"The Biden administration is escalating efforts to safeguard the U.S. power grid from hackers, developing a plan to better coordinate with industry to counter threats and respond to cyber attacks, according to people familiar with the matter."
"Public transit offers a simple way for cities to lower greenhouse gas emissions, but the pandemic has pushed ridership, and revenue, off a cliff in many big systems."
"On the London Underground, Piccadilly Circus station is nearly vacant on a weekday morning, while the Delhi Metro is ferrying fewer than half of the riders it used to. In Rio, unpaid bus drivers have gone on strike. New York City subway traffic is just a third of what it was before the pandemic.
"The US should establish a multimillion-dollar research programme on solar geoengineering, according to the country’s national science academy."
"The mountaintops rumble to life unnaturally each year as snow clouds darken the sky across the West."
"This month as Japan commemorated the 10-year anniversary of a tsunami that killed thousands of people, the United States has been reckoning with the vulnerability of its own systems for detecting the massive sea waves."
"The creators of the world’s first microwave-powered boiler have said it can provide a straightforward, zero-emissions replacement for the gas boilers that heat most homes in the UK."
"The U.S. Congress is investigating a multibillion-dollar subsidy for chemically treated coal that is meant to reduce smokestack pollution, after evidence emerged that power plants using the fuel produced more smog not less."
A much-anticipated infrastructure bill in Congress could help address the United States’ poorly rated roads, pipes and powerlines. But could the massive measure also do the heavy lifting for much-needed climate policy? The latest Backgrounder takes a deep dive into the context around climate-friendly infrastructure legislation, and looks ahead on what’s expected and how to report it.
"Since December 2019, the sun has been moving into a busier part of its cycle, when increasingly intense pulses of energy can shoot out in all directions. Some of these large bursts of charged particles head right toward Earth. Without a good way to anticipate these solar storms, we’re vulnerable. A big one could take out a swath of our communication systems and power grids before we even knew what hit us."
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