A Massive Climate Resilience Program is Escaping Florida’s DOGE Purge

Photo by Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Ron DeSantis is slashing government spending, but the Sunshine State can’t afford to abandon its climate adaptation fund.

When it comes to government spending, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is taking a cue from the Trump administration.

As his second term nears its end, DeSantis is spearheading a campaign to slash property taxes, which provide around 30 percent of local government revenue. He’s also looking to dramatically pare down state-funded programs, and he’s commissioned a state-level version of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” to do so. DeSantis’s DOGE will be run by his hand-picked chief financial officer, the creator of a YouTube show called “Government Gone Wild.” In a signal of his seriousness about cutting spending, the governor’s proposed budget for this year is 10 percent lower than his 2019 budget in inflation-adjusted and per-capita terms.

To make these cuts happen, the Sunshine State’s climate programs are in the crosshairs. 02-17-26

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/ron-desantis-resilient-florida/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Residents Along Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Have a New Worry: Blue Ammonia

Ashley Gaignard poses for a photo inside her home in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, less than 3 miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant. “What hurts the most is we’re watching the leaders that we elected … support these companies instead of supporting the community,” she said. (Sean Gardner for Floodlight)

The facilities would rely on carbon capture, which has yet to successfully scale up, and would still emit thousands of tons of pollution.

From her home in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, less than 3 miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant, Ashley Gaignard says the air itself carries a chemical edge.

The odor, she said, is sharp and lingering. Years ago, when her son attended an elementary school about a mile from the massive CF Industries ammonia production facility, he would begin wheezing during recess, she recalled. His breathing problems eased only after he transferred to a school several miles farther away.

“I’m not against progress,” Gaignard said. “We are against development that poisons and displaces and disregards human life.”

Now, along Louisiana’s Mississippi River corridor, fertilizer giant CF Industries and other companies are placing multibillion-dollar bets on “blue ammonia” — a product made from fossil fuels but with extra technology to capture planet-warming gases and pipe them underground for storage.

To date, no commercial-scale blue ammonia plants are operating — but more than 20 have been proposed nationwide, according to Oil and Gas Watch. Four of the largest such plants are slated for Louisiana, in communities already saturated with petrochemical pollution. 02-16-26

Andrea Renault / AFP via Getty Images

New SEC restrictions could sideline the small shareholders who have driven high-profile climate fights in recent years.

Five years ago, climate activists stunned corporate America by winning three seats on Exxon Mobil’s board. Similar revolts have forced some of the nation’s biggest companies to address climate change. Now, the federal regulator overseeing shareholder rights is making it harder for small investors to convey their concerns.

In November, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, announced that it would essentially stop weighing in on whether companies must put shareholder proposals to a vote. Then, in January, the agency said it would no longer allow investors with less than $5 million in shares to use its online system to send communiqués, known as exempt solicitations, to fellow shareholders. Such documents are often used to lay out an investor’s stance on a given issue, including climate action.

The SEC says the moves are an attempt to rein in the scope of government and ease burdensome regulation. But others see them as a way to contain the influence of potentially irksome investors. “We are concerned that they limit the voice of [company] owners,” Steven Rothstein, chief program officer for Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit working with companies and investors, said of the changes. “Shareholders are being cut out of the process.” 02-13-26

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/its-getting-harder-for-shareholders-to-push-companies-on-climate/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Trump’s Beef Trade Deal is a Lose-lose Gamble That Won’t Lower Prices

Credit: https://www.trafalgar.com

There’s no two ways about it: Eating more beef is bad for the planet and the climate.

Last week, President Donald Trump announced the United States would temporarily increase the amount of beef the nation imports from Argentina — by 80,000 more metric tons this calendar year.

In an executive order, the president stated these beef imports would not be subject to tariffs, and that he came to the decision after discussion with Brooke Rollins, U.S. agricultural secretary. The White House described the move as part of its push to lower beef prices at the grocery store for American consumers. But almost as soon as the trade deal was announced, Trump was met with backlash from key allies and constituents, including ranchers who say that buying more beef from Argentina hurts U.S. producers.

“The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and its members cannot stand behind the President while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef in an attempt to influence prices,” Colin Woodall, head of the trade group, said in a statement. Deb Fischer, a Republican Senator from Nebraska, also stated that the trade deal “sideline[s]” cattle ranchers in the U.S.

Trade groups, lawmakers, and economists agree that the increased imports from Argentina are unlikely to lower the record-high beef prices in the U.S. That’s partly because Americans already consume so much beef, according to David Ortega, professor in the Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics department at Michigan State University. 02-12-26

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-beef-trade-deal-is-a-lose-lose-gamble-that-wont-lower-prices/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Gwich’in Fight to Protect Caribou From Alaska Oil Development

Carolyn Van Houten / The Washington Post via Getty Images

For “the caribou people,” protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge means protecting a way of life.

