create plant-based meat that is indistinguishable and less expensive, and how we grow actual animal meat in factories rather than on live animals. Q. You talk in the book about a number of ways this can be incentivized, though there are many states that have already done things like ban cultivated meat . What could be done in these early days of alt meats that could accelerate both the science and the adoption? A. One very encouraging aspect of a shift in the direction of plant-based meat and cultivated meat is that because they are so much more efficient, there is a massive profit motive. And there is also a massive food-security motive for countries like China, Japan, and Korea that have significant food self-sufficiency concerns. Countries that cannot feed themselves recognize that that is a significant national security threat and are highly motivated to figure out how to feed themselves. These countries recognize that if they can produce meat with a fraction of the inputs required to produce animal-based meat, that will be a boon to their national security. And in the United States, we’re also seeing bipartisan support for alternative proteins for economic competitiveness reasons. Q. One challenge now is that there’s a backlash in the United States against ultra-processed foods. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have been struggling financially lately , perhaps as part of that. Is that a surmountable challenge for the industry? A. The first thing to say is that the plant-based meats are significantly healthier than what they are replacing. All of the plant-based meats that consumers like best, relative to animal-based meat, have less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, more fiber, and more protein. All of the plant-based meats are significantly less calorically dense than the animal-based meat they’re replacing. The indictment against ultra-processed foods works, generally speaking, as shorthand for products that are low in fiber, calorically dense, high in fat, high in sugar. But comparing plant-based meat to Doritos and Coca-Cola doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are some questions around some of the other ultra-processed foods, but the science is clear that the meat and dairy alternatives do not lead to bad health outcomes. Q. You make the point in the book that these companies should collaborate with the traditional meat industry, reforming the industry instead of replacing it. Why? A. The goal of the meat industry is to produce high-quality protein profitably. Figuring out how to produce that same end product far more efficiently is going to be extremely profitable for the companies and countries that lean in. If you’re sort of...

خلاصہ: The biomass industry promised these Southern towns prosperity. So why are they still dying?The mayor of Urania steered his pickup down a dirt road snaking through the weedy lots and patches of trees that had once been the bustling heart of his central Louisiana town. Jay Ivy passed pines growing where the saws of the sprawling Urania mill turned similar specimens into lumber. He pointed out the log pond, now the domain of alligators, and stopped at the mill’s smokestack, still standing over an increasingly deserted townscape. Once a year, the smokestack belches celebratory black clouds over Urania. “For our fall festival, we get it smoking again with some old tires or whatever we can find to burn,” the big-shouldered mayor said with a sheepish grin. “I suppose it reminds us of what we had here.” Jay Ivy, the mayor of Urania, looks out over his small Louisiana town. He hopes a wood pellet mill operated by British energy giant Drax will revive its economy. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today Urania was devastated when the mill and a related fiberboard operation closed in 2002, putting more than 350 people out of work. There was little hope of a revival until the British energy giant Drax arrived in the Deep South a decade ago, hungry for cheap wood it could burn in England as a “renewable” alternative to coal. Drax began opening wood pellet mills in former timber towns in Louisiana and Mississippi that had fallen on hard times. The region offered plentiful low-grade timber, a labor force desperate for work, and lax environmental regulations . The company was already producing pellets, which it calls “sustainable biomass,” in Mississippi and north Louisiana when Drax opened its biggest pellet mill just outside Urania in late 2017 . A ‘Welcome to Urania’ sign, stands at the entrance of the small Louisiana town, home to a Drax wood pellet mill. At the mill, LaSalle BioEnergy, logs await the grinders. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today A year later, then-Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, thanked Drax for “believing in Louisiana.” Jobs and other economic growth were soon to follow, he and the company promised. “Louisiana aggressively pursued Drax Biomass and today those efforts have paid off,” Edwards said at the time. But more than a decade after Drax took root in the region, prosperity has yet to arrive. Drax employs a fraction of the workers the old mills did, and many commute from other towns. The money that might have flowed from Drax into investments in local roads, parks, and schools has been eroded by massive tax breaks. Now home to around 700 residents, Urania has lost nearly half its population since 2010 , a decline that continued after Drax built its mill in 2017. In 2023, it drew unwanted attention when a news site declared it “ the poorest town in America .” According to the most recent census report, some 40 percent of Urania’s residents live in poverty, and the average income is $12,400 — roughly one-fifth the national average. “It’s a town of old people — a poor town, really,” Ivy said. A painted saw blade depicting Urania’s early days sits in the town’s recreation hall. The Louisiana town lost much of its population after its lumber mill closed. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today Gloster, Mississippi, a majority Black town of about 850 people near the Louisiana line, has also seen its population shrink since Drax opened a pellet mill near the shuttered elementary school in 2014. More than 10 percent of Gloster’s working-age residents are unemployed, and the typical household income of about $22,500 is less than half the Mississippi median. Residents in both towns believe that noise, dust, and air pollution from the nearly identical mills are harming their health. While it remains unclear whether Drax’s operations can be tied to any one person’s illness, the mills release chemicals at concentrations that federal regulators and scientists say are toxic to humans. Louisiana and Mississippi state regulators have repeatedly fined the company for a host of pollution violations, but several residents and environmental groups say the penalties haven’t made a noticeable difference. “Drax is a false solution,” said Jimmy Brown, a former worker at Gloster’s plywood mill, which closed 17 years ago. “They want to make something they can’t make in their own country, so they come here. We got this mill, but we don’t have schools anymore. We don’t have doctors anymore, and we got all these people with respiratory issues and heart issues now.” Sawdust piles up at Drax’s wood pellet mill near Urania, Louisiana. The mill presses sawdust into pellets that are burned in a former coal plant in Yorkshire, England. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today On the outskirts of Urania, a giant hydraulic arm tips a tractor-trailer backward until its cab points to the sky. Several tons of tree limbs and other logging debris spill from the trailer into one of the mouths feeding Drax’s mill, called LaSalle BioEnergy. The half-mile-long facility also consumes a steady diet of sawdust from a neighboring lumber mill and a huge volume of tree-length logs, hoisted by crane into the teeth of an industrial-size wood chipper. “We take everything — the little bitty trees that’re so thin that nobody wants them, and also the limbs and even the pine needles,” Tommy Barbo, the mill’s manager, said during a tour. “Nothing gets wasted.” Tommy Barbo, manager of Drax’s wood pellet mill in Urania, Louisiana, surveys operations at the facility. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today Drax and other utility-scale pellet makers initially promoted their industry as consumers of sawdust and other mill wastes, but these sources couldn’t meet their growing production goals. Large pellet mills now get most of their wood directly from logging whole trees. At the Urania mill, log stacks larger than football fields and higher than houses are stripped of bark, shredded, cooked in a 1,000-degree tumble dryer, pulverized in hammermills, pressed...

خلاصہ: How thick is the ice on the Great Lakes? Scientists want your help.Scientists in the Midwest are asking for help from the public this winter to measure ice thickness on the Great Lakes and other inland lakes in the region, which they plan to use to improve ice-forecasting models. Satellites do a good job at capturing how much ice coverage there is, but not how thick it is, according to researchers at the Great Lakes Observing System, or GLOS, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More data could give researchers insight as to how climate change is altering ice cover in the region and provide important safety information for people out on the ice. Improved ice models are also useful for navigational safety, like when ice-breaking ships clear frozen waterways. “Usually it’s the scientists putting data out to the public, and this time, we’re asking the public to give feedback to the scientists so they can improve the models,” said Shelby Brunner, science and observations manager at GLOS. She said buoys that collect data on lakes typically get pulled out in the winter because of harsh conditions. The citizen science program is in its second year of data collection. Last year, the program recruited around a dozen people in the Great Lakes region and logged around 30 measurements. Data collected by the public can be submitted online as long as there’s ice to measure, and stipends are available to participants. Recreation aside, the Great Lakes also make up the region’s largest source of fresh water — more than 30 million people rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Brunner said the data from last year showed researchers that ice is more variable than they initially predicted. That’s why more data from people who are already “in tune with the ice” is useful to tap into, she said. “They’re posting pictures of when there’s water in between layers of ice, and that’s information that is so novel for the modelers to have,” Brunner said. “If we can continually improve, we’re going to get safer and safer predictions.” A charter fish captain uses an auger on ice-covered Saginaw Bay in Michigan in 2025. Courtesy of Ayumi Fujisake-Manome The data is also useful as ice formation on the Great Lakes shifts with climate change, Brunner said. Research suggests that average ice cover on the Great Lakes has decreased overall since the 1990s, but year-to-year variability is high. That means there are years with very little ice or years with a lot of it — as of January 28, 38 percent of the Great Lakes had iced over this winter, higher than the historical average at this time of year. “We don’t get to go back in time and measure the past. We have to measure it now and keep it safe. So we can use it for reference for how things are looking in the future,” Brunner said. It’s not just ice fishers contributing data. Mandi Young, a science teacher in Traverse City, took her middle school students out last year to measure ice thickness on Cedar Lake, a long, narrow lake adjacent to Grand Traverse Bay popular for boating and fishing. Young has her students regularly collect information from the water, like its temperature or depth, to compare with previous years. Ice thickness was another data point they could add to the mix, she said. “The students really love it. They get the chance to be outside. They know that their information is being saved and used by other community members,” Young said. Young plans to have her students measure ice thickness again this winter. This time, they have an auger to drill holes into the icy lake. She said one of her favorite parts is the questions students ask while they’re out taking measurements: “Could we throw a rock on it? Will it break? Oh, what about throwing ice on ice, what’s gonna happen? Oh, did you hear that sound?” “Kids just get curious about ice,” she said. The data they collect from inland lakes like this one will be kept for archives and used in future research, Brunner, the scientist, said. She hopes citizen scientists see the benefit in contributing data that could help the many people, from ice fishers and ship captains to researchers, who spend time on the ice. “Our job is to collect information that’s relevant now, but also make sure we do our due diligence and make it useful in the future,” she said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How thick is the ice on the Great Lakes? Scientists want your help. on Jan 30, 2026.Source InformationPublisher: GristOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: A Nebraska utility says that its coal plant poses no ‘significant’ health threatThis story is made possible through a partnership between Flatwater Free Press and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization. On paper, the public power district serving much of eastern Nebraska has been trying to quit coal at its North Omaha plant since 2014. That June, its board voted to retire three of the plant’s five coal units in 2016 and convert the final two to natural gas in 2023. The almost 12 years since then, however, have been marked by delays that have kept coal units running at the aging plant, while power demand continues to rise. Then, in late 2025, as the public utility’s management recommended the board delay retiring the two remaining coal units, board members received some reassurance. Omaha Public Power District CEO Javier Fernandez told the utility’s board members that a human health risk assessment, commissioned by management, showed that the plant poses no additional significant “negative impact on the health of people in the vicinity.” But that’s not exactly what the report — which focused on a specific type of air pollution, not all the potential harms to human health — shows, according to six public health and environmental science experts who reviewed the study at the request of the Flatwater Free Press and Grist. Asked about the utility’s reason for commissioning the health assessment, OPPD said the utility wanted to provide “the best information possible” about a top-of-mind form of pollution to its board and stakeholders. Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen responded to news coverage of the study, writing on social media: “The science confirms it: OPPD’s North Omaha coal-fired power units — which generate some of the cheapest and most reliable electricity in Nebraska — are safe.” Rather than assuaging concerns, though, the report and the subsequent mischaracterizations of its findings have fueled criticism from community members, experts, and at least two of the utility’s board members. “So the health assessment, I think, was a smack in the face,” said State Sen. Terrell McKinney, a Democrat from North Omaha. “It didn’t speak of the historical impacts. It didn’t speak of the disproportionate amount of asthma, respiratory issues that community has or health impacts, and also the community in which the coal plant is situated is a community that’s been historically minority.” Rather than assuaging concerns, OPPD’s report has fueled criticism from North Omaha community members, who are no stranger to pollution. Naomi Delkamiller / Flatwater Free Press In the wake of the study’s criticisms, OPPD board member Craig Moody said he is looking at opportunities to partner with the Douglas County Health Department to look at environmental health impacts to North Omaha residents. Still, the report — and news coverage of its supposed findings — added fuel to an already simmering debate. In October, the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office sued OPPD, arguing its plan to phase out coal in North Omaha threatened the utility’s mandate to provide affordable and reliable electricity. Nationally, the Trump administration has moved to block other utilities from retiring coal plants for similar reasons. Ultimately, OPPD delayed retiring and refueling the coal units, with management citing a variety of reasons supporting this decision. In December, the board outlined steps and a timeline for management to work toward a future retirement, which could take at least another two years — though that timeline is not binding. And even as they did so, at least two board members were not impressed by the health study. “I generally understand why staff wanted to do the study, but to put it bluntly, it was a big miss,” Moody said at the December board meeting. “And I’m not going to go into the details. I will simply say the science is clear: Burning coal is not good for human health, and it’s really that simple.” North Omaha residents, 68 percent of whom are people of color , are no stranger to pollution. The historically redlined community is situated near a major highway and the city’s airport, and part of the community is also included in the city’s lead Superfund site. The North Omaha Station plant has operated since the 1950s. North Omaha residents suffer from higher rates of asthma, COPD, heart disease, and stroke, said Lindsay Huse, the Douglas County Health Department director. “What’s special to Omaha is the fact that we have a population who’s already experiencing many, many more negative health outcomes due to a number of variables, and if this is something that we can remove from that risk profile for them, I think that that is only a good thing,” said Huse, who sent a letter to OPPD that opposed the continued burning of coal in North Omaha after the health assessment’s release. Despite its stated desire to do so, OPPD has struggled to wind down coal in North Omaha. After meeting its 2016 goal to convert three of the coal units to natural gas — also a source of powerful greenhouse gas emissions — OPPD signaled it wouldn’t meet the 2023 deadline for the remaining two coal units. Challenges with supply chain, construction and the federally regulated generation interconnection process hindered OPPD’s ability to build and connect part of the replacement power generation . Further complicating those efforts, OPPD needed to ensure the new power sources met requirements established by the Southwest Power Pool, a regional transmission organization. OPPD set a new target of 2026 to stop burning coal at North Omaha. But some of the new power generation didn’t come online until 2025 and the utility was waiting on final agreements with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that management said were submitted years ago. In August, OPPD management hired the Electric Power Research Institute, an energy research and development nonprofit, to conduct a human health and environmental risk assessment associated with the operations of the two coal units at the North Omaha Station. Read Next Trump is keeping coal on life support. How long can...

خلاصہ: Solar farms can be havens for rare plants. Just ask the threecorner milkvetch.The ostensibly barren Mojave Desert is in fact teeming with plants and animals, including a rare species known as the threecorner milkvetch. It’s a member of the pea family, splaying across the ground instead of climbing up a garden trestle. Given the harsh desert conditions, it waits until the arrival of rains to burst from the earth — flowering, fruiting, and reproducing. Though hardy, the threecorner milkvetch — which is under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act — and its fellow species in the Mojave are still sensitive to disturbance, like when solar farms literally break ground. Traditionally, energy companies “blade and grade” habitats, meaning they cut out vegetation and even out the soil, which disrupts the seed banks stored within the ground. In the desert outside of Las Vegas, the