Climate & Environment

Arkup is a new design firm that specializes in solar-powered, sustainable, “luxury livable yachts,” or “arks.”

There’s already plenty of depression to go around in South Florida before this Memorial Day. Traffic is gonna be a ludicrous nightmare thanks to Miami Beach’s totally not-race-related crackdown on Urban Beach Week. The Marlins belong in the trash can, and the Dolphins will probably be even worse. And now, a tropical depression might just roll over the peninsula for the holiday weekend.

Logging into Twitter first thing in the morning in 2018 generally feels like diving headfirst into a flaming dumpster floating down a flooded roadway. Wage theft is legal now! Trump is treating the Constitution like a Russian prostitute! More than a week before hurricane season begins, a damn tropical storm might already be forming!

Hurricane Irma caused a ton of damage in Miami last year. But so did a bunch of unnamed rainstorms and weak tropical systems. Downtown Miami, Brickell, Miami Beach, and other parts of Miami-Dade County regularly flood these days during high tide, and larger-than-average rainstorms deluge the area. Many residents have questioned…

Look, we Miamians are spoiled. We know the rest of the world laughs at us when we complain about things like “cloud cover” and “four straight days of drizzle” because we never have to endure things like blizzards, earthquakes, severe droughts, or whatever sort of insane tarantula attacks we’re guessing occur in Australia all the time…

There’s no question the historic Miami-Dade County Courthouse, completed in 1928, is in bad shape. County commissioners have described the building as “hazardous” and “experiencing corrosion, rust, water intrusion, algae and mold penetration, termites, poor air quality, and potential asbestos exposure.” Yet voters have been clear they don’t want to pay to rebuild it.

The average Floridian would be forgiven for assuming that moneyed interests such as Big Sugar and power companies have a stranglehold on the state government. Just last year, lobbyists for Florida Power & Light (FPL) were caught literally writing the text of proposed laws.

If Miami is in a bad mood this morning, it’s understandable. This weekend was the rare two-day stretch of relentless gray clouds, driving rain, and flash floods with barely a second of sunshine. Now the city has woken up to a gloomy Monday of booming thunder and even more rain.

In the long, hot, powerless days after Hurricane Irma, Miamians grew all sorts of irate at Florida Power & Light, South Florida’s largest electricity company. After sweltering for more than a week without power, a group of sweaty Miami-area residents sued FPL last year over the widespread outages after the storm.

Saturday and Sunday, powerboat and personal watercraft professionals from around the world will make their way to Key Biscayne to face off in a massive televised water race. The 13-round event will be the first major race at Miami Marine Stadium since the graffitied venue closed in 1992.

Alessandro Renzetti was getting ready to go to sleep when he heard screams outside his Normandy Isles home. He ran outside barefoot and saw his neighbor crying as she tried to pull her beagle from the grip of another dog. At least, he thought it was another dog.

Early this year, Florida Power & Light and Miami-Dade County unveiled a joint plan they claimed would finally fix the gigantic plume of saltwater pollution that has leaked from FPL’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station into the Biscayne Aquifer, South Florida’s largest source of drinking water. The plume came from…

The beach is one of the defining facets of Miami that make this city magic. The white sands are Florida’s identity — an oasis that beckons everyone and belongs to no one, not the billionaires in beach chairs or the kids skipping class and sitting on their backpacks in the sand. But all of that might change very soon.

Pepe and Enrique, both American brown pelicans from South Florida, have spent nearly two decades as a devoted same-sex couple. At the beginning of breeding season this past December, “the boys” — as their caretakers refer to them — built a nest together in the corner of the large pen where they live overlooking Biscayne Bay.

For decades, Coconut Grove residents have trekked to a sliver of land at the end of St. Gaudens Road to enjoy the rare unencumbered view of Biscayne Bay. Someone even put a bench there. But enjoying the view hasn’t been easy since a mysterious developer — reportedly hired by the heir to a Venezuelan oil fortune and onetime coup leader — snapped up the lot next door.

Maggie Fernández showed up at last week’s Miami Sea Level Rise Committee meeting with a simple pitch. Her group, the grassroots Miami Climate Alliance, wants the city to account for all the money it spends battling rising seas and then sue oil companies and carbon polluters to pay the bill instead of raising residents’ taxes.

Earlier today, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt, a man singularly obsessed with plunging Miami into the sea, got caught living in a home owned by the wife of a prominent energy industry lobbyist. ABC News found that for much of 2017, Pruitt resided in a townhouse owned by Vicki Hart, wife of J. Steven Hart, the CEO of D.C. lobbying firm Williams & Jensen, which caters to oil and energy companies.

A new women’s rights organization is demanding that the head of Miami’s Everglades Foundation step down over his longstanding ties with accused serial rapist Harvey Weinstein. But billionaire hedge-fund investor Paul Tudor Jones is pushing back and alleging that the group is actually a front for Big Sugar. Tudor Jones…

Miami residents should hope Arctic sea ice remains as thick, frozen, and unmoving as globally possible. This subtropical city’s relationship with the far north is pretty clear: The more the ice caps melt, the more Miami floods.

After sub-hurricane-force winds blew out vast swaths of South Florida’s electrical grid for days when Hurricane Irma hit last September, residents began asking what seemed like an obvious question: Why hasn’t Florida Power & Light, the state-regulated electricity monopoly, buried more power lines underground to protect them from tropical storms?

James Taylor works for the Heartland Institute, a hard-right think tank funded by oil companies, carbon polluters, and other rich robber barons who pay them to promote fake science that supposedly debunks climate change. Heartland’s pay-for-play shtick is well documented and so simple a child could understand what it’s up to.