The Bureau of Land Management opened nominations last week for the first-ever oil and gas lease auction in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, setting the stage for development that three Gwich’in governments are now suing to stop.

Raeann Garnett, 29, is Gwich’in and the tribal chief of the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, representing about 200 people above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Alaska, accessible only by plane. In January, the Native American Rights Fund, or NARF, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Interior on behalf of Garnett’s government, the Arctic Village Council, and Venetie Village Council. “I’m the main protector of our land that we own and I do it for all our tribal members,” she said.

The lawsuit challenges the DOI’s plan to lease land in the refuge’s coastal plain, an area the Gwich’in call Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, “the sacred place where life begins,” where Porcupine caribou herds forage and calve. The Gwich’in, who call themselves “the caribou people,” have relied on the herd for food and cultural survival since before colonization. Most Gwich’in communities live alongside the animals’ same migratory route used for thousands of years. 02-11-26

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/indigenous/gwichin-fight-to-protect-caribou-from-alaska-oil-development/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Data Centers Are Scrambling to Power the AI Boom With Natural Gas

Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

As tech giants find creative ways to generate electricity, they’re building a glut of new fossil fuel projects.

Boom Supersonic wants to build the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner. Founded in 2014, the company set out to make air travel dramatically faster — up to twice the speed of today’s passenger jets — while also aiming for a smaller environmental footprint. For years, Boom has focused on developing the high-performance engine technology needed to sustain supersonic flight.

Though the company has not yet debuted its revolutionary jet, last year it identified a new and potentially lucrative application for its novel technology: generating electricity for the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom.

Many of these data centers want the kind of flexible, around-the-clock energy associated with combined-cycle natural gas turbines. These heavy-duty machines burn gas to spin turbines and generate electricity, then capture the associated heat and use it to spin the turbines some more. As far as fossil fuel generation goes, they are among the most efficient options for dispatchable baseload power. But with demand for these turbines surging and supply increasingly tight, developers are turning to creative alternatives. 02-10-26

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/data-centers-natural-gas-methane-behind-the-meter/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

What Over a Century of Ice Data Can Tell Us About the Great Lakes’ Future

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Using old records, scientists created a new dataset on how ice coverage has shifted since 1897. Researchers are already using it to study a declining fish species.

Michigan researchers have gone back in time to get a picture of how ice cover on the Great Lakes has evolved since the late 19th century.

Using historical temperature records from weather stations around the region, researchers improved their understanding of where ice might have formed and for how long it lasted — spanning the last 120 years.

Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Data last month. Researchers said this new data record would deepen understanding of how climate change has impacted the region over time and clarify what life under ice looks like for declining iconic species such as lake whitefish. The new data could also help improve ice cover forecasting in winter, making it safer for recreation and for people who go out on the ice.

“Lake ice is really part of the system, part of our life. It matters [for] our culture, regional weather, safety, everything,” said Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome, one of the study’s co-authors and associate director for the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan. 02-09-26

The Drax power plant in North Yorkshire is a significant generator of electricity for the U.K. Gary Calton / The Guardian

How Britain’s new “green energy” depends on cutting down forests in the Deep South.

Kathleen Watts’ flowers bloom much brighter now that the wind no longer blows black. Pulling weeds in the garden outside her redbrick house, she recalled when coal dust would sometimes drift through her quiet corner of northern England, a rolling patchwork of farms and villages under the shadow of what was once the United Kingdom’s largest coal-burning power station.

“When the dust came our way, we’d have to come out and clean our windows,” said Watts, who has lived in the North Yorkshire village of Barlow for more than 30 years. “And when we’d get snow in winter, there’d be a lot of black over it.”

Thankfully, she said, the wind usually blew northeast, pushing the station’s smoke and dust toward Scandinavia. Locals liked to joke that the air pollution was mostly Norway’s problem. There, it caused bouts of acid rain that damaged forests and poisoned lakes.

The U.K. has quit coal — a lengthy process culminating in the closure of the country’s last deep-pit coal mine in 2015 and the shutdown of the U.K’s last coal plant in 2024. 02-06-26

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/coal-uk-louisiana-biomass-yorkshire-emissions/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Indigenous Concerns Surface as Trump Calls For Seabed Mining in Alaskan Waters

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Wolfgang Kaehler / LightRocket via Getty Images

Anita Hofschneider, Grist

“It really feels like another false solution.”

President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns.

Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories. 02-05-26

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/indigenous/indigenous-concerns-surface-as-trump-calls-for-seabed-mining-in-alaskan-waters/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Inside the Polarizing Plan to Stash Carbon in a California Wetland

Courtesy of Vollmar Natural Lands Consulting

A proposal to store carbon dioxide deep below a Bay Area wetland is testing how — and where — California pursues climate solutions.

