As blackouts continue to cripple Cuba and fuel growing public discontent, China is leveraging the island’s worst energy crisis in decades to deepen its dependence on Chinese-made solar technology.

Key Points

• Cuban imports of Chinese photovoltaic panels increased over 1,800 percent in five years, with dozens of solar parks now operating across the island.
• China controls nearly 80 percent of the global solar supply chain and has positioned itself as Cuba's leading renewable energy partner while addressing its industrial overcapacity.
• Solar energy accounts for only about 9 percent of Cuba's electricity generation because the aging power grid cannot efficiently integrate new capacity and lacks battery storage systems.
• Cuba compensates for Chinese energy technology with nickel exports, creating asymmetric cooperation that gives Beijing access to strategic minerals while expanding its economic and strategic influence on the island.

Climate change, biodiversity loss and water conservation are often framed as problems in need of national policies. However, there is an often more important level of governance: the neighborhood.

Some 180 kg of explosives were used today, Adevărul reported, to move a large rock restricting the flow of water.

Acting defence minister Radu Miruță hailed the operation as a success, saying it will help with cooling of the plant and water transport on the river.

Given the continuing extreme weather conditions, the Cernavodă plant may still have to temporarily suspend its operations at some point, but any extra day of its work is worth more than the cost of the explosion, he said.

Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever.

They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.

Ticks usually lurk in the tall grass in wooded areas. That means going on a hike or even just hanging out in your backyard or a park can expose you to a tick bite.

Federal safety regulators have given Zoox a temporary exemption that will allow the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle technology company to charge customers for rides in its custom-built robotaxi.

The exemption from certain federal motor vehicle safety standards, which was announced Thursday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was one of the last remaining regulatory hurdles Zoox needed to clear before launching a commercial robotaxi service.

Google, Microsoft, and other hyperscalers have come under scrutiny for their impact on water quality and availability.

On Monday, SpaceX amended its initial public offering to state that water conditions—including water scarcity, regulations around water, and drought—could constrain data center development.

It isn’t the only tech company trying to assess how water scarcity might impact its business. Water use is emerging as one of the most contentious data center issues. A recent Gallup poll found that seven out of 10 Americans are opposed to data center development, with water scarcity ranking as the top resource concern. Facing increasingly fierce resistance, some tech companies are scrambling to assure the public that they’re facing the issue head-on.

You’ve been planning your dream beach vacation for months, only to arrive and find the shoreline covered in large piles of smelly, brown seaweed, with even more floating offshore. It’s disappointing, for sure – and increasingly common.

Since 2011, summer scenes like this have played out on beaches in South Florida and throughout the Caribbean.

The consequences are even greater for people who live and work along the Caribbean and Gulf coasts and the coasts of the tropical Atlantic. Large masses of sargassum seaweed can clog harbors, interfering with fishing and boating, and in some cases harm marine life. As the seaweed begins to decompose it releases gases, including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and methane, raising concerns for both public health and the environment.

Amid layoffs and industry belt-tightening, quality of coverage, not quantity, becomes even more important.

US News: Every year after Christmas, thousands of used trees are thrown away. In New Orleans, however, many of them get a second use. Instead of ending up in landfill, the trees are collected, tied into large bundles and dropped by helicopters into coastal marshes to help slow land loss.

For decades, regular citizens and advocacy groups have filed suits that forced companies and the federal government to clean up the environment. Trump officials have moved to limit that power.

Now, in a legal filing, the Trump administration is saying citizens should not be allowed to enforce environmental laws. Rather, despite what the laws say, the U.S. Department of Justice has claimed in a case involving Elon Musk’s xAI that people should be required to leave enforcement to the executive branch – even if the executive decides to take no action.

"The numbness or avoidance among many of us who care about the impact of Earth’s warming climate, is similar to the ambivalence and static grief that can take hold after a serious medical diagnosis," writes Alexis Drutchas.

Just days before Earth Day last April, my 3-year-old son, Oliver, said the most alarming thing as we walked down the stairs. “I don’t want to leave Earth.” I stopped mid-step. Was he thinking about death? Climate change? He’s only 3! 

“What do you mean, love?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Mama, but I don’t want to leave the planet with blue and white swirls,” he said, twirling his finger in the air like wind.

