Recent News
The Misleading Accounting Behind Your ‘recycled’ Plastic
A convoluted credit system allows companies to label virgin plastic as recycled. Here’s how it works.
Imagine you’re filling up 100 bags of coffee. You’re using beans from a few different providers — 10 percent of the beans they sent you are decaffeinated and the rest are caffeinated. However, you mixed them all together, so each bag is an even blend of 10 percent decaf, 90 percent caffeinated coffee beans.
It’s a shame, though, because in this hypothetical, decaffeinated coffee is in high demand. People will pay a premium for bags of 100 percent decaf coffee. So instead of labeling each bag as a 10/90 blend of decaf/caffeinated coffee, you decide to label 90 bags as regular, fully caffeinated coffee beans, and the remaining 10 as “100 percent decaf.” You can now charge much more for those “decaf” bags.
It’s a misleading strategy, at best, and one that could cause rioting among coffee drinkers. But it’s not just a thought experiment. Plastic companies are using an even more convoluted version of this accounting technique in order to make it seem that their products have more recycled content than they really do. 05-12-25
An $18M Grant Would Have Drastically Reduced Food Waste. Then the EPA Cut It.
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The Rhode Island project to create local jobs, launch compost hubs, and reduce emissions was years in the making.
Once a little girl roaming the vibrant fields of an organic lettuce farm in Kealakekua, Hawai‘i, Ella Kilpatrick Kotner learned how to live in harmony with the land before most kids learn how to tie their shoes. Nourishing the soils that gave her a regular supply of leafy greens was just a part of life. As was playing with the piles of compost on her family’s farm.
“Composting, for me, is a lot about community,” said Kilpatrick Kotner. “It’s about connecting people to food and soil, and it’s about learning and being engaged in the process, and meeting your neighbors, and treating this thing that many people think of as a waste as a resource to be cherished and handled with care and turned into something beautiful that we can then reuse to grow more food.”
She now leads a program at Groundwork RI, a nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island, that does just that.
Every day, her team of three bikes throughout the city, collecting food scraps from hundreds of households, which are then brought to a community garden. There, they mix pounds of nitrogen-rich food scraps otherwise destined for landfills with carbon-rich materials, such as dry leaves and wood shavings, while sifting out pieces of plastic and even the occasional fork. In doing so, Kilpatrick Kotner is creating a menu and a habitat for the microbes that prompt the decomposition process, transforming the waste into a spongy source of life for the soil. The compost is then made available to those enrolled in the subscription-based service to use in home gardens, yards, or urban farms. 05-09-25
Under Trump’s Emergency Order, This Pipeline Through the Great Lakes Wetlands Could Get Fast-tracked
People fish in a creek adjacent to a Royal Dutch Shell refinery near the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, in May 2021. [Photo: Cole Burston/Bloomberg/Getty Images]
The Army Corps of Engineers, citing a recent national energy emergency order by President Trump, has expedited a permit review for a new miles-long section of an oil and gas pipeline that would bore deep into protected wetlands bordering Canada and the United States.
The pipeline request from Enbridge Energy, a Canadian company, would cut beneath the Straits of Mackinac—the connecting waterway between Lakes Michigan and Huron—to install a tunnel 12 times as wide as above-ground existing pipelines. Tribal groups that had been cooperating with the Corps’ environmental impact statement for the project pulled out when they learned of the emergency review. The Corps announced April 15 that the project, known as Line 5, fits under Trump’s January order.
The project is part of a 645-mile pipeline between Superior, Wisconsin, and Sarnia, Ontario, that transports about 22 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids daily, according to the company website.
The Corps’ decision to expedite consideration came days before a sweeping change by the U.S. Department of Interior to hasten energy reviews. The federal agency said beginning April 23 that energy-related projects and, specifically, environmental impact reviews of such projects will move with unprecedented speed and with truncated public comment. Energy, under Trump’s order, refers to fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal, along with geothermal, nuclear and hydropower. 05-07-25
Trump Administration Cuts Off Harvard University From Future Research Grant Funding
Harvard University’s campus on Nov. 22, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. The Trump administration said it is cutting off federal grant funding to the Ivy League institution. APCortizasJr via Getty Images
The institution “should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote.
McMahon opened her letter with an accusation that Harvard has “engaged in a systematic pattern of violating federal law.”
What followed were McMahon’s numerous digs at Harvard, including for previously scrapping standardized testing requirements, which the university revived more than a year ago, and for launching an introductory math course to help address learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She blasted a Harvard board member who served in the Obama administration as Secretary of Commerce as “catastrophic” and a “Democratic operative” who is “running the institution in a totally chaotic way.” She also referenced the plagiarism allegations against the academic work of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, calling it “an embarrassment to our Nation.” And she derided the university for hiring former Democratic mayors Lori Lightfoot and Bill de Blasio in fellowship positions.
McMahon also alleged that Harvard “engages in ugly racism” in its undergraduate and graduate schools, but she did not elaborate or cite evidence.
The letter was the latest salvo in a feud that has escalated rapidly over roughly a month. In late March, President Donald Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced a review of some $9 billion in federal funding to Harvard over what it claimed was a failure to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. 05-06-25
In Georgia, A Fight Over Credit For Its Clean Energy Boom
Mike Stewart / AP Photo
According to a new report by Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, some 42,000 jobs are now at risk, as Republicans consider repealing IRA tax credits to pay for President Trump’s proposed tax cuts.
If Joe Biden’s presidency had a capstone achievement, it was the Inflation Reduction Act, and if the IRA’s project of reindustrializing America through climate action has a poster child, it is Georgia. The Peach State is home to more new jobs expected to result from clean energy projects that have been announced since the law’s passage in August 2022 than any other state.
Those jobs — some 42,000, according to a report shared with Grist first and publishing later today by Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock — are now at risk as congressional Republicans consider repealing some or all of the IRA’s tax credits to pay for President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts. The report argues that the possibility of IRA incentives being discontinued has already had an impact. In February, two battery manufacturers, Freyr Battery and Aspen Aerogels, canceled plans for new factories in Georgia. Those projects would have together brought 1,400 jobs to the state and invested nearly $3 billion. 05-06-25
Scientists Just Found A Way to Break Through Climate Apathy
Mel Evans / AP Photo
In a field of muddy results, it’s among the clearest findings that one cognitive scientist has seen in his career.
For much of the 20th century, winter brought an annual ritual to Princeton, New Jersey. Lake Carnegie froze solid, and skaters flocked to its glossy surface. These days, the ice is rarely thick enough to support anybody wearing skates, since Princeton’s winters have warmed about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. It’s a lost tradition that Grace Liu linked to the warming climate as an undergrad at Princeton University in 2020, interviewing longtime residents and digging through newspaper archives to create a record of the lake’s ice conditions.
“People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,” said Liu, who’s now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. “However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.”
When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?
That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change. 05-05-25
Trump Radically Remade the US Food System in Just 100 Days
Erin Clark / The Boston Globe via Getty Images
The people who grow and sell America’s food no longer trust the USDA. We made a timeline to show you what happened.
Despite its widespread perception, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is involved in much more than farming. The federal agency, established in 1862, is made up of 29 subagencies and offices and just last year was staffed by nearly 100,000 employees. It has an annual budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. Altogether it administers funding, technical support, and regulations for: international trade, food assistance, forest and grasslands management, livestock rearing, global scientific research, economic data, land conservation, rural housing, disaster aid, water management, startup capital, crop insurance, food safety, and plant health.
In just about 100 days, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have significantly constrained that breadth of work.
Since Trump’s inauguration, the inner workings of the agency have been in a constant state of flux — thousands of staffers were terminated only to be temporarily reinstated; entire programs stripped down; a grant freeze crippled state, regional, and local food systems that rely on federal funding. 05-02-25
100 Days in, Does Trump Still ‘dig’ Coal?
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Presidents have long used coal miners as political props. Yet federal policies have done little to improve their lives, and some things have actually gotten worse.
Jeffrey Willig doesn’t mine coal anymore. For nine years he worked underground, most recently for a company called Blackjewel, which laid off around 1,700 workers in June of 2019 without paying them. Robbed of their final paycheck, Willig and the others set up camp and blocked the company’s last trainload of “black gold” from leaving Harlan County, Kentucky, beginning what would be months of protest. They called on Democrats and Republicans alike for support, and received some, but ultimately were left disillusioned, spending years in court fighting for what they were owed.
Their plight came during a wave of layoffs that has rocked coal country for more than a decade. When Willig heard Democrats discuss mine closures and extoll the growth of clean energy jobs, it frustrated him. “Say they want to do solar panels. That’s great,” Willig said. “But why don’t [they] put those type of jobs in our area? They don’t do that. That’s the problem.”
Democratic party leaders and renewable energy advocates didn’t always seem to understand, he felt, how good a job mining could be. Willig earned $75,000 a year without a college degree, in a county with an annual per capita income not even one-third that. What’s more, it was fulfilling — hard work, and dangerous, but it came with unmatched camaraderie and pride in helping fuel the world. When those jobs were gone, he felt Democrats didn’t provide a clear answer to what would come after. 05-01-25
The Trump Administration Just Dismissed All 400 experts Working on America’s Official Climate Report
A view of a burned gas station in ruins in Altadena, California, following wildfires that swept through the city in January 2025. Sam Ghazi / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP / Getty Images
It’s not clear who will now write the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — or whether it will be written at all.
Every several years for the past 25 years, the federal government has published a comprehensive look at the way climate change is affecting the country. States, local governments, businesses, farmers, and many others use this National Climate Assessment to prepare for rising temperatures, more bouts of extreme weather, and worsening disasters such as wildfires.
On Monday, however, the Trump administration told all of the more than 400 volunteer scientists and experts working on the next assessment that it was releasing them from their roles. A brief memo said the scope of the report was being “reevaluated” within the context of the Congressional legislation that mandates it.
The move throws the National Climate Assessment, whose sixth iteration is supposed to be released in late 2027 or early 2028, into even deeper uncertainty. Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the White House office that produces the report and helps coordinate research across more than a dozen federal agencies.
Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was among the authors who were dismissed on Monday. She and her colleagues had just submitted a draft outline for a chapter about coastlines, with information on how sea level rise could affect communities and urban infrastructure. 04-29-25
The New Jersey Fire Signals a New Era For the Northeast
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The worst fire in New Jersey’s history is a warning that “there’s no reason that what has happened in the western U.S. can’t happen here.”
The Jones Road Wildfire, which started last Tuesday in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, is on track to become the worst in state history. Fueled by gusty winds, low humidity, and dry undergrowth — conditions increasingly common in the region — the blaze has scorched more than 23 square miles, forced thousands to evacuate, and threatened nuclear waste at a power plant. As of Monday, firefighters had contained just 45 percent of the inferno.
It follows an unprecedented wildfire season in the Northeast, which saw the Hudson Valley and Catskills burn last fall, and a record number of blazes in the five boroughs of New York City. It’s a stark reminder that conflagrations are not confined to the West, said Aaron Weiskittel, director of the Center for Research on Sustainable Forests at the University of Maine. “If you’ve got fuel, there’s a potential for a fire,” he said. Though many people don’t consider it a common hazard, “there’s no reason that what has happened in the western U.S. can’t happen here.”
Despite the growing threat, communities find themselves increasingly unprepared as more people move to vulnerable areas and the federal government slashes funding and eliminates jobs. Last week, internal emails obtained by Grist reveal that the Interior Department is planning further staffing cuts. 04-29-25
A Siege on Science: How Trump is Undoing an American Legacy
The Mauna Loa atmospheric observatory in Hawai‘i. Wekeli / iStock via Getty Images
In its first 100 days, the Trump administration has slashed federal agencies, canceled national reports, and yanked funding from universities. The shockwaves will be felt worldwide.
Across seven decades and a dozen presidencies, America’s scientific prowess was arguably unmatched. At universities and federal agencies alike, researchers in the United States revolutionized weather forecasting, cured deadly diseases, and began monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. As far back as 1990, Congress directed this scientific might toward understanding climate change, after finding that human-induced global warming posed a threat to “human health, and global economic and social well-being.”
Donald Trump and his new administration evidently disagree. In the first 100 days of his second stint in the White House, the president has released a slew of orders that destabilize this apparatus. Earlier this month, the administration effectively scrapped the government’s comprehensive National Climate Assessment — a quadrennial report that provides scientifically-backed guidance for how towns, cities, and regions can prepare for a hotter climate — when it canceled a contract for the firm that facilitates the research. Recently leaked memos, reviewed by Grist, show the White House hopes to slash scientific research at NASA and eliminate all research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which is responsible for a host of climate, weather, and conservation science. And two weeks ago, the administration froze over $2 billion of research funding to Harvard — the latest in a series of punishments targeting the nation’s top schools that the president claims have become overrun by “woke” ideology. 04-28-25
The World’s Biggest Companies Have Caused $28 Trillion in Climate Damage, a New Study Estimates
WASHINGTON (AP) — The world’s biggest corporations have caused $28 trillion in climate damage, a new study estimates as part of an effort to make it easier for people and governments to hold companies financially accountable, like the tobacco giants have been.
A Dartmouth College research team came up with the estimated pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half of the total dollar figure coming from 10 fossil fuel providers: Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation.
For comparison, $28 trillion is a shade less than the sum of all goods and services produced in the United States last year.
At the top of the list, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused a bit more than $2 trillion in heat damage over the decades, the team calculated in a study published in Wednesday’s journal Nature. The researchers figured that every 1% of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 has caused $502 billion in damage from heat alone, which doesn’t include the costs incurred by other extreme weather such as hurricanes, droughts and floods. 04-23-25
The Trump Administration Says it Wants a ‘nuclear renaissance.’ These Actions Suggest Otherwise.
Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Tariffs and a shake-up at the Tennessee Valley Authority could be getting in the way.
In March, in a thunderous op-ed in Power Magazine, a trade publication covering the electricity industry, Republican senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee called for President Donald Trump to make some major institutional changes in the Tennessee Valley Authority, America’s biggest public utility.
A couple months earlier, TVA’s CEO Jeff Lyash had announced his retirement. When the board of directors, whose seats are appointed by the president, chose Lyash’s successor, they selected someone from among the utilities current staff — Don Moul, who had been the executive vice president and chief operating officer since 2021. Blackburn and Hagerty expressed concern over the utility’s direction and leadership, saying a new direction was needed if it was to move quickly on building nuclear technology and lead “America’s Nuclear Renaissance.”
“With the right courageous leadership, TVA could lead the way in our nation’s nuclear energy revival, empower us to dominate the 21st century’s global technology competition, and cement President Trump’s legacy as ‘America’s Nuclear President,’” the senators wrote.
“As it stands now,” the senators continued, “TVA and its leadership can’t carry the weight of this moment.” 04-24-25
Coal Miners Lose Safety Nets as Black Lung Programs Collapse Under Trump
Michael Streeby, 67, a retired underground coal miner with 30 years of experience, diagnosed with advanced black lung disease, is examined by nurse practitioner Shelly Pack at the Bluestone Health Center in Princeton, West Virginia, April 15, 2025. [Photo: Reuters/Adrees Latif]
Josh Cochran worked deep in the coal mines of West Virginia since he was 22 years old, pulling a six-figure salary that allowed him to buy a home with his wife Stephanie and hunt and fish in his spare time.
That ended two years ago when, at the age of 43, he was diagnosed with advanced black lung disease. He’s now waiting for a lung transplant, breathes with the help of an oxygen tank, and needs help from his wife to do basic tasks around the house.
His saving grace, he says, is that he can still earn a living. A federal program run by the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health called Part 90 meant he was relocated from underground when he got his diagnosis to a desk job dispatching coal trucks to the same company, retaining his pay.
“Part 90 – that’s only the thing you got,” he told Reuters while signing a stack of documents needed for the transplant, a simple task that left him winded. “You can come out from underground, make what you made, and then they can’t just get rid of you.” 04-21-25
Trump’s Latest USDA Cuts Undermine His Plan to “Make America Healthy Again”
Edwin Remsburg / VW Pics via Getty Images
The abrupt cancellation of a beloved farm-to-school grant program threatens food access, school gardens, and small farms nationwide.
Early in the morning last Monday, a group of third graders huddled in the garden of Mendota Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. Of the dozen students present, a handful were busy filling up buckets of compost, others were readying soil beds for spring planting, while a number carefully watered freshly planted radishes and peas. The students were all busy with their assorted tasks until a gleeful shout rang across the space. Everything ground to a halt when a beaming boy triumphantly raised his gloved hand, displaying a gaggle of worms. The group of riveted eight- and nine-year-olds dropped everything to cluster around him and the writhing mass of invertebrates.
“They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil, because they’re healthy and they’re happy and they have sunshine, and they’ve watered them,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a Wisconsin nonprofit community agricultural organization that helps oversee the garden.
Krug stopped by the school that day to join the class, which her team runs together with AmeriCorps. Outdoor programming like this, said Krug, positions students to learn how to grow food — and take care of the planet that bears it. 04-22-25
Half the World’s People Depend on Rice. New Research Says Climate Change Will Make it Toxic
A package of white rice serves as a seafood sambal dish at a food stall in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, on January 16, 2025. Credit: Aman Rochman/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Warmer temperatures and more carbon dioxide will boost levels of arsenic, a dangerous heavy metal, in the staple crop.
Rice, the world’s most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published Wednesday in The Lancet.
Eaten every day by billions of people and grown across the globe, rice is arguably the planet’s most important staple crop, with half the world’s population relying on it for the majority of its food needs, especially in developing countries.
But the way rice is grown—mostly submerged in paddies—and its highly porous texture means it can absorb unusually high levels of arsenic, a potent carcinogenic toxin that is especially dangerous for babies.
Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist and associate professor at Columbia University, has studied rice for three decades and has more recently focused his research on how climate change reduces nutrient levels across many staple crops, including rice. He teamed up with researchers from China and the U.S. to conduct a first-of-its-kind study, looking at how a range of rice species reacted to increases in temperature and carbon dioxide, both of which are projected to occur as more greenhouse gas emissions are released into the atmosphere as a result of human activities. The new study was published in The Lancet Planetary Health. 04-16-25
The Environmental Policy Backed By Free-market Republicans
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The right to repair can reduce emissions and pollution. But for conservatives, it’s “a freedom and liberty issue.”
Several years ago, Louis Blessing’s wife asked for his help replacing the battery in her laptop. An electrical engineer by training, Blessing figured it would be a quick fix. But after swapping out the old battery for a new one and plugging the laptop in, he discovered it wouldn’t charge.
It quickly dawned on Blessing that the laptop recognized he had installed a battery made by a third party, and rejected it. It’s a classic example of a practice known as parts pairing, where manufacturers use software to control how — and with whose parts — their devices are fixed.
“To me, that is a garbage business practice,” Blessing told Grist. “Yes, it’s legal for them to do it, but that is truly trash.” After the failed battery swap, Blessing’s wife wound up getting a new computer.
The business practice that led her to do so may not be legal for much longer. Blessing is a Republican state senator representing Ohio’s 8th Senate district, which includes much of the area surrounding Cincinnati. In April, Blessing introduced a “right-to-repair” bill that grants consumers legal access to the parts, tools, and documents they need to fix a wide range of devices while banning restrictive practices like parts pairing. If Blessing’s bill succeeds, the Buckeye State will become the latest to enshrine the right to repair into law, after similar legislative victories in Colorado, Oregon, California, Minnesota, and New York. 04-18-25
In Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley,’ Black Communities Get All of the Pollution, Few of the Jobs
Lue Palmer / Verite
A new study confirms what many have long suspected.
Residents of the mostly Black communities sandwiched between chemical plants along the lower Mississippi River have long said they get most of the pollution but few of the jobs produced by the region’s vast petrochemical industry.
A new study led by Tulane University backs up that view, revealing stark racial disparities across the U.S.’s petrochemical workforce. Inequity was especially pronounced in Louisiana, where people of color were underrepresented in both high- and low-paying jobs at chemical plants and refineries.
“It was really surprising how consistently people of color didn’t get their fair share of jobs in the petrochemical industry,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist with the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. “No matter how you slice or dice the data by states, metro areas or parishes, the data’s consistent.”
Toxic air pollution in Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor, an area often referred to as “Cancer Alley,” has risen in recent years. The burdens of pollution have been borne mostly by the state’s Black and poor communities, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The Tulane study’s findings match what Cancer Alley residents have suspected for decades, said Joy Banner, co-founder of the Descendants Project, a nonprofit that advocates for Black communities in the parishes between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. 04-17-25
The Unregulated Link in a Toxic Supply Chain
A residential neighborhood abuts Cardinal Health’s warehouse in east El Paso. Residents are unaware of the facility’s ethylene oxide emissions. Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Grist
From El Paso, Texas, to Richmond, Virginia, warehouses are leaking ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing chemical. Almost no one knows about them.
By January 2018, Vanessa Dominguez and her husband had been flirting with moving to a different neighborhood in El Paso, Texas, for a few years. Their daughter was enrolled in one of the best elementary schools in the county, but because the family lived just outside the district’s boundary, her position was tenuous. Administrators could decide to return her to her home district at any moment. Moving closer would guarantee her spot. And when their landlord notified Dominguez that she wanted to double their rent, she and her husband felt more urgency to make their move.
Finally, their opportunity came. Dominguez’s boss owned a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Ranchos del Sol, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in east El Paso, and was looking for a new tenant.
With a kitchen island, high ceilings, and a park across the street where kids often played soccer, the house was perfect for the young family. Most importantly, the property was within the school district’s boundaries.
“The property as a whole seemed attractive, and the neighborhood seemed pretty calm,” Dominguez recalled.
After they moved in, Dominguez’s daughter quickly took to running around in the backyard, which featured a cherry blossom tree, and the family often grilled outside. Dominguez barely noticed the warehouse just beyond the cobblestone wall at the back. It really wasn’t until the COVID-19 stay-at-home mandate in 2020 that she noticed the stream of trucks pulling in and out of the facility. Sometimes, she would hear the rumble of 18-wheelers as early as 6:30 a.m. 04-16-25
Why the Forest Service is Logging After Hurricane Helene — and Why Some Say It’s a Mistake
Ted Richardson / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Volunteers, scientists, and hikers are asking for transparency in a process they say could prioritize profit over ecosystems
In the months after Hurricane Helene leveled thousands of acres in Pisgah National Forest, John Beaudet and other volunteers cleared downed trees from the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Chopping them up and moving them aside was back-breaking work, but essential to ensuring safe passage for hikers. So he was dismayed to learn that a section of the trail in western North Carolina could remain closed for more than a year because the National Forest Service wants that timber left alone so logging companies can clear it.
“Rather than cut those logs out of the trail and open the trail up, the U.S. Forest Service wanted to salvage those trees as timber,” said Beaudet, an avid hiker who lives near Erwin, Tennessee. Such operations, common after natural disasters like hurricanes and fires, are typically subjected to environmental review, and the government solicits feedback from the public. But when Beaudet tried to comment on the process, he found that was not an option. “For the army of volunteers that work so hard to clear the trail out, it’s kind of a kick in the shins,” he said. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy worked with the Forest Service and local hiking clubs to reroute the trail, but it does not have a timeline for completion for the salvage project, a point of uncertainty for hikers and trail advocates. 04-15-25
Massachusetts Home-electrification Pilot Could Offer a National Model
Jonathan Wiggs / The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Installations are wrapping up this month for the turnkey program providing solar, heat pumps, and batteries to households that couldn’t otherwise afford them.
A first-of-its-kind pilot to electrify homes on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard is set to finish construction in the coming weeks — and it could offer a blueprint for decarbonizing low- and moderate-income households in Massachusetts and beyond.
The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering is designed to be a turnkey program that makes it financially feasible and logistically approachable for households of all income levels to adopt solar panels, heat pumps, and batteries, and to realize the amplified benefits of using the resources together. These technologies slash emissions, reduce utility bills, and increase a home’s resilience during power outages, but are often only adopted by wealthier households due to their upfront cost.
“We are going to be advancing this as a model that should be emulated by other states across the country that are trying to achieve decarbonization goals,” said Todd Olinsky-Paul, senior project director for the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that produced a new report about the program. 04-12-25
‘People would die’: As Summer Approaches, Trump is Jeopardizing Funding For AC
Brandon Bell / Getty Images
Some $380 million is now in limbo after Trump laid off staff that run a program helping low-income people pay their energy bills.
The summer of 2021 was brutal for residents of the Pacific Northwest. Cities across the region from Portland, Oregon, to Quillayute, Washington, broke temperature records by several degrees. In Washington, as the searing heat wave settled over the state, 125 people died from heat-related illnesses such as strokes and heart attacks, making it the deadliest weather event in the state’s history.
As officials recognized the heat wave’s disproportionate effect on low-income and unhoused people unable to access air-conditioning, they made a crucial change to the state’s energy assistance program. Since the early 1980s, states, tribes, and territories have received funds each year to help low-income people pay their electricity bills and install energy-efficiency upgrades through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. Congress appropriates funds for the program, and the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, doles it out to states in late fall. Until the summer of 2021, the initiative primarily provided heating assistance during Washington’s cold winter months. But that year, officials expanded the program to cover cooling expenses. 04-11-25
Why Trump’s Executive Order Targeting State Climate Laws is Probably Illegal
President Trump continues dismantling climate policy with a move of questionable legality that benefits fossil fuels. States are sure to sue.
President Donald Trump continued dismantling U.S. climate policy this week when he directed the Justice Department to challenge state laws aimed at addressing the crisis — a campaign legal scholars called unconstitutional and climate activists said is sure to fail.
The president, who has called climate change a “hoax,” issued an executive order restricting state laws that he claimed have burdened fossil fuel companies and “threatened American energy dominance.” His directive signed Tuesday night, is the latest in a series of moves that have included undermining federal climate and environmental justice programs, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, and promising to expand oil and gas leases.
It specifically mentions California, Vermont, and New York, three states that have been particularly assertive in pursuing climate action. The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify and report state laws that focus on climate change or promote environmental social governance, and to halt any that “the attorney general determines to be illegal.”
That directive almost certainly includes the climate superfund laws that New York and Vermont recently passed. The statutes require fossil fuel companies to pay damages for their emissions, a move the executive order deems “extortion.” The president’s order also gives Bondi 60 days to prepare a report outlining state programs like carbon taxes and fees, along with those mentioning terms like “environmental justice” and “greenhouse gas emissions.” 04-09-25
Trump Axed a Rule Designed to Spare Taxpayers the Burden of Future Flooding
Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images
The change may speed up flood recovery, but it will leave communities — and taxpayers — facing the same problems over and over again.
Earlier this year, elected officials from 18 towns and counties devastated by Hurricane Helene gathered outside the Madison County courthouse in Marshall, North Carolina. Standing in a street still stained with the mud left behind when the French River overran its banks, they called for swifter state and federal help in rebuilding their communities.
Everyone stood in the chill of a late January day because the first floor of the courthouse, built in 1907, remains empty, everything inside having been washed away in the flood. The county’s judicial affairs are conducted in temporary offices as local leaders wrangle state and federal funding to rebuild. Local officials hope to restore the historic downtown and its most critical public buildings without changing too much about it. They, like most of the people impacted by Hurricane Helene’s rampage in September, don’t doubt another flood is coming. But they are also hesitant to move out of its way.
“When you talk about what was flooded and moving it, it would be everything, and that’s just not realistic,” said Forrest Gillium, the town administrator. “We’re not going to give up on our town.” 04-09-25
The World is Heating Up. How Much Can Our Bodies Handle?
Rehman Asad / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Scientists put people in a heat chamber for nine hours. Here’s what they learned.
In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity steadily climbed, coating their bodies in sweat and condensation. After several hours, their internal body temperatures began ratcheting upward, as the heat cooked them from the outside in.
“Few people on the planet have actually experienced temperatures like this,” said Robert Meade, a postdoctoral researcher in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who led the study. “Imagine moisture condensing on the skin like a glass of water on a hot day. That’s how hot it was, compared to skin temperature.”
Their experiment tested the body’s ability to cope with extreme heat by exposing participants to temperatures at which they could no longer cool themselves. Their study, published last week in the science journal PNAS, confirmed that this dangerous threshold is much lower than scientists had previously thought: a so-called wet bulb temperature, which accounts for heat and humidity, of 26 to 31 degrees C.
Scientists call this limit the point of “uncompensable” heat stress, “because the body cannot compensate for the heat load placed upon it,” Meade said. “With climate change driving heat waves, there’s been a lot of interest in defining these upper limits.” 04-08-25
The Rio Grande Valley Was Once Covered in Forest. One Man is Trying to Bring it Back.
Epiphytes dangle from trees at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, one of the few surviving tracts of original thorn forest. “It was coming to places like this that got my wheels turning,” said Jon Dale, director at American Forests. The refuge contains a wetland that draws birders from around the country. Laura Mallonee / Grist
The Tamaulipan thorn forest once covered 1 million acres on both sides of the bor. Restoring even a fraction of it could help the region cope with the ravages of a warming world.
Jon Dale’s love affair with birds began when he was about 10 and traded his BB gun for a pair of binoculars. Within a year, he’d counted 150 species flitting through the trees that circled his family’s home in Harlingen, Texas. The town sits in the Rio Grande Valley, at the convergence of the Central and Mississippi flyways, and also hosts many native fliers, making it a birder’s paradise. Dale delighted in spotting green jays, merlins, and altamira orioles. But as he grew older and learned more about the region’s biodiversity, he knew he should be seeing so many more species.
Treks to Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, which spans 2,088 acres near the border with Mexico, revealed an understory alive with even more birdsong, from the wo-woo-ooo of white-tipped doves to the CHA-CHA-LAC-A that gives that tropical chicken its common name. The preserve is one of the last remnants of the Tamaulipan thorn forest, a dense mosaic of at least 1,200 plants, from poky shrubs to trees like mesquite, acacia, hackberry, ebony, and brasil. They once covered more than 1 million acres on both sides of the Rio Grande, where ocelots, jaguars, and jaguarundis prowled amid 519 known varieties of birds and 316 kinds of butterflies. But the rich, alluvial soil that allowed such wonders to thrive drew developers, who arrived with the completion of a railroad in 1904. Before long, they began clearing land, building canals, and selling plots in the “Magic Valley” to farmers, including Dale’s great-great grandfather. His own father drove one of the bulldozers that cleared some of the last coastal tracts in the 1950s. 04-07-25
A Federal Judge Just Hit the Brakes on Trump’s Plan to Fast Track Industrial Fish Farming in the Gulf
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Advocates for marine health say aquaculture ‘has no place in U.S. ocean waters.”
President Donald Trump’s first-term push to open the Gulf of Mexico and other federal waters to fish farming has come to a halt in the early days of his second term.
A federal judge in Washington state ruled against a nationwide aquaculture permit the Trump administration sought in 2020. The wide-ranging permit would have allowed the first offshore farms in the Gulf and the likely expansion of the aquaculture industry into federally managed waters on the East and West coasts.
The ruling, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Kymberly K. Evanson on March 17, was applauded by several environmental groups.
“A nationwide permit isn’t at all appropriate because our federal waters are so different,” said Marianne Cufone, executive director of the New Orleans-based Recirculating Farms Coalition, a group opposed to offshore aquaculture. “Florida is not Maine. California is not Texas. And in just the Gulf of Mexico, there are significantly different habitats [and] different fish species that could be affected.”
Offshore aquaculture, which involves raising large quantities of fish in floating net pens, has been blamed for increased marine pollution and escapes that can harm wild fish populations. In the Gulf, there’s particular concern about the “dead zone,” a New Jersey-size area of low oxygen fueled by rising temperatures and nutrient-rich pollution from fertilizers, urban runoff and sewer plants. Adding millions of caged fish would generate even more waste and worsen the dead zone, Cufone said. 04-04-25
A Deadly Mosquito-borne Illness Rises as the US Cuts All Climate and Health Funding
Kevin Frayer / Getty Images
Climate change is driving an explosion in dengue cases. Studying that connection is about to get much harder.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, issued an urgent alert about dengue fever, a painful and sometimes deadly mosquito-borne illness common in tropical and subtropical parts of the world. Some 3,500 travelers from the United States contracted dengue abroad in 2024, according to the CDC, an 84 percent increase over 2023. “This trend is expected to continue,” the agency said, noting that Florida, California, and New York, in that order, are likely to see the biggest surges this year.
On Thursday, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency put out a similar warning, noting that there were 900 cases of travel-related dengue in the U.K. in 2024, almost 300 more infections than the preceding year. The two reports relayed a similar array of statistics about dengue, its symptoms, and rising caseloads. But the U.K. Health Security Agency included a crucial piece of information that the CDC omitted: It noted why cases are breaking records. “The rise is driven by climate change, rising temperatures, and flooding,” it said.
In the past, the CDC has readily acknowledged the role climate change plays in the transmission of dengue fever — but the political conditions that influence scientific research and federal public health communications in the U.S. have undergone seismic shifts in the months since President Donald Trump took office. The new administration has purged federal agency websites of mentions of equity and climate change and sought to dismantle the scientific infrastructure that agencies like the CDC use to understand and respond to a range of health risks — including those posed by global warming. 04-03-25
Companies Used to Tout Their Climate Plans. Under Trump, They’ve Gone Quiet.
Photo of the mostly empty BlackRock building on a rainy night with orange light glowing from inside
Craig T. Fruchtman / Getty Images
Mentions of environmental concerns on S&P 500 earnings calls have plunged.
Just a few years ago, pledges to tackle climate change were a staple of corporate PR. Amazon trumpeted its climate pledge and stamped it on the name of Seattle’s biggest arena. Walmart promised to slash a gigaton of carbon emissions from its supply chain, and the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock, with its $11 trillion in investments, pressured companies to come up with a plan to zero out their emissions by 2050.
Now, many corporations are avoiding the subject altogether. During earnings calls, mentions of many well-known terms related to the climate are down 76 percent compared to three years ago, according to a recent analysis of S&P 500 companies by Bloomberg. The sharpest declines came from financial firms and consumer discretionary companies, the category for those offering optional purchases, like Starbucks and Airbnb.
The hesitancy to talk about climate change — sometimes called “greenhushing” — could decrease pressure on the big corporate polluters that have been slow to cut their emissions. The trend has been linked to a growing backlash against sustainable investing, as well as a shifting political landscape with President Donald Trump’s second term underway. “I think large companies in particular today are very, very cautious,” said Hortense Bioy, the head of sustainable investing research for Morningstar, a financial services firm. 04-02-25
Yellowstone’s Gateway Town Fears For Its Future Amid Trump Funding Cuts
Emily Senkosky
“Gardiner is a company town and Yellowstone is the mill. If somebody starts screwing with the mill, we have no choice but to be concerned.”
On March 1, hundreds of people gathered in Gardiner, Montana, at the northern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The crowd — which included residents from across the state and current and former public lands employees — was part of a nationwide protest against the layoffs of federal workers.
Roughly 5 percent of National Park Service workers have been caught up in the sweeping layoffs carried out by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. This isn’t counting the hundreds of others who are taking the “fork in the road” offer to resign from their positions. The staffing crisis facing national parks is felt not only within the federal workforce itself, but also in gateway towns like Gardiner, where the economy depends heavily on Yellowstone.
There, under the Roosevelt Arch — named for president Theodore Roosevelt, who laid its cornerstone and is known for preserving over 230 million acres of public land — protesters shouted chants like, “Public lands in public hands!” and “Hey, ho, Trump and Musk have got to go.” Organizers talked about what public lands mean to the local economy. The crowd even harmonized to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” 04-01-25