The Montezuma Wetlands drape across 1,800 acres of Solano County, California, where the Sacramento River empties into San Francisco Bay. Once drained and diked for farming and grazing, the marsh has been rehabilitated over the past two decades, and in 2020, tidal waters returned for the first time in a century. Today, the land teems with shorebirds, waterfowl, and other wildlife in a rare example of large-scale habitat restoration.

But just as the ecosystem is on the mend, another makeover may be coming. A company called Montezuma Carbon wants to send millions of tons of carbon dioxide from Bay Area polluters through a 40-mile pipeline and store it in saline aquifers 2 miles beneath the wetland. Approval could come in as little as 12 to 18 months once the county approves a test well, with what its backers call “limited disposal” coming one year after that. If the project proceeds, it could be the Golden State’s first large-scale, climate-driven carbon capture and storage site. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency approved Carbon TerraVault, a smaller project in Kern County, California, that would store carbon dioxide in depleted oil wells. 02-04-26

UCAR President Antonio Busalacchi addresses a town hall on January 28, 2026, at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Houston. (Image credit: AMS)

Members of the American Meteorological Society were briefed Wednesday about ongoing developments on the future of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which the White House has said it will break up.

This week’s mammoth U.S. winter blast wasn’t the only storm affecting the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society occurring in Houston, Texas. Looming in the background of the meeting – and jumping into the foreground during an evening town hall on Wednesday, January 28 – was the fate of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, which the Trump administration is moving to dismantle.

Based in Boulder, Colorado, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation since its founding in 1960, NCAR (or NSF NCAR, as the center brands itself) is a premier national and global hub for weather, water, and climate-related research. Beyond carrying out its own work, NCAR manages aircraft and supercomputing resources used by many hundreds of scientists, and it collaborates with many public and private stakeholders.

“NCAR is great at engaging our communities with a focus on the next generation of scientists. I think losing that would be a tremendous loss,” outgoing American Meteorological Society President David Stensrud said at the town hall. Stensrud first worked with NCAR in 1989 as a Ph.D. student. 01-30-26

Trump’s ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’ For Polluters Faces Its Latest Test in Court

The president exempted about 40 medical sterilization companies from Biden-era emission standards. A new lawsuit challenges his authority.

Last spring, the EPA made a surprise announcement: President Trump would consider giving some polluters exemptions from a handful of Clean Air Act rules. To get the ball rolling, all it would take was an email from a company making its case. The EPA set up a special inbox to receive these applications, and it gave companies about three weeks at the end of March to submit their requests for presidential exemption. Hundreds of companies wrote in, including coal plants, iron and steel manufacturers, limestone producers, and chemical refiners.

One industry was particularly eager for exemption: medical device sterilizers. About 40 of the roughly 90 device sterilization plants that operate nationwide, along with their trade association, wrote in, arguing they shouldn’t have to comply with an air quality rule limiting how much toxic material they could emit. That’s because these facilities sterilize medical equipment with ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen that studies have linked to cancers of the breast and lymph nodes. 02-02-26

The population of Gloster, Mississippi, has seen its population shrink, even after the opening of a wood pellet mill. The typical household income of about $22,500 is less than half the Mississippi median. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian.

States gave Drax millions in tax breaks in the hopes of boosting jobs.

The mayor of Urania steered his pickup down a dirt road snaking through the weedy lots and patches of trees that had once been the bustling heart of his central Louisiana town.

Jay Ivy passed pines growing where the saws of the sprawling Urania mill turned similar specimens into lumber. He pointed out the log pond, now the domain of alligators, and stopped at the mill’s smokestack, still standing over an increasingly deserted townscape. Once a year, the smokestack belches celebratory black clouds over Urania.

“For our fall festival, we get it smoking again with some old tires or whatever we can find to burn,” the big-shouldered mayor said with a sheepish grin. “I suppose it reminds us of what we had here.”

Urania was devastated when the mill and a related fiberboard operation closed in 2002, putting more than 350 people out of work. There was little hope of a revival until the British energy giant Drax arrived in the Deep South a decade ago, hungry for cheap wood it could burn in England as a “renewable” alternative to coal.

Drax began opening wood pellet mills in former timber towns in Louisiana and Mississippi that had fallen on hard times. The region offered plentiful low-grade timber, a labor force desperate for work, and lax environmental regulations. The company was already producing pellets, which it calls “sustainable biomass,” in Mississippi and north Louisiana when Drax opened its biggest pellet mill just outside Urania in late 2017. 01-30-26

Grist / OSMRE

Trump said coal needed better PR. Then Coalie showed up.

Can a lump of coal ever be … cute?

It’s a question no one was thinking about until last Thursday, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a cartoon of himself on X kneeling next to “Coalie” — a combustible lump with giant eyes, an open-mouthed grin, and yellow boots, almost like a carbon-heavy Japanese video game character.

