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The New York HEAT Act might not make the final budget. The bill reduces the state’s reliance on natural gas and cuts ratepayer costs by eliminating certain rules. It was in both legislative chambers’ one-house budgets, but last-minute scrambling could remove it. New York League of Conservation Voters Policy Director Patrick McClellan said, aside from people’s preference for natural gas, other challenges have made the bill hard to pass. “I think that there has also been some irresponsible fear-mongering against this bill from some people who oppose it,” said McClellan, “basically telling people this means that their natural gas service...

The latest discoveries were made by Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) instrument as part of the James Webb Observations of Young ProtoStars (JOYS+) program and revealed key chemical ingredients astronomers are looking for in the search for distant worlds that could be home to life.Given that they are young protostars, IRAS 2A and IRAS 23385 do not appear to have planets in orbits around them yet. However, the detections of organic molecules around them are promising indicators for regions of future habitability.Along with the detection of ethanol, MIRI has also detected what astronomers believe is probably acetic acid, an ingredient commonly...

Pythons turn their food into meat pretty efficiently, a study finds, making them an intriguing alternative to climate-unfriendly cows. Put aside your chicken cutlets and meatloaf and say hello to python curries and satay skewers. Some snake scientists think eating these reptiles—already customary or at least acceptable in parts of the world—might help lessen the damage our food choices have on the environment. With some eight billion people on the planet today, all of whom require protein to stay healthy, finding new sources of these nutrients is a crucial issue. But how do you get from the challenge of providing...

The recently launched satellite will provide a global view of methane emanating hot spots, and make its data open to the public. Earlier this week, a new satellite launched to track methane as it emanates from oil and gas fields across the world, hoping to expose major producers of the greenhouse pollutant and hold them accountable... “Data from this satellite will help us to better measure methane emissions and target their sources, bringing more transparency to the problem, giving companies and investors the information they need to take action, and empowering the public to hold people accountable,” Michael Bloomberg, United...

New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing JBS USA, the world's largest producer of beef, over the company's emissions and for "greenwashing" by allegedly misleading the public about its environmental impact. In an announcement, James noted that beef production has the largest greenhouse gas footprint of any major food commodity and that animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to James, JBS USA's various net-zero pledges for 2030 and 2040 are therefore misleading and "not feasible" given the scope of its worldwide beef production operations. "As families continue to face the daily impacts of the...

Intuitive Machines have successfully soft landed on the Moon, carrying a number of payloads for NASA, this represents a return to the moon for the USA. However far more significantly, it's the first purely commercial lander to land on the surface of the moon, and the first lunar lander to use purely cryogenic propellents for all its deep space maneuvering. Both of these factors are core to NASA's Artemis program, and so seeing success here is important to NASA's plans.However.It's far from a perfect success, because it appears to have fallen over during the landing, and this is limiting the...

The U.S. has become the world’s top exporter of liquefied natural gas. President Biden is finding that this superpower status comes with its own set of headaches. In the past two years, hundreds of cargoes loaded with supercooled gas departed the U.S. Gulf Coast as foreign buyers turned to America for energy supplies. Developers of export terminals have seized the momentum to advance plans to build new plants and crank out even more LNG. Now, climate activists and Democratic lawmakers are exhorting the Biden administration to halt this expansion. They argue that the federal government, which has to approve LNG...

Infrared emission from methane suggests atmospheric heating by auroral processes. Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found a brown dwarf (an object more massive than Jupiter but smaller than a star) with infrared emission from methane, likely due to energy in its upper atmosphere. This is an unexpected discovery because the brown dwarf, W1935, is cold and lacks a host star; therefore, there is no obvious source for the upper atmosphere energy. The team speculates that the methane emission may be due to processes generating aurorae. These findings are being presented at the 243rd meeting of the American...

A team of engineers and atmospheric scientists at Harvard University, working with a colleague from the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has calculated the increased amount of methane being expelled into the atmosphere due to increases in rice farming in parts of Africa. In their paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the group describes how they recalculated methane emissions due to recent increases in rice production in sub-Saharan Africa, and what they found by doing so. Prior research has shown that methane is the second most important greenhouse gas (behind carbon dioxide)—it has been found to...

It’s not really an exaggeration (if at all) to say that every single day we hear from Hillary Clinton, Liz Cheney, Joe Scarborough, the media, and others about how dangerous President Trump is—ad nauseam they declare how “like Hitler” he is. And, it seems every single day, Joe Biden issues some new executive order or regulation assaulting our freedoms and our prosperity. He knows he can’t get his radical agenda through Congress so he just goes around them. He violates his oath of office by not only refusing to enforce immigration laws that Congress passed, but sabotaging our sovereignty too.It...

