SteveKLord

Walk outside into 100-degree heat wearing a black shirt, and you’ll feel a whole lot hotter than if you were wearing white. Now think about your roof: If it’s also dark, it’s soaking up more of the sun’s energy and radiating that heat indoors. If it were a lighter color, it’d be like your home was wearing a giant white shirt all the time.

This is the idea behind the “cool roof.” Last month, Atlanta joined a growing number of American cities requiring that new roofs be more reflective. That significantly reduces temperatures not just in a building, but in the surrounding urban environment. “I really wanted to be able to approach climate change in the city of Atlanta with a diversity of tactics,” said City Council member Liliana Bakhtiari, who authored the bill, “because it’s far easier to change a local climate than it is a global one.”

Extreme weather seems to make the headlines almost every week, as disasters increasingly strike out of season, break records, and hit places they never have before.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records.

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and flooding.

Update: President Trump signed the domestic policy and tax bill into law on Friday, July 4.

“These bills are an affront to our sovereignty, our lands, and our way of life. They would gut essential health and food security programs, roll back climate resilience funding, and allow the exploitation of our sacred homelands without even basic tribal consultation,” said Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida in Alaska, in a statement. “This is not just bad policy — it is a betrayal of the federal trust responsibility to tribal nations.”

Tribes across the country are particularly worried about the megabill’s hit to clean energy, complicating the development of critical wind and solar projects. According to the Department of Energy, tribal households face 6.5 times more electrical outages per year and a 28 percent higher energy burden compared to the average U.S. household. An estimated 54,000 people living on tribal lands have no electricity.

Addressing a crowd outside the White House on Friday (4 July), the US president said: “China’s right now building 68 coal-generating plants, and we’re putting up wind … It does not work, aside from ruining our fields and our valleys and killing all the birds, being very weak and very expensive – all made in China.”

Commenting on “all the windmills that China sends us”, he then went on to claim: “I have never seen a wind farm in China. Why is that?”

Well, the reality is that they are there, because the country is described as the “global renewable energy leader” due to it hosting “nearly half of the world’s total operating wind and solar capacity” – per a 2023 report from the non-profit research organisation, Global Energy Monitor.

The same report notes at the time of its publication in June that year, the combined onshore and offshore wind capacity of China had doubled from what it was in 2017, surpassing 310 gigawatts.

And according to the energy think tank Ember, China accounted for more than half of the global increase in both wind and solar power last year.

The American clean power industry is thriving and making a significant contribution to the U.S. economy thanks to policies of the Biden-Harris administration, as well as the highly competitive prices and speed with which clean power systems and energy storage can be currently installed. But the industry is now facing an all-out assault from President Donald Trump.

His signature “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which Trump signed into law on July 4, heavily targets the industry, which Trump has labeled the “green new scam.” The legislation eliminates a 30 percent tax credit for residential rooftop solar panels by the end of 2025, as well as those dedicated to utility-scale solar and wind, although plants that are already financed and approved by June 2026 — or that are operational by 2027 — can still qualify for the credits. (The credit for solar leasing companies will also last through 2027 and can be passed through to consumers.) The bill also eliminates tax credits for electric vehicles and chargers, as well as battery storage systems, geothermal heating, electric panel upgrades, energy audits and weatherization, all of which can lower consumer’s energy bills.

In a last minute move, however, Republicans struck a proposed excise tax on wind and solar projects if the materials included a percentage of minerals sourced from certain foreign countries. Experts say that, regardless of the excise tax reprieve and the included grandfather provisions, the clean energy industry will be badly hurt and consumers’ energy prices could rise by eight to 10 percent.

Australian-based renewable energy and storage investor Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners says its new 373 MW Cleve Hill Solar Park – the biggest in the UK – has begun commercial operations.

The Cleve Hill solar park, situated in Kent in England’s south, consists of over 550,000 solar panels and is expected to provide clean electricity equivalent to the needs of 102,000 homes, and is being hailed as a landmark on multiple fronts.

It is four times the size of the next largest operational UK solar project, and will also feature a 150 MW co-located battery energy storage system (BESS), making it also the largest co-located solar plus storage project ever constructed in the UK power market.

Cleve Hill was also the first solar and battery storage project to be consented as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) by the UK government, and secured the first solar contract for difference (CfD) by the UK Government-backed Low Carbon Contracts Company.

Critics of the 'green transition' argue it is imposing an unacceptable cost on ordinary working people. But is it really renewable technologies that are causing our bills to go up, or are there other forces involved? We scratch the surface and take a look.

Up Top Acres Is building Farms Above Our Heads

During DC Climate Week, we literally toured one of the freshest rooftops in the city. Up Top Acres is a national leader in rooftop farming and urban agriculture, managing over 40 farms and gardens across the East Coast.

We visited their rooftop location just blocks from the Capitol, where they’re harvesting lettuce, basil, tomatoes, strawberries, kale, herbs, and new ways of thinking about what a building can be. These rooftop farms help reduce stormwater runoff, cool buildings, and bring people together.

Imagine this. You’re living in a remote rural hamlet in the forested hills of Mysore, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. You’re miles from the nearest doctor, a day’s journey by foot and bus to the nearest hospital. And there’s no mains electricity. If you suddenly fall ill and need urgent medical help, what are your chances?

A few years ago, they’d be slim. Today, though, you make your way a couple of hundred metres down the track to a minor miracle: a small, gleaming white building topped with solar panels. Inside, a specially trained health worker checks you out, runs a few tests, takes your blood pressure, even does an ECG, maybe gives you some lifesaving treatment or medicine. Then she connects you to a doctor in a distant hospital, who’s right there on the screen, giving you the sort of specialist consultation that would normally be far out of reach.

It sounds like one of those rosy scenarios beloved of futurists, but this isn’t speculative fiction. The Climate Smart Health Clinic, as the sign over the door declares, is here and now, in the village of Basavanagiri Hadi.

It’s part of an ambitious programme that is using a combination of solar power and mobile connectivity to revolutionise the prospects for healthcare across swathes of rural India. It springs from the Selco Foundation, an independent not-for-profit, which is a sister organisation of Selco India, the country’s leading solar company specialising in small-scale, decentralised systems.

With the backing of the Ikea Foundation, the scheme is designed to provide reliable, clean and affordable electricity to 25,000 of the country’s state-run primary health care (PHC) centres, as well as to explore entirely new ways of delivering health services – like the ‘tele-clinic’ in this Mysore village.

Desemboque del Seri, a community in northern Mexico, has seen stunning results after installing solar panels in family vegetable gardens.

Verónica Molina, a member of the indigenous Comcaac community, has led the charge, according to Inter Press Service. After learning about solar farms in India in 2016, that experience inspired her to change how her community functioned.

This change has allowed Molina's community to save money and live in a healthier environment. While this technology is relatively new to Mexico, Molina's work has the potential to revolutionize how many people live.

"With the panels, we pay less for energy, and with the gardens we save money on vegetables," Molina said in a translated statement to IPS.

LG Energy Solution’s new lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) battery plant in Holland, Michigan, marks a significant step for clean energy in the US. Opened in early May 2025, this facility shifts focus from electric vehicles (EVs) to energy storage systems (ESS) as EV demand cools. This article explores the plant’s impact on jobs, the economy, clean energy, and how policies like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the One Big Beautiful Bill, tariffs, and competitors shape its future.

On a vast property in Lee County, in the heart of southwest Georgia, Tyler Huber raises sheep.

As the flock grazes, the sheep need somewhere to take a break from the Georgia sun.

“It is incredibly hot, the sun is just unavoidable, and the fact that they’ve got shade every fifteen feet out here — it’s just the ideal environment, to have shade so close,” he said on a recent hot day.

The shade comes from solar panels, using that same relentless sunshine to generate energy. The sheep, in turn, cut down on mowing costs for the solar farm. The flock loves chowing down on the vegetation under and around the panels, Huber said.

Before solar developer Silicon Ranch bought this land, it used to have row crops — mostly corn and cotton — and beehives. Farmers can’t grow corn and cotton under solar panels, but this is still farmland for sheep and bees.

Scenes like this are increasingly common as power companies add more and more solar energy to keep up with rising demand for renewable electricity. Many of those solar panels are being built on farmland. The American Farmland Trust, which tracks the conversion of farmland to other uses, projects that 80 percent of the acreage needed to scale up solar energy could be agricultural land. The trend has given rise to a wave of opposition from local activists to state legislatures and the White House.