It might seem like a strange mascot to promote what Burgum calls the “American Energy Dominance Agenda.”

“Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” said Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo, and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World.

In Japan, Dale said, seemingly everything gets a cute character attached to it — not just in TV shows and games, but also as part of government public relations efforts. This ultra-adorable aesthetic, associated with rounded shapes and huge eyes, is so common it has a name: kawaii. Even the Tokyo police department has an orange, mouselike mascot, with a disarming cuddliness that serves to make law enforcement feel softer and less threatening. 01-29-26

John Moore / Getty Images

To keep the lights on, states like New York and Massachusetts will need to build projects that are currently “impossible.”

Since his presidency began last year, Donald Trump has embarked on an all-out campaign to destroy the nation’s nascent offshore wind industry. He has halted all wind lease sales in federal waters, issued stop-work orders for nearly-completed wind farms, and told oil industry executives that his “goal is to not let any windmills be built.” Last month, his Interior Department said it would terminate five major wind farms that are under construction in the north Atlantic Ocean, citing vague “national security” issues. These wind farms would together generate around 5.6 gigawatts of power, enough to supply around 4 million homes.

Trump’s actions have all but destroyed the U.S. offshore wind industry, which was already facing significant economic challenges during the Biden administration. While developers behind the terminated wind farms recently secured court orders allowing them to complete construction, other potential wind installations have been scrapped, and investors are retreating from offshore projects. Even as solar energy continued to grow at a rapid clip in 2025, wind saw virtually no growth in the United States. 01-28-26

Ross D. Franklin / AP Photo

The agency’s plan would narrow water quality reviews and make it harder for tribes to enforce treaty rights.

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to revise the Clean Water Act, specifically a section of the law that regulates water quality and limits states’ and tribes’ authority over federal projects, as well as how tribes can gain the authority to conduct those reviews. Experts say the move would dissolve one of the few tools tribes have to enforce treaty rights and hamper their ability to protect tribal citizens.

“What the Trump administration is proposing to modify here is a really important tool for states and tribes, because it gets at their ability to put conditions on or, in extreme cases, block projects that are either proposed by the federal government or under the jurisdiction of the federal government,” said Miles Johnson, legal director at Columbia Riverkeeper, an organization that works on issues affecting the Columbia River.

Developers seeking to build dams, mines, data centers, or pipelines must navigate a permitting process to do so. One requirement in the process is obtaining certification from a tribe or state confirming that the project meets federal water quality standards. Currently, tribes and states conduct holistic reviews of projects, known as “activity as a whole”, evaluating all potential impacts on water quality, including spill risks, threats to cultural resources, and impacts on wildlife. This approach was established under the Biden administration in 2023. 01-27-26

Data Centers Are Facing an Image Problem. The Tech industry is Spending Millions to Rebrand Them.

Through television ads and online campaigns, industry-backed groups are promising jobs, clean energy, and lower electricity bills.

With community opposition growing, data center backers are going on a full-scale public relations blitz. Around Christmas in Virginia, which boasts the highest concentration of data centers in the country, one advertisement seemed to air nonstop. “Virginia’s data centers are … investing billions in clean energy,” a voiceover intoned over sweeping shots of shiny solar panels. “Creating good-paying jobs” — cue men in yellow safety vests and hard hats — “and building a better energy future.”

The ad was sponsored by Virginia Connects, an industry-affiliated group that spent at least $700,000 on digital marketing in the state in fiscal year 2024. The spot emphasized that data centers are paying their own energy costs, framing this as a buffer that might help lower residential bills, and portrayed the facilities as engines of local job creation.

The reality is murkier. Although industry groups claim that each new data center creates “dozens to hundreds” of “high-wage, high-skill jobs,” some researchers say data centers generate far fewer jobs than other industries, such as manufacturing and warehousing. Greg LeRoy, the founder of the research and advocacy group Good Jobs First, said that in his first major study of data center jobs nine years ago, he found that developers pocketed well over a million dollars in state subsidies for every permanent job they created. With the rise of hyperscalers, LeRoy said, that number is “still very much in the ballpark.” 01-26-26

Stacks of wood are organized at the Drax biomass facility in Urania, Louisiana. Eric Shelton / Mississippi Today

In Louisiana and Mississippi, people living near wood-pellet mills say they’re getting sick.

It almost felt like old times for the friends and family gathered at Robert Weatherspoon’s house. The living room couches and chairs were filled, a football game was on the TV, and the aroma of bacon and butter beans drifted in from the kitchen.

What was missing was Weatherspoon’s voice. While his friends usually bring the food or cook during get-togethers, Weatherspoon is counted on to supply the laughs. The 67-year-old with an expressive, cherubic face has a reputation for devastating one-liners, off-color game commentary, and stories — skewed somewhat for comedic effect — about people everybody knows in Gloster, a mill town in southern Mississippi too small to have strangers.

