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The Louisiana Wind Industry’s Plan For Survival: Outlast Trump
Wind turbines off the coast of Rhode Island in 2022. John Moore / Getty Images
Trump brought offshore wind development to a near standstill. Louisiana companies plan to “wait for the clock to run out” in 2029.
Louisiana’s offshore wind industry has a date circled on the calendar: January 21, 2029 — the first day after President Donald Trump is scheduled to leave office.
Trump’s policies have brought offshore wind development to a near standstill around the country, with his administration paying developers roughly $4 billion to walk away from projects. But in Louisiana, leaders in the industry say they are trying to preserve their expertise and supply chain in hopes of reviving offshore wind projects under the next administration.
“Come January 21st, 2029, we all get to wave goodbye,” said state Representative Joe Orgeron, a Republican from southeastern Louisiana who worked in the offshore wind industry. “The current administration has been a one-man stopping show. I’m pretty confident, and I’m hopeful that it’ll change.”
Orgeron later put the industry’s near-term strategy more succinctly: “Just wait for the clock to run out.”
His views were echoed by the other wind energy experts on a panel at Tulane University’s Future of Energy Forum. “The Trump administration has been pretty openly hostile to seeing the advancement of the offshore wind industry,” said Madelyn Smith, a program manager with the Southeastern Wind Coalition, a nonprofit that supports the development of wind power across 11 states. 10-09-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/climate-energy/louisiana-offshore-wind-industry-outlast-trump/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Trump is Gutting the Endangered Species Act. These 10 Species Whow What’s At Stake.
A Florida panther, captured by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Larry W. Richardson / USFWS
Hundreds of imperiled species, including North Atlantic right whales and rusty patched bumble bees, could face greater threats from industry and development.
The Supreme Court once billed the Endangered Species Act as “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species ever enacted by any nation.” Federal protections have been key to saving nearly 300 U.S. species — including the bald eagle, American alligator, and grizzly bear — from permanent extinction.
Each year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is primarily responsible for implementing the law, evaluates species and lists them as “endangered” or “threatened.” When federal activity or private development has the potential to harm a listed species or its habitat, project developers are required to consult with the Service or obtain a permit prior to construction.
For the last several decades, the interpretation of two words in particular — “take” and “harm” — have formed the backbone of the Nixon-era law. Its prohibition of “taking” an animal criminalized any attempts to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” at-risk species. And the provision on “harm” ensured that degrading a listed species’ habitat could be penalized. These definitions have been key to the success of the law. 10-08-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/regulation/trump-gutting-endangered-species-act-these-10-species-show-whats-at-stake/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
The Northeast’s Reliance on Heating Oil is Turning Into a Crisis
Ryan McFadden / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images.
The war in Iran has sent heating oil prices soaring, and families may not be able to keep their homes warm this winter.
There are many markers of fall: vibrant foliage, apple picking and pumpkin-spiced everything, to name a few. Cranking up the heat is another. With record-setting energy prices, everyone is bracing for higher bills. For the more than four million households that rely on heating oil, this winter could be particularly devastating.
The war with Iran has pushed the cost of heating oil, which is essentially diesel, higher than it ever has been. It is hovering around $6 a gallon across much of the Northeast, where about 82 percent of homes that burn the fuel are located. That’s compared to the mid-$3 range in February. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association, or NEADA, projects that the cost of warming a home with that fossil fuel will go up 50 percent across those states. That amounts to $878 per household, or some $3.8 billion overall.
“The volatility of this product right before winter is scary,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the organization, which had projected a lower increase just weeks earlier. “This is part of the cost of the war.” 10-07-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/solutions/the-northeasts-reliance-on-heating-oil-is-turning-into-a-crisis/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
The Future of Commuter Rail Could Be Taking Shape in Boston
Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
A new fleet of battery-powered trains will test whether transit agencies can electrify without installing miles of overhead wires.
Marvin Martin was in the Four Corners area of Dorchester one day when a train sped by on the Fairmount Line into downtown Boston. It was filled with white people, sitting comfortably and reading newspapers. It made him wonder why the commuter line seemed to pass through communities of color without stopping, leaving people in his neighborhood to crowd into buses.
Martin decided to do something about that. In 1995, he and others began pressuring the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to expand service. It took more than 15 years, but the agency added three stops in Dorchester in 2012 and 2013. It opened a fourth in Mattapan in 2019.
But Martin wasn’t finished. He also had been pushing for electrifying the line.
“We want a train that would not be spewing a bunch of toxic particulates into the air,” Martin, who recently retired as the head of the transit advocacy organization Action For Equity, said. 10-06-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/solutions/the-future-of-commuter-rail-could-be-taking-shape-in-boston/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Extreme Heat Left This Student Athlete on Life Support. He Won’t Be the Last.
Matthew Mayich, wearing a St. Louis Blues jersey, smiles after being drafted by the team.
The St. Louis Blues hockey team selected Matthew Mayich during the 2023 NHL draft. He later transferred to Arizona State University to continue his college career. Jeff Vinnick/NHLI via Getty Images
Decades of research have established how to prevent and treat heat illness, but uneven policy adoption and implementation has left players at risk.
Matthew Mayich stepped onto the field of Sun Angel Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, at about 7 a.m. on August 20. It was the standout hockey player’s first official practice with his new team, and temperatures were already in the mid-80s.
He and his Arizona State University teammates spent at least 45 minutes doing push-ups, planks, flutter kicks, bear crawls, squats, sprints, and buddy-carries, led by guest trainer and former Green Beret Tim Ziesel. BAs temperatures approached 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the players set off in small groups, according to the university’s timeline of events. Mayich appeared to struggle, then stumbled, dropped the ball, and fell. He tried to rise and fell again.
As temperatures approached 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the players set off in small groups, according to the university’s timeline of events. Mayich appeared to struggle, then stumbled, dropped the ball, and fell. He tried to rise and fell again.
Athletic staff treated him with iced towels and cool water, then sprayed him with a garden hose. Initially responsive, his condition deteriorated, and the trainer called 911. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, where he remains in critical condition after experiencing what his family’s lawyer, Robert Carey, called exertional heat stroke. Carey did not respond to requests for additional information about the diagnosis, which could not be independently corroborated. He has told journalists the family’s hope for a meaningful recovery hovers near a miracle. 10-05-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-heat/extreme-heat-left-this-student-athlete-on-life-support-he-wont-be-the-last/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Under Trump, California’s Clean Car Rules Are Essential — and Vulnerable
Allen J. Schaben / Getty Images
The federal government has scrapped its rules lowering vehicle emissions, and it’s going after California’s.
The Trump administration came close to fully dismantling the federal government’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from cars Monday, announcing a final plan to ease fuel-efficiency requirements. The move was largely symbolic: Congress had already eliminated the penalties automakers face for violating those standards. Those steps, along with a range of other reductions in federal climate authority, have now left the federal government with virtually no meaningful policy governing carbon pollution from cars, which account for roughly 16 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
But one entity still has enough sway, and just enough regulatory authority, to keep pressing car companies toward greater fuel efficiency: California. The state’s vehicle emissions rules are still in effect, effectively setting a baseline for fuel efficiency that automakers cannot fall below without potentially incurring penalties. The Trump administration has been busy attacking California’s ability to make its own emissions rules, but it hasn’t claimed full victory — yet. For now, the Golden State’s wounded but not defeated regulations are the most important government policy on vehicle emissions in the country. 10-01-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/trump-california-ev-clean-car-rules-fuel-economy-lawsuits/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
The Surprising Allies Backing Boulder’s Climate Case Before the Supreme Court
Matt McClain / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Ranchers, conservative legal scholars, and former Republican EPA chiefs are siding against oil companies. Here’s why.
Deirdre Macnab was reading her local newspaper this spring when she learned that Rio Blanco County, where she lives in northwest Colorado, had taken the side of oil companies in a major lawsuit before the Supreme Court. Suncor and Exxon Mobil were trying to get out of standing trial — the city and county of Boulder had sued them, seeking damages for the rising costs of adapting to heat waves, wildfires, and floods.
After ranching for a decade, Macnab had seen those costs firsthand. During one of the worst fires in Colorado history last year, 60 of her neighbor’s cows burned to death. Record heat and drought this year parched the land so thoroughly, ranchers had to pay thousands of dollars to haul in feed and water for their animals. Some ranchers, headed toward bankruptcy, had to sell part of their herds or put their land up for sale.
“It really disturbed me that the county was taking sides,” Macnab said, “and in particular, supporting oil companies whose operations, we now know, are putting the human population and wildlife, livestock, everything, at risk.” Rio Blanco County spent thousands of taxpayer dollars in legal fees to join the brief alongside other Colorado counties where the oil industry has a large presence. 10-01-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/boulder-supreme-court-climate-lawsuit-ranchers-exxon/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
States Want to Make Big Oil Pay For Climate Harm. Now, Courts Are Weighing In.
Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images
New York’s “climate superfund” law has suffered two losses in court, while a U.S. Supreme Court case next week could determine the fate of similar efforts nationwide.
Last week, another federal judge blocked New York’s so-called “climate superfund law,” the state’s attempt to make fossil fuel companies pay for climate-related damages linked to their activities. Signed in 2024, the legislation inspired other states to start drumming up their own ways to hold Big Oil financially accountable for the costs of a warming planet.
The two rulings are certainly a blow to the law’s advocates. But they’re not a death knell for this approach. That’s according to seven lawmakers from Connecticut, Hawaiʻi, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New Hampshire, who told Grist the decisions have limited relevance to their states. Most expressed continued interest in advancing their own superfund legislation.
What may be more threatening to these kinds of pollution-accountability laws is Suncor v. Boulder County, a case the Supreme Court will hear beginning next week. Though a decision may not come until next spring, the outcome could nullify all state-level attempts to make fossil fuel companies pay for climate costs. 09-30-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/state-climate-superfund-law-court-cases/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
How Elite Universities Got Tangled Up in Politics and Petroleum
Scott Eisen / Getty Images
Half a century of corporate influence set the stage for Trump’s attacks, a new study argues.
After returning to office last January, President Donald Trump made it clear to America’s universities that federal money comes with strings attached. Since then, the administration has frozen or withdrawn billions of dollars in federal funding from top schools and launched investigations into them, using its leverage to influence admissions, hiring, and DEI policies. The consequences have been stark: According to the Academic Freedom Index, institutional autonomy in the United States dropped sharply last year, placing it on a steeper descent than those seen in Hungary, Turkey, and India.
A new study argues that this attack didn’t come out of nowhere. In the paper recently published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, researchers show how corporate interests, including oil companies, have sought to influence universities for at least half a century, using big donations to shape research agendas. That weakened schools’ defenses against outside influences, the authors say, paving the way for Trump’s attack. 09-29-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/universities-politics-petroleum-trump-research-education/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
After Trump Opened Bears Ears Land to Business, Prospectors Swooped In
Courtesy of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
All the claims on the 1.2 million acres appear to have been filed by small-scale miners in Utah with an interest in uranium.
It didn’t take long for prospectors to stake their claims on land in southeast Utah that was previously protected in Bears Ears National Monument.
On September 11, the first day the 1.2 million acres were opened up, miners filed 16 claims, two months after President Donald Trump shrank the monument by about 90 percent. All of the claims appear to have been filed by small-scale local miners with other jobs, small businesses, and an interest in uranium mining. But the rapid timing of those claims alarmed environmental groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and they expect more to come.
“Hobby miners who want to go locate claims, play miner on the weekend, leave disturbance and pollution in their wake that really damages the monument resources,” said Steve Bloch, an attorney for the environmental nonprofit.
George Schultz, an off-roading guide based in Moab, filed three claims in the Lockhart Basin. He said staking a claim is merely a “step” in the mining process and noted Bureau of Land Management Lands outside of monument protections are meant for multiple uses.
Schultz declined to say which minerals he expected to mine at his claim sites, but his LinkedIn profile notes experience in uranium exploration. 09-28-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/trump-bears-ears-mining-claims-prospectors-utah/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Whether it’s ‘super’ or ‘Godzilla,’ El Niño is Already Breaking Records
NASA / VIIRS data courtesy of NOAA.
In the coming months, the world will get a glimpse of life on an even hotter planet.
By now, you’ve seen the headlines, and there’s more of them every day: It’s “jaw-dropping.” It’s poised to make global warming worse. California has just declared a statewide state of emergency. This year’s El Niño — a shift in Pacific Ocean trade winds that scrambles global weather patterns — has been hotly discussed as one of the strongest on record, and one that could bring about potentially disastrous consequences. One study projects that it may cause as many as 451,000 heat-related deaths around the world by February.
The current El Niño has also been given an array of eye-catching descriptors. When Jeffrey Shaman, a climatologist at Columbia Climate School, heard the phrase “super El Niño” for the first time earlier this year, he said, “I literally googled it.” The phrase isn’t officially used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the World Meteorological Organization. But he still sees value in the label as a way of communicating the significance of this year’s likely unprecedented El Niño to the general public.
