Grist

The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.

The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say, in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays.

By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year. ...

Rats are in many ways better adapted to cities than the humans that built them. While urbanites struggle with crowds, sparse parking spaces, and their upstairs neighbors stomping around at 4 a.m., rats are living their best lives. Huddled safely underground, they pop up at night to chew through heaps of food waste in dumpsters and hot dogs left on stoops.

Now scientists have found yet another gnawing advantage for rats. A study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances found that as temperatures climb in cities, rat populations are growing, even as city dwellers suffer. “In cities that have experienced the fastest warming temperatures, they tended to have faster increases in their rat numbers as well,” said Jonathan Richardson, an urban ecologist at the University of Richmond and lead author of the paper. “Females will reach sexual maturity faster. They’re able to breed more, and typically their litters are larger at warmer temperatures in the lab.

The analysis used public complaints about rats and inspection records from 16 cities between 2007 and 2024, which collectively served as a proxy for rat populations. In 11 of those cities, rat numbers surged during that period. The winner of the Most Rats Gained award goes to Washington, D.C., with a 390 percent increase according to the city’s last decade of data, followed by San Francisco (300 percent), Toronto (186 percent), and New York City (162 percent). Meanwhile, a few cities actually saw their rat populations decrease, including New Orleans, Tokyo, and Louisville, Kentucky, due in part to more diligent pest control....

One of the biggest myths about renewable energy is that it isn’t reliable. Sure, the sun sets every night and winds calm down, putting solar panels and turbines to sleep. But when those renewables are humming, they’re providing the grid with electricity and charging banks of batteries, which then supply power at night.

A new study in the journal Renewable Energy that looked at California’s deployment of renewable power highlights just how reliable the future of energy might be. It found that last year, from late winter to early summer, renewables fulfilled 100 percent of the state’s electricity demand for up to 10 hours on 98 of 116 days, a record for California. Not only were there no blackouts during that time, thanks in part to backup battery power, but at their peak the renewables provided up to 162 percent of the grid’s needs — adding extra electricity California could export to neighboring states or use to fill batteries.

“This study really finds that we can keep the grid stable with more and more renewables,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University and lead author of the new paper. “Every major renewable — geothermal, hydro, wind, solar in particular, even offshore wind — is lower cost than fossil fuels” on average, globally....

Solar panels and wind turbines give the world bountiful energy — but come with a conundrum. When it’s sunny and windy out, in many places these renewables produce more electricity than is actually needed at the time. Then when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing, those renewables provide little to no electricity when it’s sorely needed.

So for the grid of tomorrow to go 100 percent renewable, it needs to store a lot more energy. You’ve probably heard about giant lithium-ion batteries stockpiling that energy for later use. But when providing backup power, even a big battery bank will usually drain in four hours. The need for an alternative has the United States government, researchers, and startups scrambling to develop more “long-duration energy storage” that can provide a minimum of 10 hours of backup power — often by using reservoirs, caverns, and other parts of the landscape as batteries.

A new study from several universities and national labs in the United States and Canada shows that large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills. It looked specifically at the Western Interconnection, a chunk of the grid that includes the western U.S. and Canada, plus a bit of northern Mexico. The study found that building more long-duration energy storage there would reduce electricity prices by more than 70 percent in times of high demand....

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Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The U.S. alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 — more than any other year.

Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies....