Axios

U.S. Customs and Border Protection started detaining solar panel imports from Chinese companies that allegedly source products from Xinjiang forced labor, Washington Post reports.

Why it matters: China is the supply chain leader for solar energy equipment, but concerns over human rights violations led the Biden administration to order a ban in June.

A dangerous scenario is taking shape across the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Ida, currently a Category 1 storm, is poised to intensify and hit coastal Louisiana on Sunday night or early Monday as a major hurricane of Category 4 intensity.

Driving the news: Ida made landfall on the Isle of Youth after rapidly strengthening over a span of several hours from a tropical storm into a Category 1 hurricane Friday afternoon. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph, with higher gusts, as it approached western Cuba.

Rivian, the well-financed electric vehicle startup, on Friday said it had filed plans to go public with securities regulators.

Driving the news: The plans for a public listing come as the company prepares to launch deliveries of its pickup truck next month, with plans to start delivering its SUV this fall.

President Biden has approved a state of emergency for Louisiana as Hurricane Ida approaches landfall following Gov. John Bel Edwards' previous declaration.

The latest: FEMA will now dispatched as part of the request to "coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures," said Biden in a statement.

Firemaps, a San Francisco-based startup that uses satellites and drones to defend homes from wildfires, raised $5.5 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Why it matters: The world is burning more regularly and with more intensity. As of today, 88 large fires are burning just within the U.S., covering 2.4 million acres, per the National Interagency Fire Center, with nearly 27,000 wildland firefighters and support personnel assigned to incidents. In California, nine of the 10 largest fires on record have occurred since 2010.

Americans have become more likely to want to live in areas where "houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away," a new Pew Research Center poll finds.

The intrigue: Correlation isn't causation. But the change between 2019 and this year occurred during the COVID pandemic and "the accompanying period of telework, remote schooling and pandemic-related restrictions on indoor dining and other indoor activities," Pew notes.

The electric mobility company Revel is installing battery storage at a New York City charging hub in a partnership that represents a growing and evolving trend in the industry.

Driving the news: Revel is adding storage from the firm Electric Era to help power its large charging "superhub" in Brooklyn that offers public access and charging for Revel's ride-hailing vehicles.

Drone delivery still seems exotic to most of us, but people in Logan, Australia, near Brisbane, routinely get food and other items delivered from the sky.

Why it matters: On-demand delivery is growing alongside an explosion in e-commerce, fueled by changes in consumer behavior during the pandemic. With roadways ever more congested, airborne delivery could sometimes be a faster option.

What's happening: This weekend, Google's drone delivery service, Wing, expects to hit 100,000 deliveries in Logan, two years after starting operations there.

• More than 50,000 deliveries were made in the past eight months, including a record 4,500 in the first week of August.
• That includes more than 10,000 cups of coffee, 2,700 sushi rolls, 1,000 loaves of bread and 1,200 hot chooks (Australian slang for rotisserie chickens).
• Wing started in two Logan neighborhoods and now serves 19 suburbs with a combined population of more than 110,000 people.

Of note: The Google delivery milestone comes a few weeks after Wired reported that Amazon's drone delivery program in the U.K. was "collapsing."

State of play: There are various commercial drone trials in the U.S., but the Federal Aviation Administration is still writing safety and navigational rules.

• For now, drones can't fly beyond the line of sight of the operator, which limits any kind of regular delivery service.
• Wing has an FAA waiver to test drone deliveries in a portion of Christiansburg, Virginia.
• It is also offering drone delivery in Canberra, Australia, and parts of Helsinki, Finland.
• Silicon Valley-based Zipline delivers medical supplies via drone in Rwanda and Ghana. It will begin a delivery trial with Walmart later this year in Bentonville, Arkansas.

How it works: Wing's operation in Logan is a live, automated, on-demand service.

• Customers use the Wing app to place orders from one of 11 participating vendors operating out of one of Wing's "nests," or operation centers.
• Available items include coffee, food, hardware, clothing, pet supplies and beauty products — up to 3 pounds.
• The vendor secures the order inside the package and attaches the box with a clip to the underside of the drone, which itself weighs just 10 pounds.
• Wing's software chooses the optimal route to the destination, which can be as small as a picnic-table-sized clearing in someone's backyard, driveway or a nearby park.

When the drone arrives, it descends and hovers while the package is dropped down on a line. When it reaches the ground, the clip automatically releases the package, and the line recoils inside the drone.

• Customers never interact with the drone itself.

By the numbers: The 3-pound weight cap would seem to be a limiting factor, but Wing says 90% of last-mile deliveries weigh less than 5 pounds.

• We checked: The average rotisserie chicken — er, hot chook — is about 2 pounds, per Betty Crocker.

Be smart: Drone deliveries could be a novel service, but the real opportunity for drones is industrial. They can be used to survey and inspect buildings, pipelines and bridges, for example, keeping workers safely on the ground.

Go deeper: Fly me a pizza (or two)

Towns in northern and central California registered some of the worst air quality in the world Thursday because of smoke from wildfires burning in the state, according to data from the federal government.

Why it matters: Microscopic particles suspended in wildfire smoke are a danger to the public and have been linked to decreased lung function, aggravated asthma, heart attacks and premature death in people with heart and lung disease, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Tropical Storm Ida formed Thursday afternoon over the Caribbean Sea and has the potential to become a powerful hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico and strike the northern Gulf Coast by Monday, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The big picture: The Hurricane Center included unusually sobering wording for the first advisory on a storm, partly because the timing of landfall means there is only a few days for residents in the storm's potential path to prepare.

It's just over two months until a pivotal United Nations climate summit, and if Capitol Hill's importance to the equation wasn't already clear, it sure is now.

Catch up fast: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released an analysis showing the Democrats-only reconciliation plan — and to a much lesser degree the bipartisan infrastructure deal — would essentially put the U.S. on track to meet President Biden's pledge under the Paris Agreement.

A recent satellite image of the southwestern portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet shows the existence of cerulean blue pockmarks — phenomena that provide scientists with a worrying message about sea-level rise and the risk of massively consequential changes in ocean behavior.

Why it matters: The melt ponds, rivers and moulins, cracks in the ice where surface water can plummet to where the ice sheet meets bedrock, are a symptom of a summer season that has brought large spikes in melt extent.

Electric, self-driving taxis might not be the answer to our climate problems that many people think, a new study finds.

Why it matters: Transportation is the largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which is one reason that the Biden administration is pushing for a rapid shift to electrification.

• But instead of reducing energy consumption and emissions that contribute to climate change, widespread deployment of electric robotaxis could exacerbate those problems, the joint Harvard-MIT study found.

Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and fellow Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) from Colorado are urging President Biden to declare a drought disaster in the West.

Driving the news: The lawmakers wrote to Biden Wednesday, calling on his administration to support Western governors' Federal Emergency Management Agency drought disaster declaration request issued earlier this month, as they experience water cuts driven by rapidly depleting supplies.