“We don’t have to go anywhere. Earth is where we live,” I said.

Oliver has recently become fascinated with space. Yet his words had a clairvoyant feel, reaching into a distant future. At 3, he has no idea that scientists are already considering whether other planets might be viable for human life.

The Environmental Protection Agency under Donald Trump has scrapped an important regulation meant to limit spraying of biosolids on crops.

Consumers and agricultural workers rejoice: the Trump administration has killed a key regulation meant to keep toxic human and industrial waste sludge from our food supply, because toxic sludge is apparently not a threat to public health.

On Monday, the Guardian reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is tossing out a major body of research that formed the basis for regulations which would have effectively limited the amount of sewage byproduct we’re allowed to spray into the environment.

We often think about weather controlling wildfires: dry air, heat, wind and lightning help determine when fires start and how quickly they spread.

However, once a wildfire becomes intense enough, the relationship can flip. Instead of simply responding to the weather, the fire begins to create its own weather.

I study wildfires and air quality at the University of Texas at Arlington. Here are four key ways wildfires influence the weather around them:

Campaigners worry politicians will have moved on by time of elections in which Marine Le Pen is expected to challenge.

As dozens of forest wildfires burned across France this week amid the summer’s fourth brutal heatwave and increasing air pollution, some wondered whether voters’ first-hand experience of the climate emergency would change the political debate ahead of next year’s presidential election.

The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, who cut short a tour of France on medical advice that at seven months pregnant she should avoid breathing smoke-filled air in the south-west near a huge wildfire in Gironde, said the political class still had its head in the sand.

She said the government had ignored her plea for cross-party crisis talks to declare a national state of emergency on the climate this summer. She called for a new “climate welfare state” in France to help those whose lives were being affected as about 260,000 people were evacuated because of wildfires across the country.

What is it?

Phosphate mining in Florida officially kicked off around 1882 near Hawthorne in Alachua County. Since then, Florida has become the largest producer of phosphate in the United States.

The mining process involves significant alteration of the landscape by removing vegetation to access phosphate-rich soil and the rock beneath. This raw material then undergoes beneficiation, in which the desired phosphate ore is separated from the sand and clay. This process can cause the formation of clay-settling “ponds,” which further damage surrounding habitat.

During the final step of the process, phosphate rock is treated with sulfuric acid to produce phosphoric acid, a vital ingredient in synthetic fertilizers that many consider indispensable for modern agriculture. Ensuring food security by boosting crop yield and used in animal feed and various industrial products.  

Today, on the 1A show I mentioned earlier, someone mused at the idea of stationing data centers in space. So, I was interested when I saw Communications Daily mention it today...

While space sustainability advocates are pressing the FCC to consider the possible environmental impacts of proposed orbital data center mega constellations, policy experts -- including some of those sustainability advocates — said the agency isn’t likely to do so. 

The energy crisis from the war in Iran is one of Southeast Asia’s most pressing concerns, which I am covering closely along with other Associated Press colleagues.

Rising prices of gasoline, diesel and other oil-based fuels due to the conflict are driving ordinary people toward electric vehicles and renewable energies such as solar.

The Iran war, now in its fifth month, dominated conversations among top diplomats at a major meeting last week in Southeast Asia.

Donald Trump has no ideas, but America is ready for a U-turn on climate change.

The news on green technology is surprisingly good. Both development and installation of renewable energy and industry are leaping ahead at rates I would not have thought remotely possible even five years ago. It’s the fastest energy transition in history—and ironically the pace has only accelerated of late thanks to Donald Trump’s madcap war on Iran, which is acting as a de facto carbon tax across the entire planet. Call it Trump’s Green New Deal.

Alas, the progress is coming far too late to head off severe climate disasters. After Canada and the American eastern seaboard were blanketed by another suffocating plume of wildfire smoke in recent weeks, much of Europe is now suffering the same fate. Great swathes of France and Spain are ablaze, with little relief on the horizon. And now weather forecasters are warning that it looks like the most powerful El Niño in recorded history is coming soon.

Climate change is not going to wait for America or any other country to sort out its political dysfunctions. We can confront climate reality or be run over by it.