Winnebago has shown two different iterations of Ford Transit-based eRV prototypes, but an actual all-electric production camper van available for sale has remained elusive in the American market. That's set to change with a little push from outside the old guard in Elkhart (and Minnesota). Founded just last year by ex-SpaceX and Tesla engineers, Detroit-based Grounded RVs has presented a Ford E-Transit camper van it plans to have ready for delivery in a few weeks' time. More than just a silent, zero-emissions camping coach with loads of solar power, the Grounded G1 is an impressive smart RV with a modular interior design that lets buyers customize their ideal floor plan before heading off on a cleaner style of road trip.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 office tweeted that 24/7 air monitoring was ongoing at 23 stations in the East Palestine community. The agency’s Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer bus tests air emissions near the derailment soil removal site. The agency had announced the deployment of the TAGA bus to East Palestine on February 28—that is, 25 days after the Norfolk Southern derailment. That is “way too late,” says Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator during the Obama administration. “The TAGA bus should have been there the first week.”

Delay has been the EPA’s default reaction throughout the series of decisions that ceded the federal agency’s emergency authority and superior expertise to ill-prepared Ohio local and state officials. The EPA took 18 days to order Norfolk Southern to pay for cleanup operations and ten days to send a small team of six agency officials and 16 contractors to the site—a decision that Enck called “late” and “limited.”

Local residents and visiting researchers continue to suffer from exposure to the toxic chemical burn-off. 

California is no stranger to big swings between wet and dry weather. The “atmospheric river” storms that have battered the state this winter are part of a system that has long interrupted periods of drought with huge bursts of rain—indeed, they provide somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all precipitation on the West Coast. 

The parade of storms that has struck California in recent months has dropped more than 30 trillion gallons of water on the state, refilling reservoirs that had sat empty for years and burying mountain towns in snow.

But climate change is making these storms much wetter and more intense, ratcheting up the risk of potential flooding in California and other states along the West Coast. That’s not only because the air over the Pacific will hold more moisture as sea temperatures rise, leading to giant rain and snow volumes, but also because warming temperatures on land will cause more precipitation to fall as rain in the future, which will lead to more dangerous floods.

This story was originally published by Grist. A sandy bluff towers above the beach in Dillingham, Alaska. Every year, Alaska Native resident Ken Shade

Based on a 25-year record of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, a team of scientists led by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have shown that changes in snowfall over Antarctica can have significant short-term effects on global sea level rises.

The joint report from the University of Florida and 1000 Friends of Florida found a 23 percent increase in population and just under a foot of sea rise by 2040 could wipe out a million acres of undeveloped land.

HYANNIS – Registration is open for the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce Big Blue Conference, a two-day event May 2 and 3 highlighting economic opportunities for the region’s water resources. …

Farmworkers share stories of life in the Florida agricultural fields

They say the federal government has previously agreed to added protections for the species, but has since backtracked.

Back in 2019, Canadian startup Ride Solar launched a Kickstarter aimed at converting a 52-year-old water taxi into a solar-powered cruise vessel for sight-seeing tours of Prince Edward Island. The campaign was unsuccessful but the idea lived on, and now the refitted and renamed Islola Solaretto is…

HYANNIS – Local marine experts are applauding President Joe Biden’s announcement of the U.S. Ocean Climate Action Plan (OCAP) that they say acknowledges the essential role the ocean plays in …

Biden announced the designation of new national monuments: Nevada's Avi Kwa Ame National Monument and Texas' Castner Range National Monument.

The Boston protest is one of 102 climate demonstrations organized Tuesday all over the U.S.

As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?”

This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab, a group of Australian and international scientists who study plastic pollution, adds to a growing body of evidence that ingesting plastic debris has discernible chronic effects on the animals that consume it. This work represents a crucial step: moving from knowing that plastic is everywhere to diagnosing its effects once ingested.

SAY YOU ARE a maker of computer graphics cards, under pressure from investors questioning your green credentials. You know what to do. You email your various departments, asking them to tally up their carbon emissions and the energy they consume. Simple enough. You write a report pledging a more sustainable future, in which your trucks are electrified and solar panels adorn your offices.

Good start, your investors say. But what about the mines that produced the tantalum or palladium in your transistors? Or the silicon wafers that arrived via a lengthy supply chain? And what of when your product is shipped to customers, who install it in a laptop or run it 24/7 inside a data center to train an AI model like GPT-4 (or 5)? Eventually it will be discarded as trash or recycled. Chase down every ton of carbon and the emissions a company creates are many times times higher than it first seemed.

“Beach, eat, drink, dance, repeat.” These are Rihanna’s favorite things to do in Barbados. In a June 7 interview with Conde Nast Traveller, the pop star gushed over her home country, a small island nation in the middle of the Caribbean. “When I’m in Barbados, all is right with the world,” she said. But not all was right with Barbados. 

The same day, the local The Daily Nation newspaper reported on an “invasion of the Sargassum seaweed”—a brown, leafy algae that had washed up in thick mats on the white-sand beaches of the island’s eastern shores. The next day, the country’s government declared it a national emergency. Seen from afar, the bloom looked like a coppery oil spill slicking the sea. But a closer look revealed dead wildlife entangled within it.

As severe weather events increase, so does danger to rural communities. Plans are in place to address the urban observation bias in national weather prediction, but the other piece — reliable broadband — could still be years away for places like Eastern Kentucky.

In countries such as India, a great deal of toxic dye waste from the textile industry is released directly into waterways, potentially harming people and the environment. A new filtration media could remove much of that dye from wastewater streams – and it's derived from wood.

In court, the feds said Oak Flat would be in the hands of mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP by early summer.

A new U.N. water report warns the world is headed toward a global water crisis if human-caused climate change and population growth aren't addressed.

Little is known about the mosquito species known as Culex lactator. But it belongs to a group of mosquitoes known to carry diseases and researchers are worried about what will happen.

One in five animal species on the planet are beetles, with around 400,000 species officially described but scientists believing there could be as many as 1.5 million different types of these resilient little bugs on Earth. And with short lifespans of between a few weeks to a few years, they’ve…

Across the U.S. on Tuesday, people gathered outside major banks demanding that financial institutions shift away from investing in fossil fuel projects.

The report calls for international caps on plastic production and reductions in the toxicity of chemicals in plastics.