Governors Wind Energy Coalition
A Growing Summertime Risk for Cities: Power Failures During Heat Waves Source: By Christopher Flavelle, New York Times • Posted: Tuesday, May 4, 2021
The author of a new study said the combination of blackouts and extreme heat “may be the deadliest climate-related event we can imagine.”
A power failure in New Orleans last month. Blackouts have increased more than 60 percent in the United States since 2015.Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON The growing risk of overlapping heat waves and power failures poses a severe threat that major American cities are not prepared for, new research suggests.
According to a recent study released in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, power outages have risen by more than 60% since 2015, even as climate change has exacerbated heat waves.
The authors calculated that a combination outage and heatwave would subject at least two-thirds of people of three major U.S. cities to heat exhaustion or heat stroke using computer models.
(Photo : Pixabay)
Even if each of the cities in the sample has dedicated public cooling centers for people who need relief from the sun, the authors discovered that such centers will only serve around 2% of the population, leaving the vast majority of residents at risk.
A growing summertime risk for cities: Power failures during heat waves bizjournals.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bizjournals.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lakes Could be ‘Tapped’ for an Environmentally Friendly Biofuel
New research suggests that a carbon-neutral biofuel could be created from methane extracted from lakes.
Image Credit: VarnaK/Shutterstock.com
The production of renewable energy sources is vital to meeting increasing energy demands whilst simultaneously attempting to limit damage to the environment. This future of sustainability in fuel sources is the key to limiting greenhouse gas emissions and in the battle against climate change.
New research suggests that a new sustainable and environmentally gentle fuel could emerge from an unlikely source. A team of environmental scientists from the University of Basel, Switzerland, suggest that methane stored in lakes could be tapped, converted to methanol, and used as fuel.
May 3, 2021 at 9:27 am
Chances are, most if not all of the produce in your kitchen is threatened by fungal diseases. The threat looms large for food staples of the world such as rice, wheat, potatoes and maize (
SN: 9/22/05). Pathogenic fungi are also coming for our coffee, sugarcane, bananas and other economically important crops. Annually, fungal diseases destroy a third of all harvests and pose a dire threat to global food security.
To stop the spread of fungal diseases, farmers fumigate the soil with toxic chemicals that lay waste to the land, sparing not even the beneficial microbes teeming in the earth. Or they ply plants with fungicides. But fungicide use is effective only in the short run until the pathogenic fungi evolve resistance against these synthetic chemicals.