I was reading about the growing wildlife risk out west this summer with the drought they’ve been having out west. It seems like many parts of the west are getting drier while the east is getting wetter. I wonder if this means we will have more of those gray-brown hazy summer days this summer, where a lot of sun is blocked by high-level smoke in the atmosphere and there is a ton of glare everywhere, like we had for a while last summer.
It’s been six decades since the last extreme drought in New York. Our climate getting noticeably wetter. In 2018, I was in camping in Finger Lakes National Forest. Little over two weeks after I left, there was 7 inches of rain in a half hour where I was camping, and 9 inches the next town up in Lodi where cars were floating down Main Street. Such occurrences are more likely now when there is so much water in atmosphere due to climate change.
The Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down on a powerful class of greenhouse gases that are used in refrigerators, air conditioners and building insulation. On Monday, the agency announced a new regulation that would dramatically decrease production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, over the next 15 years.
Refrigerants are one of my favorite topics! While this article really oversimplifies the issues -- getting rid of HFC in new units is good for climate change. HFC-23 has a global warming potential of 14,800 times that of carbon dioxide. HFC-134a used in cars is 1,430 GWP.
That said, units built with one refrigerant generally can't be switched to another without modifications. Often it's just better to refill refrigerants after leaks are patched. The EPA mandates all refrigerants are recovered when cars, refrigerators and air conditioners are scrapped, so there should be a supply for a long time for HFCs, just like you can still buy CFCs and HCFCs to refill old units. The Empire Plaza, for example still uses CFC refrigerant (CFC-22) in it's chillers, even though they haven't manufactured any new stock in nearly 25 years now.
Most of the low GWP refrigerants pose engineering and safety challenges -- propane is very flammable and explosive, water and carbon dioxide require extremely high pressures that require super-strong components, and other refrigerants are patented and expensive like hydrofluoroolefin (HFC-1234yf). Also, hydrofluoroolefin produces flourine gas when burned, which can be very toxic in car and house fires. But scientists are finding solutions to these kind of problems, and most people aren't particularly concerned what is chilling their beer and office as long as it's sufficiently cold and is energy efficent.
With sea levels expected to rise three to six feet by the end of the century, coastal communities are moving fast to construct major shoreline projects to protect themselves. As the size of these projects expands, the primary building materials--dirt and mud --are getting scarce.
Dirt (what you dig up on land) and mud or sediment (the wetter variety already in rivers and bays) are the raw materials of climate change adaptation. They're used to build levees, the massive earthen barriers that hold back waves, and to raise elevation so buildings can sit higher than the floodplain.
Mud is also a crucial component of restoring wetlands and marshes, which act as natural barriers against storm surges while providing valuable habitat for sensitive species. In the right conditions, marshes can gain elevation over time from sediment, potentially keeping pace with sea level rise in a way that human-built infrastructure can't.
Until now, mud and dirt have mostly been treated as waste products. Dirt leftover from construction projects is often just trucked to landfills. Sediment is trapped behind large dams, no longer spreading naturally throughout watersheds.
One of the pair of active nuclear reactors within blast radius of Manhattan made a federal safety watch-list back in 1993. That’s when regulators cited Unit 3 at the Indian Point Energy Center for leaky coolant pipes and faltering engineering support. Shortly thereafter a control-room operator tested positive for marijuana and cocaine. But none of that helped activists’ long quest to turn off the nuclear plant.
Up until Friday, when Indian Point’s final reactor will be shut down, dogged opposition from environmentalists and safety advocates failed for decades to shut it down permanently. The two reactors produced about 2.1 gigawatts of power for nearly 45 years—enough to meet a quarter of demand from New York City, without emitting greenhouse gas.
This should be a milestone for activists who spent more than a generation trying to remove the nuclear shadow over the biggest U.S. metropolis. It has instead brought into focus a different anxiety: global warming. In the intervening years concern over greenhouse gas has become paramount, and the deactivation of Indian Point comes with a certain—if temporary—increase in planet-warming pollution.
The Indian Point Energy Center (Indian Point) permanently stopped generating electricity on April 30, 2021, when it retired its last operating nuclear reactor, Unit 3, earlier than originally planned. The Indian Point nuclear power plant began operations in 1962 and produced over 565 terawatthours (TWh) of electricity in the 59 years it was open. The Unit 3 retirement removes almost 1,040 megawatts (MW) of nuclear generating capacity from New York State, leaving about 3,200 MW of remaining nuclear capacity at three plants in upstate New York.
Indian Point is located in Buchanan, New York, about 25 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. The plant had three pressurized water reactors. Unit 1 began operations in 1962 and shut down in 1974. Units 2 and 3 began operations in 1974 and 1976, respectively; Unit 2 retired in April 2020. The Consolidated Edison grid system distributed the plant’s electricity to the five boroughs of New York City and neighboring Westchester County.