But shuffling from his bed to the living room had left him breathless. Weatherspoon took a puff from his inhaler, but his throat was locked and his chest was tight. He tried a joke on an old high school buddy across the room, and it fell flat, stalled between labored breaths.

His next utterance was darker, whispered to the person with the closest ear. “I thought I was dying last night,” Weatherspoon said. “For 20 minutes, I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t move.” An odd thought crossed his mind as he lay there, struggling for air. “I said, ‘Let me write something before I go. I want to tell about my life. I want to put it all down.’” 01-23-26

People bear Greenlandic flags as they gather in front of the U.S. consulate protest against President Donald Trump and his announced intent to acquire Greenland on January 17, 2026, in Nuuk, Greenland. Sean Gallup / Getty Images

Historians say underpinning Trump’s talk of national security lies a longstanding pattern of American entitlement to Native land.

Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.

Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute.

Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.” 01-22-26

The J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in West Olive, Michigan. Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In 2025, regulatory rollbacks and surging power demand helped buoy an industry in trouble.

Heading into President Donald Trump’s second term, coal looked like an industry nearing the end of its life. Utilities planned to retire more than half of the nation’s coal-fired power plants by 2028, no new facilities were coming online, and production had been flat for years.

Trump’s first year back in office has given the industry an opportunity to retrench. The president is an avowed supporter of coal, and his Department of Energy has repeatedly intervened to prevent plants from shutting down. At the same time, a Trump-supported boom in the construction of artificial intelligence data centers has led to a surging need for power, prompting many utilities to postpone coal facility closures.

The combination of federal intervention and rising energy demand may have stalled coal’s decline, at least for the moment. Consumption increased 13 percent last year, reversing a long downward slide and causing a bump in domestic carbon emissions. Of the 11 coal-fired plants slated for retirement last year, just two shuttered. But one of them may return: A Utah facility closed in November after losing its primary customer, but the legislature hopes to save it by finding another buyer. Many of the utilities that committed to shutdowns over the next two years have abandoned those plans.” 01-20-26

Jon G. Fuller / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

If enacted, the Utah and Oklahoma measures would restrict litigation against oil companies over their role in the climate crisis.

U.S. lawmakers in two red states are attempting to shield the fossil fuel industry from climate liability.

In Oklahoma, a newly introduced bill would bar most civil lawsuits against oil companies over their role in the climate crisis, unless plaintiffs allege violations of specific environmental or labor laws. A similar proposal in Utah would block lawsuits over climate-warming emissions, unless a court finds the defendant violated a statute or permit.

“I think anyone in America who breathes the air around them and also believes in corporate accountability ought to be very concerned about these types of end-runs against accountability,” said Jay Inslee, the former governor of Washington state and a former trial attorney.

The proposals appear designed to prevent parties in either state from joining the growing wave of U.S. climate accountability litigation, which has seen more than 70 states, cities and local governments sue major oil companies for allegedly misleading the public about climate risks. 01-18-26

A Convergent Imagining

by J. Drew Lanham

Illustration by Gabriella Trujillo

What if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson had met? Imagining an exchange in the year 1964, as the civil rights and environmental movements were forging parallel and increasingly urgent paths into American culture, J. Drew Lanham explores the power and necessity of convergence.

January 6, 1964

Rachel Carson
11701 Berwick Road
Silver Spring, MD 20904

Dear Miss Carson,

Rachel, if I might? Hoping you are well in these turbulent times. I am fine but feel now pressed to do even more after this last attempt at silencing me came so close.

I became aware of you, Miss Carson, hearing your voice ring strong through the articles I’ve come across in various magazines. Although I am not a bird-watcher or naturalist, your passion for doing right by God’s creation—birds and humanity both—strikes me as righteous in every sense of the word. Considering how grave is the need to enlarge the just message of charity and care to every living soul in these urgent times we find ourselves in, I felt compelled to reach out. 02-01-21

Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The administration has done real damage to climate action, experts say. But in many ways, renewables are unstoppable.

A year ago, Donald Trump assumed the presidency for a second time and immediately got to work dismantling the climate progress that Joe Biden’s administration had made. Among other sweeping efforts, the White House boosted fossil fuels over renewables, tried to stop states from reducing emissions and adapting to climate change, and paused wind projects despite rising demand for electricity. Later, in July, the administration succeeded in gutting the clean-tech incentives provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, which among other things were meant to expand wind and solar. That landmark legislation was the most ambitious climate action the United States had ever taken.

