usa

Millions of Americans have been watching with growing alarm as their homeowners insurance premiums rise and their coverage shrinks. Nationwide, premiums rose 34% between 2017 and 2023, and they continued to rise in 2024 across much of the country. To add insult to injury, those rates go even higher if you make a claim – as much as 25% if you claim a total loss of your home. Why is this happening? There are a few reasons, but a common thread: Climate change is fueling more severe weather, and insurers are responding to rising damage claims. The losses are exacerbated by more frequent extreme weather disasters striking densely populated areas, rising construction costs and homeowners experiencing damage that was once more rare. Hurricane Ian, supercharged by warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane in October 2022 and caused an estimated $112.9 billion in damage. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via...

Humans generate a lot of plastic waste – more than 400 million metric tons a year. To bring this fact a bit closer to home, the U.S. produced an average of 0.75 pounds (0.34 kilograms) of plastic waste per person each day in 2010, which is equivalent in weight to an unopened can of soda. Plastic products have been propelling our quality of life forward for over a century, from keeping food fresh longer to enhancing medical hygiene and making transportation more energy-efficient. In the meantime, plastic waste has also accumulated. Today it is an unsolved and growing problem of gargantuan proportions. Worldwide, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled – largely through mechanical processing, creating products like drainage pipes – and 19% is incinerated. The rest is either buried in landfills or has escaped into the environment, where it damages ecosystems and harms human health. To address existing and future plastic waste, new approaches beyond mechanical rec...

Many sharks and rays are known to breach, leaping fully or partly out of the water. In a recent study, colleagues and I reviewed research on breaching and ranked the most commonly hypothesized functions for it. We found that removal of external parasites was the most frequently proposed explanation, followed by predators chasing their prey; predators concentrating or stunning their prey; males chasing females during courtship; and animals fleeing predators, such as a ray escaping from a hammerhead shark in shallow water. We found that the highest percentage of breaches, measured by the number of studies that described it, occurred in manta rays and devil rays, followed by basking sharks and then by eagle rays and cownose rays. However, many other species of sharks, as well as sawfishes and stingrays, also perform this behavior. A breaching white shark surprises researchers off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Why it matters It takes a lot of ene...

Plastic is a fast-growing segment of U.S. municipal solid waste, and most of it ends up in the environment. Just 9% of plastic collected in municipal solid waste was recycled as of 2018, the most recent year for which national data is available. The rest was burned in waste-to-energy plants or buried in landfills. Manufacturers assert that better recycling is the optimal way to reduce plastic pollution. But critics argue that the industry often exaggerates how readily items can actually be recycled. In September 2024, beverage company Keurig Dr Pepper was fined US$1.5 million for inaccurately claiming that its K-Cup coffee pods were recyclable after two large recycling companies said they could not process the cups. California is suing ExxonMobil, accusing the company of falsely promoting plastic products as recyclable. Environmental law scholar Patrick Parenteau explains why claims about recyclability have confused consumers, and how forthcoming guidelines from the U.S. Federa...

As a child growing up in the early 1990s, I remember learning in school about the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels traps heat near the Earth’s surface, like the glass of a greenhouse. I imagined myself on the playground, roasting inside a humid hothouse. Fast forward 30 years, and the terms have changed. For a while, “global warming” was the go-to expression for talking about rising global temperatures and the role of human activities, particularly the use of fossil fuels. It had a spike in internet searches in 2007, probably due to former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning,” which hit theaters in 2006. Near the end of the Obama administration, “climate change” became the most common term. It’s now trending in Google searches more than global warming. Both terms make the same point: Rising global temperatures have major consequences on local weather...