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Home Articles Energy Efficiency is Making Headway at COP28 Climate Conference Energy Efficiency is Making Headway at COP28 Climate Conference Doubling the annual pace of energy efficiency progress would achieve half of the emissions reductions needed by 2030. This article was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

For teenagers, Facebook isn’t cool anymore. That’s probably the least surprising insight from a recent Pew Research Center survey that analyzed social media habits in American teens. Some of the other results, however, provide a little more food for thought. Snapchat, for example, isn’t nearly as popular as YouTube. TikTok has actually lost traction since last year. And race and sex also affect social media preferences.

After failing in the last legislative session early this year, a major update of New Mexico’s Oil and Gas Act is again in the works, this time with a sharp push from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office. The Oil and Gas Act is the bedrock law outlining how production of the two fossil fuels is regulated in the state, and it hasn’t seen a major update in decades. If finalized, the new bill would be introduced in the legislative session that begins in January.

It pays to mix it up—planted forests containing more than one tree species can store several times as much carbon as monocultures, as shown in a published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.

As the United States is set to break its all-time fossil fuel production record in a year that’s likely to be the hottest ever recorded, an analysis published Monday by the Center for Biological Diversity warns that planet-heating oil and gas projects approved by the Biden administration “threaten to erase the climate emissions progress from the Inflation Reduction Act.” According to the CBD report, “The potential carbon emissions from 17 massive fossil fuel projects approved by the Biden...

Faith in UN climate conferences is at a new low. If we wanted a final straw, the appalling and yet somehow unsurprising revelation that the United Arab Emirates had planned to use its position as host of the latest annual gathering, known as COP28, as a platform for making new oil deals should suffice. It might seem that there could be no more depressing state of affairs. But we believe the opposite: This is the most positive climate moment in years.

A next-generation geothermal plant backed by Google has started sending carbon-free electricity to the grid in Nevada, where the tech company operates some of its massive data centers. On Tuesday, Google and geothermal developer Fervo Energy said that electrons began flowing from the first-of-a-kind facility earlier this month. The 3.5-megawatt project, called Project Red, is now supplying power directly to the Las Vegas–based utility NV Energy.

“Did you hear at the beginning where I said I wrote a book and nobody wants to talk about it,” jokes Andrew McAfee in the middle of his press conference on the first day of Web Summit, the annual tech conference in Lisbon, earlier this month.

Overfishing is a global problem that, like many of the modern era, has intensified with growing populations and prosperity. The seafood boom has put pressure on wild populations of certain species, threatening the collapse of productive and valuable ocean fisheries. Fishing capacity of richer nations has expanded accordingly and threatens to crowd out poorer nations that can’t keep up.

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. In the beginning, parking lots were created to curb chaos on the road. But climate change has turned that dynamic on its head. Since the 1920s a little-known policy called parking minimums has shaped a large facet of American life. In major cities, this meant that any type of building — apartments, banks, or shopping malls — needed to reserve a certain amount of parking spaces to accommodate anyone who might visit.