Experts say the administration’s moves have done real damage to the nation’s ability to fight climate change. But they also stress that strong countervailing forces — including falling prices for renewables, surging demand for electricity, and aggressive campaigns by states and cities to slash emissions — continue to drive the transition to clean energy. The result is a growing tension between federal policy and market reality, one that is likely to define U.S. climate and energy outcomes for years to come. 01-16-26

A man rinses with water in August after playing beach footvolley in Beirut, Lebanon, on a sweltering hot day. Bilal Hussein/AP

Earth’s average temperature last year hovered among one of the three hottest on record, while the past three years indicate that warming could be speeding up, international climate monitoring teams reported.

Six science teams calculated that 2025 was behind 2024 and 2023, while two other groups — NASA and a joint American and British team — said 2025 was slightly warmer than 2023. World Meteorological Organization, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials said 2023 and 2025 temperatures were so close — .04 degrees Fahrenheit apart — that it’s pretty much a tie.

Last year’s average global temperature was 59.14 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 2.59 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial time, the World Meteorological Organization calculated, averaging out the eight data sets. The temperature data used by most of the teams goes back to 1850.

All of the last three years flirted close to the internationally agreed-upon limit of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since the mid 19th century. That goal for limiting temperature increases, established in Paris in 2015, is likely to be breached by the end of this decade, the scientists said. 01-14-26

Anthony Vazquez / Sun-Times

The U.S. House voted to cut millions promised for the work this year. The Senate will vote this week, as advocates and some lawmakers push back.

The Senate is taking up a spending package passed by the House of Representatives that would cut $125 million in funding promised this year to replace toxic lead pipes.

Including three of 12 appropriations bills, this package will fund parts of the federal government, including the Environmental Protection Agency. The Senate is slated to vote on it later this week. Near the end of more than 400 pages of text, it proposes repurposing some funds previously obligated by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law.

That law, advanced by the Biden administration, promised $15 billion over five years to fund the replacement of service lines — pipes routing water into people’s homes and other buildings — that are made of or contain lead, a neurotoxin that can cause cognitive, developmental, reproductive, and cardiovascular harm.

The EPA released 2025 funding allocations in November, months late, obligating nearly $3 billion across the country. Illinois, the state with the most lead pipes in the nation, received the largest share. Another $3 billion was slated to be disbursed this year, the last for the funds. 01-13-26

Ricardo Beliel / Brazil Photos / LightRocket via Getty Images

Amid changing political headwinds, the moratorium on soy-driven deforestation is in danger. What now?

Nearly 20 years ago, a Brazilian lobbying group for soy trading and processing companies signed onto a historic conservation deal known as the Amazon soy moratorium. The voluntary agreement prohibits members from buying soybeans grown on lands deforested after July 2008. Proponents of the deal say that it has been highly effective at protecting forest land without impeding soy production over the last two decades. Under the moratorium, growing soy on other lands — like those cleared before 2008, or pasture or savannah lands — is still fair game, and reports indicate that production on such lands in the Amazon has quadrupled since 2006. Now, amid changing political headwinds, the deforestation agreement is in danger.

On January 1, a new law eliminating the tax benefits for members of the moratorium took effect in Mato Grosso, the Brazilian state that produces the most soybeans in the country. These tax benefits functioned separately from the moratorium; nevertheless, following the new law, the lobbying group for soy traders — including multinational firms like Cargill, Bunge, ADM, and others — announced its plan to leave the moratorium, which experts say will put more of the Amazon rainforest at risk of deforestation. Without participation from these major corporations, the agreement risks becoming largely toothless — and exacerbating growing challenges faced by agricultural producers today. 01-13-26

Courtesy of CleanCapital

A new 9.1-megawatt solar array will help residents of Waukegan, Illinois, reduce energy bills. State incentives for low-income solar made the project possible.

As someone who spent several years as a workers’ rights organizer, Fredy Amador is intimately familiar with the financial struggles people face in the current economy. Northern Illinois’ skyrocketing energy bills make the situation even tougher.

Now, Amador has become an evangelist for something that can provide a modest measure of relief: a community solar project, built on a Superfund site too polluted for much else in the city of Waukegan where he lives, about 40 miles north of Chicago.

Residents who subscribe to get energy from the solar farm are guaranteed to see savings on their energy bills, under a state program incentivizing solar in low-income areas.

The 9.1-megawatt Yeoman Solar Project, which went online last month, can provide energy for about 1,000 households, as well as the Waukegan school district, which owns the land. 01-10-26

Grist / Getty Images

Chevron met with Trump and spent millions lobbying him to let it continue operating in Venezuela. Now it is uniquely positioned to profit from the country’s vast oil reserves.