This year is shaping up to be the hottest on record. And while carbon dioxide dominates the climate conversation, another powerful pollutant, methane, requires our urgent attention. In fact, reducing methane emissions is the single most efficient way to limit warming in our lifetimes. This means that as we curb methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, we can not forget to swiftly tackle methane emissions from landfills. At the end of the month, when world leaders meet at the COP28 climate conference, the United States can set an example by putting stronger landfill controls on the agenda to...

A 2-mile-long methane plume in New Mexico. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Anew instrument aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has been used to identify more than 50 “super-emitters” of methane — a major step toward slashing global warming. The challenge: To combat global warming, we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide accounts for the majority of those emissions, and transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy will significantly reduce those. Methane is a much less common greenhouse gas than CO2, but it’s far more potent, with each ton emitted causing 80 times as much warming in...

“Climate change” is in the news daily, with each featured story getting an attention-grabbing sensationalist headline. The frenzy is at its peak now because it’s the time of year for tropical storms and wildfires. However, to appreciate that these stories are pure narratives, it’s a good time to consider the facts behind the so-called “greenhouse gases.” Several atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, absorb light in the infrared region. These are collectively known as the “greenhouse gases” because absorbing infrared energy warms up the air—hence the name greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide, on a per-molecule basis, is six...

Explanation: Where else might life exist? One of humanity's great outstanding questions, locating planets where extrasolar life might survive took a step forward in 2019 with the discovery of a significant amount of water vapor in the atmosphere of distant exoplanet K2-18b. The planet and its parent star, K2-18, lie about 124 light years away toward the constellation of the Lion (Leo). The exoplanet is significantly larger and more massive than our Earth, but orbits in the habitable zone of its home star. K2-18, although more red than our Sun, shines in K2-18b's sky with a brightness similar to the...

WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday began a new effort to crack down on methane emissions, a major contributor to climate change. The first-ever White House Methane Summit came at a time of severe heat across much of the U.S., including in Pittsburgh, where temperatures are expected to approach or exceed 90 degrees until the weekend. President Joe Biden established a new methane task force to work with state and local officials to detect leaks and reduce emissions. The White House said billions of dollars of natural gas are lost to leaks every year. In Pennsylvania, methane accounts for...

The Zhuque-2 rocket lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Wednesday China said the rocket completed the flight mission. Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua via EPA-EFE July 12 (UPI) -- A methane-fueled rocket, launched by China, has reached orbit for the first time, beating out potential competitors from the United States and indicating a renewed effort by that nation to land astronauts on the moon with a more powerful spacecraft. Built by Landspace, a private Chinese company, the 164-foot Zhuque-2 rocket lifted off from its Jiuquan launch complex, in China's Inner Mongolia, on Wednesday morning local time, Chinese...

The Russian economy's industrial sector is in decline, according to air-pollution readings from satellites.A Wall Street Journal report showed that the decline may be worse than what Moscow officially reports.Pollution in Russia's industrial regions fell 1.2% in the six months to April, and is 6.2% lower annually.Russia's economy is suffering from an industrial decline as Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine drags on, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5P satellite.

French dairy giant Danone said Tuesday it wants to slash methane emissions by 30 percent within seven years, pointing to the way the cows it uses are raised, handled, and milked as ripe for change. AFP reports Danone said it would seek the cuts by 2030 using cow breeds that emit less methane, improving cow diets, prolonging their milking periods and capturing emissions from manure to be used for biogas, for example. The company is also looking at innovative solutions to help reduce emissions including a cow mask that can trap burp gases, the report continues.

A catastrophic leak from a natural gas storage field in Cambria County likely released over one billion cubic feet of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. The incident demonstrates the importance of tracking — and punishing — methane emissions, a priority recently moved forward by both Congress and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. It also shows the urgency of implementing state-level regulations to control methane emissions from Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry. Methane is the primary component of natural gas, and is fifty times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. While CO2 grabs the headlines, CH4...

President Biden is expected to announce a proposal for stronger regulations on the oil and gas sector aimed at controlling emissions of a planet warming gas called methane. The stronger methane regulations are part of a slew of climate-related actions that Biden is expected to announce during his trip to the COP27 global climate summit in Egypt. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) projects that in 2030, the requirements would cut 87 percent of methane emissions from the pollution sources that it regulates when compared to 2005 levels. The proposal strengthens a Biden administration proposal from last year that was expected...