One Month From Election Day, Helene Has Snarled the North Carolina Voting Process
MelissSue Gerrits/Getty Images/Grist This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 1.3 percent in 2020, his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just…
Your Phones and Computers Rely on This Remote North Carolina Mine. Helene Just Walloped It.
Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of…
FEMA Aims to Tighten Restrictions on Building in Flood-Prone Areas
Flooding from Hurricane Beryl swamps a highway running through Houston, July 8, 2024. Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/ZUMA This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency spends millions of dollars to help rebuild schools and hospitals after a hurricane, it tries to make the community more resilient…
Climate Disasters Are Leaving Some Poor Nations in a Crushing Cycle of Debt
A destroyed home in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian.Roger Edelman/ZUMA This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A new UN report sheds light on how climate change is driving some climate-vulnerable nations deeper into debt, locking them into unsustainable cycles of economic crisis and hampering their governments’…
Our National Flood Insurance Program Is a Trainwreck
David Ryder/Getty/Grist This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Congress created the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968 as a way for the federal government to bear a risk that private companies wouldn’t. Since then, Uncle Sam has backed the vast majority of flood insurance policies in the United…
In India, a Growing Need for AC Could Add to Global Heating
Men remove an air conditioner in advance of a building demolition in New Delhi.Naveen Sharma/Zuma This story was originally published by the Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For Muskan, the arrival of summer in Delhi is the “beginning of hell.” As temperatures in her cramped, densely populated east Delhi neighborhood often…