On Saturday, hours after U.S. forces in Caracas killed at least 80 people and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump sounded less like a wartime commander than a developer surveying a newly acquired property. The country’s future, he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, belonged to “very large United States oil companies,” which would soon be pumping “a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”

The land in question includes the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — at some 300 billion barrels, roughly 17 percent of global totals. But after years of political turmoil and U.S. sanctions, Venezuela accounts for barely 1 percent of global crude production. “It’s true that they know the oil is there,” said Samantha Gross, the director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “But the aboveground risks are huge.” 01-09-26

A neighborhood in Pacific Palisades on the one-year anniversary of the fires that ravaged Los Angeles. Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

A new analysis finds that in 2025 major catastrophes took 276 lives and caused $115 billion in damages. It could have been much worse.

Last year began with the costliest wildfires in American history, as a series of blazes tore across Los Angeles for nearly all of January. A parade of other catastrophes followed: severe storms across the southern and northeastern United States, tornadoes in the central states, drought and heat waves through the western expanse of the country.

All told, the U.S. notched 23 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2025, which claimed 276 lives and caused $115 billion in damages, according to a new analysis from the research group Climate Central. Only 2023 and 2024 recorded more of these events, and 2025 was the 15th consecutive year with an above-average number. (Since 1980, the annual average has been nine events costing $67.6 billion. In that time, the country tallied 426 total billion-dollar disasters, costing more than $3.1 trillion.) Last year was the ninth most expensive on record for billion-dollar disasters.

The clear signal here is climate change: It’s worsening wildfires, causing heavier rainfall and flooding, and supercharging hurricanes. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters happened on average every 82 days, according to the analysis, but over the last decade that window has tightened to just 16 days. In 2025, Americans endured one of these events every 10 days on average — an almost nonstop cavalcade of suffering. 01-08-26

Texas Clears the Way For Petrochemical Expansion as Experts Warn of Health Risks

Public Health Watch chronicles a fossil fuel infrastructure boom that could worsen air pollution in some areas and exacerbate climate change.

Let’s establish some baselines.

Texas is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than Saudi Arabia or the global maritime industry. Its oil, gas, and petrochemical operations discharge tens of millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into the air each year, comprising almost one-fifth of such releases in the United States. It is the nation’s top emitter of the carcinogens benzene, ethylene oxide, and 1,3-butadiene.

It accounts for 75 percent of the petrochemicals made in the U.S. It is an engine of the world’s plastics industry, whose products clog oceans and landfills and, upon breaking down, infuse human bodies with potentially dangerous microplastics.

Despite all of this, the state’s commitment to fossil fuel infrastructure is unwavering, driven by economics. Oil and gas extraction, transportation, and processing contributed $249 billion to the state’s gross domestic product and supported 661,000 jobs in 2021, according to the most recent reports from the Texas Economic Development & Tourism Office. An industrial construction spurt is well into its second decade, with little sign of slowing. 01-07-26

NCDEQ explains on its website that the pink color of the lagoon in this photo is indicative of healthy microbial activity in a swine lagoon. Photo: NCDEQ

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality has suffered the highest percentage of staff cuts of any state, with nearly one-third of its workforce eliminated between 2010 and 2024, according to an environmental watchdog group.

A whopping 32%, or 386 DEQ staff positions, were wiped out during that 14-year period, according to an Environmental Integrity Project report released last month.

Those staff cuts, the report concludes, leave the state agency responsible for administering regulations to protect water, air quality and the public’s health “ill-positioned to confront” pollution from the state’s growing factory farming industry, climate-driven storms and flooding in coastal communities.

The report notes how the agency was downsized when former Gov. Pat McCrory signed the 2015-16 state budget into law, triggering a shift of several divisions from what was then the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The Republican governor, who also renamed the agency the Department of Environmental Quality, said the move aligned with his vision for government efficiency.

Josh Kastrinsky, DEQ’s deputy communications director, said in an email that it is “difficult” to directly compare present staffing levels to those in 2010 because of the changes that were made to the department in 2015. 01-05-26

Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Environmental advocates notched key wins at local and state levels this year — despite the Trump administration’s rollbacks.

As 2025 draws to a close, environmental advocates across the U.S. find themselves weighing a year marked by both setbacks and successes.

Despite major environmental reversals taken by the Donald Trump administration, including loosening fossil fuel rules and weakening endangered-species safeguards, conservationists, lawmakers, and researchers still notched key wins at local and state levels.

Here are some environmental triumphs across the country amid a year of political turbulence.

California launches methane-tracking satellite

California turned to space technology this year to curb methane pollution, launching a new program that uses satellite-mounted sensors to spot major leaks in near real time.

The $100 million effort, funded through the state’s cap-and-trade program, sends data to the California Air Resources Board as the satellite passes over the state roughly five times a week. One satellite is already in orbit, with seven more expected to launch in the coming years.

Hawai‘i researchers identify microplastic-eating fungi

Scientists at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa have discovered that many fungi living around the islands can naturally degrade plastic, with some even being trained to consume the microparticles faster. 01-04-26

National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Andy Weinheimer makes final adjustments to equipment for measuring the impact of air pollution on the Arctic’s atmospheric chemistry and changing climate. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

The center is one of the world’s premier institutions for studying the atmosphere. Its work has saved countless lives.