Gemini Solar Project took a gentler approach, instead trying to preserve the ecosystem. According to a new study, it paid off for the threecorner milkvetch: Before the development, scientists found 12 plants on the site, and afterward in 2024 found 93, signifying that the seeds survived construction. Compared to a nearby plot of land, the plants at Gemini grew wider and taller, and produced more flowers and fruits. That might be because the solar panels shade the soil, slowing evaporation, which makes more water available to the plants to grow big and strong. “So you just have the potential for a lot more plants,” said Tiffany Pereira, an ecologist at the Desert Research Institute and lead author of the paper , which was published late last year. “There’s seedlings of so many other species coming up as well. And so the fact that seed bank survived is phenomenal.” Plants grow among panels in the Gemini Solar Project, outside Las Vegas. Courtesy of Tiffany Pereira It’s yet more evidence that solar farms can be built in ways that minimize disturbances to ecosystems. (The company behind the Gemini project, Primergy, did not respond to requests for comment.) This technique is called ecovoltaics: Instead of blade-and-grade, facilities are built with native species in mind. To give the ecosystem a boost, for instance, a crew can seed the soils with native grasses and flowers. “Some of those seed mixes do quite well at solar facilities, and they attract pollinators, birds, and other wildlife as a result,” said Lee Walston, an ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Sort of asking that umbrella, Field of Dreams , question, right: If you build it, will they come?” In Minnesota, at least, the answer is yes. Walston led a study of two solar sites on converted cropland there, observing the growth of biodiversity over the course of five years. The researchers found that the number of unique flowering plant species increased sevenfold, and the abundance of insect pollinators tripled. Native bees alone increased by 20 times. In a follow-on study across a dozen solar sites , grassland birds flocked to the areas, likely attracted by the abundance of insects — same goes for bats . Birds could also nest among the panels, hiding from predators. “We’ve seen positive outcomes, sort of across the board,” Walston said. “Anytime that you’re seeing increases in insect prey, you’ve got at least a really strong potential for also seeing greater bird activity and bat activity, as they are attracted to those sites.” Such a significant boost to biodiversity is not a given, though. Certain plant species will need more or less shade from the panels: In the Mojave, Pereira only found one threecorner milkvetch, for example, growing directly under a panel. The rest were popping up in the sunnier spaces between them. Young plants of other species, by contrast, might prefer shadier spots, because too much sunlight can stress them. An ecovoltaic project teems with flowers, which attract native pollinating species. Courtesy of Lee Walston Panel height is a major factor, too: Taller ones let bigger plant species grow to their full potential — but the higher the supports, the more a solar company must spend on materials. A facility might also set a specific height to accommodate livestock like sheep and goats, used for “conservation grazing” to clear out invasive weeds, which in turn reduces the fire risk of dead plants. “We’re trying to work with developers,” Walston said, “to say, ‘OK, well, if all you can do is 2 feet, what might be the best mix of seed mixes and management styles that could really optimize the habitat?’” That mowing might sound destructive, but it mimics the natural order of things, as grazers like deer and buffalo, in addition to wildfires, have historically served the same purpose. Ecovoltaics can also return former agricultural fields to more of their natural state. “I think there is real potential for solar farms to be especially good for biodiversity in prairie ecosystems, since prairies evolved over time to require repeated disturbance,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at the nonprofit Environment America, who wasn’t involved in the new research. The blade-and-grade alternative, on the other hand, doesn’t just disrupt a habitat. With native plant species cleared out, the earth loses the root structures that keep soils from blowing away. Then, opportunistic and fast-growing invasive species can take over, muscling out the natives. And their flowers might not be as enticing for indigenous pollinators like bumblebees. Just as endemic plants can grow among solar panels, so too can crops, a technique known as agrivoltaics. Researchers are finding, for example, that things like cucumbers grow like crazy on rooftops . The panels create a unique microclimate that keeps crops from getting too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and uses about one-third of the water compared to growing in full sun. Now scientists are trying to figure out which crops — especially high-value ones that can make up the cost of installing solar...

