Senior Science Reporter
Justine Calma is a senior science reporter at The Verge, where she covers energy and the environment. She’s also the host of Hell or High Water: When a Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
Since reporting on the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, Justine has covered climate change on the ground in four continents. "Power Shift" her story about one neighborhood’s fight for renewable energy in New Orleans was published in the 2022 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing.
Find her on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and X.
Roughly half of customers lost power yesterday. As of this morning, more than 30 percent of customers are still without service, according to power utility Luma Energy.
It shows how vulnerable the US territory’s grid is after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017 and left residents without electricity for up to 11 months. In July, Puerto Rico filed a $1 billion suit against fossil fuel companies.
[The Washington Post]
The World Health Organization made the declaration today after a new strain of the virus spread across the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries that hadn’t previously reported cases of mpox.
It’s deadlier this time around compared to 2022, when it was called monkeypox. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US also warned clinicians to stay on alert for the virus.
[The New York Times]
They’re on different sides of a debate over how to counteract pollution from data centers’ energy use, Financial Times reports.
Amazon and Meta are part of a lobby group that wants more lax standards for renewable energy certificates, which can pose similar risks as carbon offset credits. Google, meanwhile, backs a different strategy for bringing more renewables online wherever data centers operate.
[Financial Times]
The warning says that the possibility of a massive earthquake is higher than usual — not that it will definitely occur within a certain timeframe. It follows a 7.1-magnitude earthquake earlier today that also triggered a tsunami warning.
[The Washington Post]
SunPower helped kick off a solar boom in the US, Canary Media explains. But the company was hit hard by soaring interest rates and faced allegations of mismanagement, CNBC reports. Solar companies in the US have grappled with inflation and supply chain kinks pushing up projects costs in recent years, and have struggled to compete with more affordable panels made in China.