“It’s colloquial, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all,” Shaman said. 09-25-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/whether-its-super-or-godzilla-el-nino-is-already-breaking-records/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
The Louisiana Fishermen Refusing To Go Down With the Ship
A passing shrimp boat in Cameron, Louisiana.
Cameron, Louisiana, used to be the largest exporter of seafood in the U.S. Now, it’s one of the largest exporters of liquefied natural gas—and it comes at the cost of the fishermen who are still there.
The first thing I notice about Cameron, Louisiana, is that all the RV parks are full.
Venture Global, a Virginia-based liquefied natural gas developer valued at around $36 billion, broke ground on a new multi-phase LNG plant in Cameron in August of 2019. Today, the first part of the plant—Calcasieu Pass 1, or CP1—is fully operational, cooling methane to -260 degrees Fahrenheit and preparing it for transport through the TransCameron Pipeline, a subterranean straw 24 miles long and 42 inches in diameter that undercuts the Louisiana Gulf Coast. The construction of CP2 is currently underway.
To get through multiple construction phases, Venture Global needed thousands of temporary workers, which is why the town is overflowing with camper trailers and trucks with out-of-state license plates.
Put simply, these plants are enormous. Venture Global has a permit from the Department of Energy to export more than 640 billion cubic feet of LNG per year, or 1.75 billion cubic feet per day, from the Calcasieu Pass facilities to free trade agreement and non-FTA nations alike. CP1 covers 432 acres of land, or more than 327 football fields, plus a mile of coastline. It has two berths for conventional LNG carrier ships, which can haul 185,000 cubic meters of LNG at a time and stretch nearly 1,000 feet long. CP2 is slated to be more than 2.5 times the size of CP1. 09-24-26
The Long Goodbye to Piana degli Albanesi
Marco Di Lauro / Getty Images
This Sicilian community has endured for centuries. Can it survive a changing climate?
Giorgia Caruso always imagined her children one day inheriting the farm her family has tended for three generations.
Her daughters would do more than produce organic meat and dairy. They would continue a way of life central to Piana degli Albanesi, a community founded 500 years ago by Albanian refugees fleeing the Ottoman conquest. Perched on a fertile plateau in the mountains south of Palermo, the town has long provided much of the wheat and dairy central to Sicily’s agricultural traditions. Caruso hoped to see her children carry those traditions on.
“I have two daughters I wished could take over our farming business one day, which is like our third child,” Caruso said with teary eyes as she tended the last of the family’s livestock.
Now she’d like to see them build their lives somewhere safer.
One day in late July three years ago, flames as high as a three-story building engulfed the family’s fields and threatened their home. Caruso and her husband Vito lost several acres of land and almost two dozen sheep, making it difficult to imagine their daughters taking over a business that may no longer exist in a few years. 09-23-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/this-sicilian-community-has-endured-for-centuries-can-it-survive-a-changing-climate/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
A Clean Energy Source is Buried Under the Desert, But it Takes Water to Use It
Ellen Schmidt / AP Photo
Geothermal companies face tough tradeoffs over water as they aim to power the data center buildout in Western states.
Beneath the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and the deserts in between, lies a massive energy source — and it isn’t a fossil fuel. The smashing and separating of tectonic plates that produced many of the West’s most dramatic landscapes have also allowed heat from the planet’s core to rise nearly to the surface. Now, an explosion of new geothermal energy companies wants to drill into the Earth and capture that heat for clean electricity. These companies have new technologies to better reach the heat, and a massive new customer base: energy-hungry data centers.
Tech giants seeking to build data centers while meeting their climate goals see geothermal as a promising option because it can produce consistent power around the clock, unlike solar and wind. Meta and Google have signed agreements with geothermal start-ups in New Mexico and Utah, including a deal announced this month in which Google agreed to buy 396 megawatts from Fervo’s soon-to-come-online Cape Station facility in southwest Utah, enough to power around 430,000 households. The federal government also received record per-acre bids from developers seeking to build geothermal on public lands in the Mountain West this year. New geothermal technology borrowed from the oil and gas industry, along with California’s renewable-energy goals, have helped drive the boom, but experts say demand from tech companies is a major factor. 09-22-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/geothermal-clean-energy-source-water-use/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Has the Farm Bill Hit a Dead End?
Senator John Boozman leans over and appears to whisper something to Senator Mitch McConnell at a Senate Agriculture Committee meeting.
What was once a bipartisan slam dunk has now become a hyper-politicized game of chicken, with hunger, nutrition, and conservation programs on the line.
Last Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell returned to Congress after a three-month absence and promptly cast a deciding vote in the Republican-led agricultural committee. Back in August, Democrats on the committee blocked the Senate’s version of the farm bill from progressing to a full vote.
But even after McConnell’s vote, the way things are going, it’s unlikely that Congress will pass a farm bill this year — which would mark the fourth straight year that lawmakers have failed to renew the nation’s cornerstone of agricultural policy.
The issues that made Democrats oppose the farm bill last month are still there, meaning the path to surviving a vote on the Senate floor remains unclear. With 53 seats, Republicans hold a majority in the chamber, but they need 60 votes to pass a bill — so they would need to sway several Democrats to their side in a relatively short amount of time. Midterms, after all, are in November. 09-21-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/has-the-farm-bill-hit-a-dead-end/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Curating Carson
Exhibition revives Rachel’s environmental legacy
SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE LAST CENTURY, every carbon-based life-form on Earth holds within its cells the spike of the radioactive marker carbon-14, imprinting the reality of the Atomic Age in our deepest recesses. This turning point also marked the time when the scientist and naturalist Rachel Carson was writing her most influential works, shaping a global conversation that continues today. A prescient voice, she wrote about the wonders of the natural world and the ways humans were fundamentally altering life on the planet.
A new exhibit, Silent Springs, Windswept Seas: Rachel Carson’s Environmental Vision, now showing at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, revisits Carson with a new lens. On a recent day, curator Carla Baricz gave me a tour as summer light filtered softly through the marble window-walls of the structure. To create the exhibit, Baricz and her co-curator, James Kessenides, both Yale librarians, drew from nearly a hundred boxes of material. It is one of the library’s largest—and most visited—collections.
Yale’s Beinecke Library featured an exhibit on Carson twenty years ago, but that show followed a linear biographical style, from birth to death. This time, the curators put her in context and conversation with the world that shaped her, one she would go on to shape. Their aim was to keep Rachel Carson in the conversation as her legacy ages and morphs. And in fact, she seems to be having a moment. Just in the last week, I came across mention of her in sources as diverse as Valeria Luiselli’s new novel, Beginning Middle End, and a recent episode of Ted Lasso. 09-17-26
As Russia Attacks Ukraine’s Grid, Solar Offers a Path to Resilience
A Ukrainian flag flies behind solar panel
Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty Images
With help from government incentives, Ukrainian businesses and households are increasingly investing in solar.
On a spring day earlier this year, 10 men stood on the rooftop of a door manufacturing facility in the central Ukrainian town of Bila Tserkva, surveying the rows of solar panels that surrounded them. Since Russia invaded in 2022, the town has endured repeated attacks, triggering mass power outages. For the factory, which supplies doors to homes and businesses, keeping production going had become extremely challenging. The outages were particularly brutal in the winter, when limited power supplies led to rolling blackouts across the country.
Some days, the employees burned discarded wood in a fireplace to keep the warehouse warm. The facility has backup generators, but they were expensive to run. Tired of relying on a grid that was being routinely bombarded by Russian missiles, Yaroslav, the facility’s owner, decided to switch to solar earlier this year.
Switching to solar energy will enable them to “further expand our capacity and be a bit more independent from the general grid,” he said. “It will be cheaper, more economical, and more ecological.” (Yaroslav requested that Grist use only his first name and withhold details about the facility for fear of Russian retaliation.) 09-16-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/as-russia-attacks-ukraines-grid-solar-offers-a-path-to-resilience/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Americans Are Increasingly Concerned About the Environmental Impact of AI, New Poll Finds
On the way home from a recent trip, Eriech Tapia drove past a sea of dark industrial buildings lining an already jam-packed northern Virginia road: data centers.
“It was interesting to see how many were going up,” said Tapia, a 30-year-old Republican from Arlington, Virginia, who works in higher education advocacy and policy. He said the data centers lend valuable computing power that can help keep the U.S. competitive with other nations, but he also worries about how much electricity they use.
Like Tapia, Americans have grown more concerned about the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence over the last year, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
The survey data say about half, 53%, of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about artificial intelligence’s environmental impacts. That is up from 41% last year. Democrats are driving much of the increase in environmental concern, but the poll also reveals broader worries about the local impact of data centers, which power AI and cloud computing. 09-16-26
Trump Topples the Last Pillar of Biden’s Climate Agenda
Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images
With the repeal of a rule that limited carbon emissions from power plants, the president is further delaying the phaseout of coal.
Coal is by far the dirtiest of the world’s major energy sources. It accounts for almost half of the cumulative global carbon emissions since the industrial era began — as much as oil and natural gas combined. And it generates much more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than either oil or gas. Most climate experts agree that phasing out coal power is the single biggest change the world could make to slow down global warming.
For almost twenty years, the United States has whipsawed on the question of whether the federal government should try to speed up that phaseout. After Barack Obama failed to push a carbon tax through Congress, his administration drafted the “Clean Power Plan,” which would have forced electric utilities to cut their emissions by shifting away from coal. President Donald Trump repealed that rule during his first term, and the Supreme Court later said that the president could not unilaterally force utilities to give up the fuel. 09-14-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/trump-zeldin-epa-repeal-biden-carbon-power-plant-rule/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
As Extreme Weather Worsens, Black and Hispanic Homeowners Are Paying More for Insurance
A woman stands outside her flooded home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in April 2023. Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images
Residents in predominantly Hispanic communities in Florida are paying on average $5,014 more annually for their policies, a new report says.
Homeowners in Hispanic and Black communities nationwide are paying a disproportionate share of skyrocketing home insurance costs, according to a recent report. The disparities leave communities of color at greater risk as climate change increases the frequency of billion-dollar disasters.
The report, released in July by the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit representing nearly 250 consumer groups, concluded that homeowners in predominantly Hispanic ZIP codes pay on average a 30 percent higher premium ($950 more annually) compared with homeowners in white communities. In predominantly Black ZIP codes, homeowners pay, on average, a 16 percent higher premium ($500 more annually).
The findings were based on an analysis of identical policies across communities, eliminating the possibility the inequities were related to differences among homeowners, their homes or what they chose to insure, the report said. Local risk factors could be responsible for some of the disparities, although even when such factors were accounted for the gap remained large. 09-12-26
More Than 70% of New Solar is Being Built in States That Voted For Trump
Trump-supporting states are driving the solar boom even as Republican policies complicate its future.
States that voted for Trump are leading the country in solar adoption. In recent years, Republican opposition to solar has mounted, with the Trump administration making it more difficult to build solar on federal land and Congress scaling back federal tax credits for the industry. But a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association has found that states that voted for Donald Trump in the last presidential election counted for eight of the top 10 solar-building states in the country in the first half of the year.
“At least at the macro level, Republican-led and governed states are not only open to but embracing solar energy as a technology,” said Tim Pawlenty, CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association and a former Republican governor of Minnesota.
Altogether, solar construction in Trump-supporting states has buoyed an ongoing explosion in national solar deployment. The country added more than 11 gigawatts of solar power in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 45 percent compared to the same period in 2025. States that supported Trump in the last election made up close to three-fourths of that growth.
Texas and Florida, the two largest Trump-supporting states by population, were ranked first and third, respectively. Those Sun Belt states have been consistent leaders in solar construction, as have Indiana, Ohio, and Arizona, which have also remained in the top 10 solar-building states since 2024. Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, and Utah also reached the top 10 in some, but not all, of those years. 09-10-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/more-than-70-of-new-solar-is-being-built-in-states-that-voted-for-trump/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Wendell Berry’s Message to Readers: All We Need Is Here
Wendell Berry with the horses Nip and Jed at Lane’s Landing Farm in Kentucky, 2012.Credit…Guy Mendes
Barbara Kingsolver remembers the man she counted among her most important literary mentors.
A great mentor gives us the confidence to look ahead to our own work while we still feel that gentle hand at our back, always there to help move us along. I’ve felt Wendell Berry’s literary hand between my shoulder blades for such a majority of my life that, after his death on Monday at the age of 92, it’s a shock to wake up into a day without him in this world. The only words I want to read right now are his. “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” for a start, advises me this morning to ask the questions that have no answers. To invest in the millennium.
…Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
The manifesto further instructs me to put my faith in humus, listen to carrion, expect the end of the world and laugh. To swear allegiance to my better self with the courage of insurrection:
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection. 09-04-26
Georgia Bet Big on EV Manufacturing. Trump Pulled the Plug.
It’s a grim moment for what was a booming industry in the state. But EV makers are still forging ahead.
For years, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has been working to make the state a welcoming home for clean energy manufacturing — EVs, solar panels, batteries for storage. The state went all out with tax breaks and a worker training program to attract EV and battery makers — and for a while it was working.
Georgia-based bus manufacturer Blue Bird started selling electric buses commercially in 2018 and built an expanded factory for electric buses in 2023. In 2022, Hyundai built a plant near Savannah that it said would be dedicated to making EVs. In 2024, Kia started making EVs at its West Point plant. And in 2025, Rivian broke ground on its manufacturing plant near Atlanta. The Hyundai and Rivian operations are two of the biggest economic development projects in Georgia history. The state has also worked to attract other parts of the EV and clean energy manufacturing sector, including battery makers and recyclers and solar panel companies.
Under the second Trump administration, the economic outlook for these companies has been destabilized. In addition to ending federal EV tax credits, the Trump administration has imposed tariffs on battery packs, charger hardware, and other components; loosened rules around emissions from gas-powered cars; and ended the Biden administration’s push to make government vehicle fleets electric. And a year ago, federal immigration agents raided an electric vehicle battery plant and arrested more than 400 people, most of them South Korean workers there to help get the new factory off the ground. 09-09-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/georgia-bet-big-on-ev-manufacturing-trump-pulled-the-plug/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
America is Losing Its War Against Wildfire
Wildland firefighting is increasingly facing an intractable reality: We’re stuck in a vicious cycle. A doom loop.
Dan Dallas had defended these communities before. The little towns on the Karuk tribal land are nestled in a gorge along the Klamath River, amidst a million-acre wilderness of Northern California conifer and hardwood that makes up the Six Rivers National Forest. This time, August 2023, a fusillade of lightning strikes had ignited the web of steep canyons south of the town of Orleans in two dozen places, and as the fires expanded, they merged.
As an incident commander for the U.S. Forest Service, Dallas wasn’t called up until fires got big. On the drive from Colorado, he considered the recent experiences that had begun to trouble him.
“I’d been to multiple places, two, even three, sometimes four times,” he remembered in a recent interview. On each fire, he’d followed the Forest Service playbook. Keep the fire small. Contain it quickly. Box it in by throwing hardware at it, bulldozing the ridgetops and dropping fire retardant slurry or water from planes and helicopters. Don’t light the fuse on a megafire that could reach the nearest town. But he was starting to realize: Even If you don’t light the fuse, you still have the bomb. 09-08-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/america-is-losing-its-war-against-wildfire/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
A Hard-won Rule to Cut Chemical Plant Pollution is Being Unraveled
In 2024, the Biden administration enacted wide-ranging regulations to protect communities near petrochemical plants from air toxics. The Trump administration has since granted exemptions to scores of polluting facilities and is working to rewrite the long-awaited rule.
In April 2024, Tish Taylor and her father, Robert, stood behind President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Michael Regan, as he signed a regulation designed to dramatically reduce toxic pollution from petrochemical plants like those that cluster near the Taylors’ homes along the lower Mississippi River, in Louisiana.
Taylor struggled not to cry through the signing ceremony, which followed years of demands from communities like hers — in the 85-mile corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that has become known as Cancer Alley — for tighter limits on plants’ emissions. The new regulation, known as the HON rule, was “a wonderful gift to generations ahead of us,” Taylor said. “It’s hard for me to find the words to say how validated we felt.”
For decades, regulations on emissions of hazardous chemicals such as toluene, ethylene oxide, and vinyl chloride have been weaker than restrictions on more common pollutants, such as those emitted by vehicles. 09-06-26
This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As Family Farms Decline and the Climate Heats up, Farmers Weigh What to Do With Their Land
In Michigan and around the country, farmers are facing decisions about how to best keep land in production as values rise, climate change threatens operations, and a younger generation chooses not to farm.
John Boyer grew up on his family’s 131 acres of rolling fields of corn, oats, and wheat in a rural area near the tiny city of East Jordan in northern Michigan. The farm had changed ownership outside the family several times over the decades before Boyer rebought it in 2018. He felt an obligation to repurchase and farm the land to prevent development from encroaching on the area’s community of family farms.
“For any farmer, everything’s personal,” Boyer said. “Every piece of property, every stone you pick up, you spend countless hours out there.”
As millions of farmland acres around the country are expected to change hands in the next few decades, farmers are facing decisions about whether — and if so, how — to preserve farmland amid pressures from rising land values, a shifting climate, and a younger generation that doesn’t want to farm. The number of acres devoted to farming in Michigan has declined in recent decades, as it has in the rest of the country. And ownership of that land is changing. 09-04-26
The Summer We Love is Slipping Away
From the Southwest to the Jersey shore, climate change is altering the traditions and norms that have defined summer for generations.
There was a time when summer felt easy to recognize. In childhood, summer was a time of freedom and adventure. Even into adulthood, it is a time many of us feel most free to enjoy each other and the natural world — from lazy afternoons at the beach to camping trips and swimming holes, from family cookouts and neighborhood block parties to the simple pleasure of biting into peaches and tomatoes so ripe the juice runs down your wrist. It’s when our time of dreaming through the cold comes to fruition. The time when the vegetables and fruits we planted in the spring are harvested, the time when we finally spend our precious accrued vacation time and hard-earned cash, when we treat our children to the best of what life has to offer.
But summer is changing. Over the past half-century, annual hot-season temperatures in parts of the United States have warmed by as much as 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit, driving heat waves, droughts, and downpours. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded for the contiguous U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We are witnessing the slow erosion of our old summer normal. As climate change makes the season more extreme, our habits, traditions, and pastimes are also evolving, in ways both subtle and truly seismic. 09-03-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/summer-culture-region-climate-change/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
Michigan Invests $7.5M to Find Out if It’s Sitting on a Clean Energy Gold Mine
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/ AFP via Getty Images
The funding will go toward researching geologic hydrogen, a carbon-free energy source buried beneath the state that could clean up heavy-emitting industries like transportation.
Michigan is investing $7.5 million to research geologic hydrogen — a clean energy source buried beneath the state that experts say could help power a transition away from fossil fuels. That’s because when hydrogen fuel burns, the only byproduct is water. There are no greenhouse gases or other harmful air pollutants emitted, unlike fossil fuels.
If used as a fuel or in fuel cells, a large store of hydrogen could help clean up the state’s high-emissions industries, such as trucking and steel as well as cement manufacturing, said Kevin Mehren, director of the Michigan Infrastructure Office. Energy production, including at natural gas plants, and transportation are the top sources of greenhouse gas emissions in both Michigan and the country at large.
Geologic hydrogen “is a major decarbonization tool, I think one of the strongest that we have come across,” Mehren said. “It has massive potential across all aspects of our economy, just to fill gaps and provide a new energy source for us.”
A 2025 study from the U.S. Geological Survey mapped out areas around the country with a lot of potential for buried hydrogen, with Michigan on the higher end. The study prompted Governor Gretchen Whitmer in January to direct state resources into more research, from which the recent funding announcement stemmed. Companies in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa — states also highlighted in the USGS survey — are currently drilling for geologic hydrogen, according to Sandia National Laboratories. 09-03-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/michigan-invests-7-5m-to-find-out-if-its-sitting-on-a-clean-energy-gold-mine/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
When Plastic Companies Write the Lesson Plans
The plastics industry is offering schools curricula that cast plastics as safe, recyclable, and a source of good jobs. Critics say it’s propaganda.
This fall, 54 million K-12 students are headed back to the classroom for another year of lessons in all the classic subjects: math, English, history, biology. But there’s another subject that’s been sneaking into school curricula: plastics.
A new report from the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition documents the many ways the plastics industry has been inserting its agenda into classrooms across the U.S. — including through lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “the contribution plastics make to modern life.”
Industry interests offer these resources to teachers for free or for cheap, according to the report. The materials tend to highlight the necessity of plastics while downplaying their significant downsides to human health and the environment.
“When that information is provided to kids, it obfuscates the true impacts of plastic pollution,” said Madison Dennis, senior policy and advocacy manager for Plastic Pollution Coalition and one of the report’s main authors. Besides harming marine life, plastics can expose people to hazardous chemicals, clog storm drains and contribute to flooding, and release planet-warming greenhouse gases. Dennis’ organization is calling for stricter school policies against the use of industry-sponsored learning materials. 09-01-26
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/article/plastics-industry-lesson-plans-school-curricula/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.