خلاصہ: Why the government is trying to make coal cuteCan a lump of coal ever be … cute? It’s a question no one was thinking about until last Thursday, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a cartoon of himself on X kneeling next to “Coalie” — a combustible lump with giant eyes, an open-mouthed grin, and yellow boots, almost like a carbon-heavy Japanese video game character. Department of the Interior It might seem like a strange mascot to promote what Burgum calls the “American Energy Dominance Agenda.” “Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” said Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo, and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World . In Japan, Dale said, seemingly everything gets a cute character attached to it — not just in TV shows and games, but also as part of government public relations efforts . This ultra-adorable aesthetic, associated with rounded shapes and huge eyes, is so common it has a name: kawaii. Even the Tokyo police department has an orange, mouselike mascot , with a disarming cuddliness that serves to make law enforcement feel softer and less threatening. Coalie appears to do something similar, countering Burgum’s “mine, baby, mine” message with a kawaii-style innocence. “You know, it makes us feel more familiar,” Dale said. “It makes us want to get closer.” Those warm, fuzzy feelings come from how our brains are wired to respond to babylike characteristics . Give a character a round body, big eyes, and chubby arms and legs, and you can even make a lump of coal look huggable. Coalie is just the latest in a long line of characters used by controversial industries, from tobacco to nuclear energy, that seem designed to make their risks feel less threatening — though they typically looked less cute, at least in the United States. David Ropeik, a risk expert, sees Coalie as part of a tradition of advertising strategies that widely disliked companies use to push back against criticism. “It’s a common response from cultures that feel themselves under attack, looking for ways to make their case in a less than adversarial way to sell their point of view,” Ropeik said. President Donald Trump has been working on rehabilitating coal’s image as the administration tries to stall the fuel’s decline . Trump has even said he has a standing order in the White House for staff to use the phrase “clean, beautiful coal.” He explained why in November, saying, “It’s ‘clean and beautiful’ because it needs public relations help.” Even cuteness can backfire, though, if people notice that an extra-adorable character is trying to coax them into liking something dangerous. Consider Pluto-kun, a cherubic mascot from the 1990s who promoted the Japanese nuclear company Tepco — at one point by cheerfully drinking a glass of plutonium as if it were harmless. The character attracted little attention until the nuclear accident at Tepco’s Fukushima plant in 2011, when people began resurfacing Pluto-kun online to point out the irony of its upbeat reassurances as the threat of nuclear disaster felt real and immediate. Some felt a similar dissonance when Interior Secretary Burgum posted the image of Coalie. Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy at Appalachian Voices, an environmental nonprofit, said the character was mocked by some of her friends and colleagues who work to support coal communities because of the serious damage they see firsthand from coal. “There’s nothing funny about climate change,” she said. “There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about the water pollution that many people in Appalachia experience because of coal mining.” Part of the problem was that the timing was bad, Barnes said. The day after Coalie showed up on Burgum’s social media feed, Trump signed a law that redirects $500 million in funding originally set aside for cleaning up abandoned coal mines to the Forest Service and federal wildfire management programs. On top of that, the administration has been trying to roll back safety programs for miners. To people who care about the health of people working in mines and living near mines, Barnes said, Coalie “comes across as a middle finger, in a way.” For Coalie’s creators, the backlash was a bit surprising, according to Simone Randolph, the communications director at the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSMRE. The thing is, Coalie wasn’t initially intended as a mascot for “American Energy Dominance.” Its story actually started way back in 2018, when a social media manager at OSMRE put googly eyes on a picture of coal. “Coalie” became a running joke in the office and an icon on their Teams channel, evolving into different versions over the years, Randolph said. “If you walk down our hallway in the D.C. office, people have pictures of Coalie on their doors.” Grist / OSMRE Despite the uproar over Coalie, Randolph hopes the mascot can help people learn about her obscure federal office. OSMRE oversees the permitting and regulation of the country’s coal mines and is responsible for cleaning up old, polluted mining land. The agency has transferred and authorized billions of dollars to restore mining lands for better uses — like what’s now the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden . “So often, communication boils down to something that’s kind of bland,” Randolph said. “It doesn’t really catch the public’s attention. And so we were hoping to do something that would be a little bit more attention-grabbing.” Last week, OSMRE posted an explainer of its work using Coalie as a guide to walk readers through the agency’s responsibilities. But the office’s character has notable differences to the version of Coalie that Burgum posted on X, which has tiny pink circles next to its eyes. Its features show a clear link to kawaii, an unusual move for an American institution, Dale said. It’s possible that it’s the result of somebody in...

خلاصہ: The winter storm exposed the grid’s real weakness: lots of old polesIn 1843, Congress gave Samuel Morse $30,000 to try to send a telegram from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Rather than bury the transmission wires underground, where technical issues would be hard to identify, the inventor of Morse code strung them along wooden poles and trees. When the system was completed about a year later, the first transmitted message read: “What hath God wrought?” This was the beginning of the modern electrical grid, and although demand for electricity has increased exponentially since then, the system for distributing electricity remains remarkably similar to its initial, 19th century version, especially the utility poles. Trees have to meet stringent standards to become a utility pole, remaining free of knots, scars, swelling, or contact with the ground, but poles are still vulnerable to extreme weather — prone to electrical fires, wildfires, and frigid temperatures. As the country grapples with skyrocketing power demand, extreme weather events now spur contentious debates about what kinds of energy work best. Conservatives blamed the California heat wave blackouts in 2020 on renewable energy, and climate advocates blamed the freeze in Texas in 2021 on the state’s reliance on natural gas, with each side claiming that its resources are more reliable. Winter Storm Fern barreled across the country this week, resurrecting concerns over the grid in Texas, where the state has added ample solar batteries, and in New England, which lost access to hydropower from Canada. So far, power plants across the country have held up just fine, whether running on renewables or fossil fuels. But the storm revealed another vulnerability in the country’s aging power grid — the wires and poles that carry electricity from house to house. “That last mile of the grid is extremely vulnerable,” said Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “The equipment’s old, or the poles themselves are old, and they can break under extreme events. Those types of boring infrastructure investments are really critical to ensuring that we have reliability and resilience under extreme events.” In most of the country, this infrastructure “is becoming one of the main drivers of electricity cost increases,” said Michelle Soloman, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation, a clean energy think tank. The bill has come due on much of the grid, Soloman explained. There’s currently a transformer shortage in the United States, and the Trump administration’s tariffs has made replacing infrastructure significantly more expensive. “When we think about how to reduce electricity costs for consumers, certainly making sure that we’re finding ways to reduce the cost of those components is really important,” Soloman said. The biggest damage done by Winter Storm Fern was to a series of power lines owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, a federal power provider established under the New Deal in the 1930s. The storm toppled more than two dozen transmission lines that feed power to smaller utilities across Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and iced over some of the TVA’s other infrastructure. That left those smaller utilities without the energy they needed to keep the lights on. As of Wednesday afternoon, at least 300,000 customers in those three states still lacked power, according to the website PowerOutage.us. Meanwhile, the TVA’s power plants made it through without disruption. The authority weatherized its main coal and gas plants after the catastrophic Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused the first rolling blackouts in the TVA’s history and cost the authority $170 million. This time around, the generation plants all stayed online despite record levels of power demand. The worst-affected utility during this week’s winter storm has been Entergy, which serves most of Louisiana along with parts of Texas and Mississippi. Winter Storm Fern knocked out power for more than 171,000 customers at its peak, and took out hundreds of pieces of infrastructure — the utility estimates that at least 30 transmission lines, 860 poles, and 60 substations went out of service. Entergy is used to getting knocked around by extreme weather. After Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana in 2021, Entergy lost more than 30,000 poles. Its main transmission tower carrying power into New Orleans collapsed in 150-mile-per-hour winds, cutting off power deliveries to the Crescent City. Not all this damage was inevitable: Entergy’s critics pointed out that nearby Florida had spent billions to harden its grid against storms with stronger poles and underground power lines. This allowed the Sunshine State to restore power much more quickly after similar hurricanes. Read Next Yes, climate change can supercharge a winter storm. Here’s how. Matt Simon The smaller utilities that cut power during Winter Storm Fern often don’t have the resources to pursue such repairs. Power poles only get replaced every 50 years or so , and replacing a pole network can cost millions of dollars. It’s this repair work, rather than the need to serve new data centers, that explains why power prices have risen over recent years. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the “primary driver of increased electricity-sector costs in recent years has been distribution and transmission expenditures — often devoted to refurbishment or replacement of existing infrastructure.” By far the greatest cost increase was in California, where utilities have had to spend billions of dollars to harden their grids against wildfires. Even when utilities do invest in grid resilience, some storms can still break through. More than 30,000 customers of the North East Mississippi Electric Power Association lost power during the peak of the outage brought on by Winter Storm Fern, and the utility had only restored power to 5,000 customers as of Tuesday morning. The electric co-op spends about $2 million a year to remove trees and other vegetation around its power lines, according to a spokesperson, but the storm outpaced those efforts. “When large trees — some more than 30 feet tall — fall due to extreme ice loading, there is...