Ford is getting $9.2 billion to develop three EV battery factories. The loan is a watershed moment in the US race to catch up with China on green tech.

🧵Here's what you need to know bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-… First of all, this is an enormous loan.

It's by far the biggest government backing for an automaker since the bailouts in the 2009 financial crisis.

Alaskan officials recently canceled the Bering Sea snow crab season for the first time ever after scientists discovered an unprecedented decline in crab numbers.

The number one suspect: climate change trib.al/2Lbn0Pp The decision to cancel both the Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red king crab seasons came as a devastating blow for local fisheries in a state where the seafood industry is an economic cornerstone trib.al/2Lbn0Pp

Clean energy is about to go mainstream.

From solar power and electric cars, to grid-scale batteries and heat pumps—the world is crossing into a mass-adoption moment for green technologies trib.al/Aj17qEM Bloomberg Green has identified 10 of those tipping points and analyzed which countries have crossed the threshold and how quickly those markets then expanded trib.al/Aj17qEM

We're thrilled to announce the finalists for the inaugural Bloomberg Green Docs competition.

The documentary film contest honors short films addressing the urgency of climate change.

This thread features the finalists and here's more info: bloom.bg/3S3LW6B We’ll be screening all five films — and announcing the winner — at the #BloombergGreenDocs Film Festival in Los Angeles on October 26.

You’re invited to join us for an evening of films, Q&As and cocktails! The event is free, but a ticket is required: bit.ly/3EjfM3H

Car executives have finally made cheap EVs ... on paper.

They aren't sending many to the factory.

Here's what you need to know if you are shopping for an electric car in the US 🧵 bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The vast majority of electric cars and e-trucks are now expensive, high-trim versions packed with extra features.

Here's a look at the yawning gap between starting prices and average sticker prices

The farming technology company Plenty is gearing up to build its biggest indoor complex yet.

The $300 million facility will grow multiple crops, including strawberries, leafy greens and tomatoes.

How will it work? 🧵 bloom.bg/3BpxVKj Plenty says that its 30-foot vertical towers maximize light for crops, producing 350 times the yield per acre of traditional farms

Waterways are drying up due to droughts and heat waves that owe their origins to climate change.

These photos reveal what lies beneath normal water levels 🧵 bloom.bg/3RiwmEp The world is fully in the grip of accelerating climate change, and it has a profound economic impact.

Losing waterways means a serious risk to shipping routes, agriculture, energy supplies — and drinking water

An extreme summer has taken a toll on Asia’s longest river.

The Yangtze flows about 3,900 miles through China and feeds farms that provide much of the country’s food and massive hydroelectric stations, including the Three Gorges Dam trib.al/zeg4enJ A year ago, water lapped almost as high as the riverbank.

Now, the level is at the lowest for this time of year since records began in 1865, exposing swathes of sand, rock and oozing brown mud that reeks of rotting fish trib.al/zeg4enJ

Ghana is drowning in plastic. It's everywhere.

We take you inside a failed recycling program backed by some of the world's largest international corporations [THREAD] bloom.bg/3dDN824 Here's a birdseye view of the plastic waste catastrophe along the Atlantic shores of Accra, Ghana's capital city.

Those big blue dots you see are actually massive bags filled with plastic bottles, set for recycling

A startup backed by Paris Hilton and the Hemsworth family is launching an initiative to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial that went extinct in the 1930s 🧵 bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Colossal Biosciences was started in September 2021 with Harvard geneticist George Church and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm.

As of March 2022, it has raised $75 million from people like the Winklevoss twins to Tony Robbins

Joe Biden's sweeping climate legislation looked doomed to fail. Then Bill Gates stepped in.

Read our exclusive report featured as Bloomberg's The Big Take🧵 bloom.bg/3K1AGVO In the middle of July — with temperatures surging through one of the hottest summers in US history, half of the country in drought — the Senate's all-important member, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, slammed the brakes on legislation to combat global warming.

Again

Shipwrecks, corpses, secret gardens and ancient cities are being revealed as extreme weather dries lakes, drains reservoirs and melts sea ice around the world 🧵 bloom.bg/3pbE33b In Italy's River Po, 70-year record-low water levels have revealed a previously submerged World War II-era barge

In the midst of an arid summer that set heat records across Europe, the continent’s rivers are evaporating and there’s little chance these once-reliable lifelines will rebound quickly as the climate crisis worsens 🧵 bloom.bg/3d8qY7N The Rhine — the continent’s most important river and a pillar of the German, Dutch and Swiss economies for centuries — has dried up to the point of becoming all but impassable at a key bottleneck, stymieing vast flows of diesel and coal bloom.bg/3d8qY7N

The Western US is an empire built on snow. And that snow is vanishing.

Disappearing snowpack is accelerating the historic drought across the Western US, and so far government responses haven't matched the scale of the problem 🧵 bloom.bg/3vyzKSY Since most of the region gets little rain in the summer, even in good years, its bustling cities and bountiful farms all hinge on fall and winter snow settling in the mountains before slowly melting into rivers and reservoirs

Mountains of garbage near South Asia megacities are contributing to some of the world's strongest and most persistent methane clouds observed by satellite, highlighting a major challenge in the global climate fight 🧵 bloomberg.com/features/2022-… Methane has 84 times the warming power of carbon dioxide and is often released during oil, natural gas and coal production.

Waste sites generate the potent greenhouse gas when organic material like food scraps or cardboard breaks down in the absence of oxygen.

The US is the latest country to pass what's become a critical EV tipping point: 5% of new cars sold are powered only by electricity 🧵
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… If the US follows the trend established by 18 countries that came before it, 25% of new car sales could be electric by the end of 2025, according to a Bloomberg analysis of adoption rates around the world.

That would be a year or two ahead of most major forecasts

The European Union wants to import as much African gas as it can, but doesn't want to fund projects that would allow the world's poorest continent to burn more of the fuel at home. 🧵

Read The Big Take:
bloomberg.com/news/features/… On Nigeria's Bonny Island, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Niger Delta, a giant plant produced enough liquefied natural gas in 2021 to heat half the UK for the winter.

Most of it was shipped out of the country, with Spain, France and Portugal the biggest buyers

Our view of the traditional lawn is being challenged.

It's one of the ugly realities homeowners are facing as global warming hits suburbia.

Still wanting to keep the look, a growing number of people are pulling up grass and laying down artificial turf trib.al/vK4yCCB A couple of decades ago, artificial turf was often a thin carpet atop a hard surface — rough on the knees as well as the eyes.

Athletes complained. Parents were worried for their kids' safety.

But as the product improved, so did homeowners' interest

For carmakers, the electric race is existential. For US customers, however, it's bewildering.

How do you make sense of the more than 30 EV models on the market?

Check out our new interactive dashboard bloom.bg/3yM3YUF Along with key EV specs, we've come up with a Green rating for each model, based on resources needed to manufacture batteries and how efficiently the cars travel on the road.

Here's our Green rating formula.

You can read more about our methodology here bloom.bg/3yM3YUF

The nor'easter about to tear up the U.S. East Coast with near-hurricane-force winds and fast-falling snow is almost certain to intensify so rapidly that it will meet the definition of a bomb cyclone.

The technical term is "bombogenesis" bloom.bg/33XlQiA The key ingredient of a weather bomb is the collision of cooler air with much warmer air, and that is on hand.

A cold front from Canada dropped temperatures to 17°F in Central Park overnight Wednesday into Thursday, and the Atlantic Ocean's water is warmer than normal

Scientists and investors are turning to a billion-year-old home brew to help meet Europe's future natural gas needs and provide a way to store and deploy excess energy from solar and wind generation: bloom.bg/3rPnhI4 In the same way brewers use live yeast to turn sugar and starch into beer, European energy companies are relying on single-celled creatures called archaea to ferment carbon dioxide and hydrogen into methane — the main component of natural gas.