On December 16, the Trump administration announced its intent to dismantle the National Science Foundation-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, one of the world’s premier institutions for studying the atmosphere in all its variety and complexity. The announcement came in a statement released to USA TODAY from Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

“The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado,” Vought said. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway and any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

Founded in 1960, NCAR receives its core funding from the National Science Foundation, or NSF, which has been the center’s sponsoring entity from the beginning. In addition, some NCAR researchers and programs have received support through grants from NOAA, NASA, EPA, and other entities.

Core funding from NSF to NCAR in fiscal year 2025, which ended on September 30, was around $123 million, or roughly half of NCAR’s total budget, according to Science magazine. NCAR employs about 830 staff, largely based in the Boulder, Colorado area. 12-17-25

‘Everything is worse since Drax came here’: US Residents Say Wood-pellet Plant Harming Their Town

Carmella Wren-Causey has had trouble breathing after Drax moved into her town of Gloster. Photograph: Kathleen Flynn/The Guardian

Residents of Gloster, Mississippi, are suing plant that exports wood pellets to UK and Europe. Company says it is reducing emissions

When Helen Reed first learned about the bioenergy mill opening in her hometown of Gloster, Mississippi, the word was it would bring jobs and economic opportunities. It was only later that she learned that activity came with a cost: the Amite Bioenergy mill, opened in 2014 by British energy giant Drax, emits large – and sometimes illegal – quantities of air pollutants, including methanol, acrolein and formaldehyde, which are linked to cancers and other serious illnesses.

“When I go out, I can’t hardly catch my breath,” Reed said. “Everything is worse since Drax came here.”

The facility churns out billions of wood pellets each year to meet surging overseas demand for “sustainable biomass”, a renewable alternative to coal.

Now, Gloster residents are suing Drax, alleging that the company unlawfully exposed people to “massive amounts of toxic pollutants”, according to the October filing.

Drax, one of the world’s biggest players in the booming biomass industry, has turned the UK’s largest coal power station, a mile-wide complex in rural Yorkshire, into what is essentially an immense wood stove fueled with Mississippi and Louisiana pine. The company, whose Yorkshire plant is among the UK’s largest single carbon emitters, has faced scrutiny and lawsuits in the UK for pollution and workplace safety violations. 12-17-25

Grist / Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco

Facing pressure to increase timber harvests, the Forest Service is sidestepping rigorous environmental reviews and limiting public participation.

When the Forest Service approved the sale of nearly 70 acres for commercial logging in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest in late 2024, Sam Stearns was furious. The Shawnee is the only national forest in the state, and one of the smallest in the nation. The agency initially billed the so-called McCormick Oak-Hickory Restoration Project timber sale as a “thinning” operation to remove older trees and make room for younger saplings. Logging operations contribute to habitat loss, and Stearns found the Forest Service’s justification lacking.

“Never in the history of this planet has a forest been logged back to health,” said the 71-year-old Stearns.

Stearns, who is the founder of the preservation group Friends of Bell Smith Spring, planned to oppose the sale. He began keeping an eye out for the agency’s public comment period, which provided residents like him an opportunity to voice their concerns. For months, he and other local environmentalists scoured the web and local newspapers for mentions of the sale to prepare for the comment period, but the McCormick Project never turned up. 12-16-25

Dublin, Ohio’s Bridge Park development. (Image credit: City of Dublin)

Rethinking American suburbs could help people drive less, lowering emissions.

Like many American communities, Dublin, Ohio, grew from a small rural town in the 19th century into a sprawling suburb in the 20th. Today, it’s embracing a 21st-century development trend: walkability.

An affluent suburb of the Ohio capital, Columbus, Dublin is home to roughly 50,000 people. In recent years, the local government has shepherded the development of a walkable new neighborhood, Bridge Park, and built an attractive pedestrian bridge connecting it to the historic town center. Building on the success of this development, in 2024 the city council announced another ambitious project that will turn a 1980s office park into a walkable district with housing, shops, restaurants, public spaces, and workplaces.

Projects that aim to transform traditional suburban environments are increasingly common in the United States. Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, architecture professors at Georgia Tech and the City College of New York, respectively, have been writing about similar efforts, which they call suburban retrofits, for almost two decades. In that time, they’ve seen massive growth in both the number of these projects and the level of ambition they display, with innovative strategies taking on issues like public health, aging populations, equity, jobs, and climate change, all while reducing car dependency. 12-12-25

John Keeble / Getty Images

A global supply chain built for speed is leaving behind waste, toxins, and a trail of environmental wreckage.

The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth a desert bloom, blanketing the ground with delicate purple flowers that disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared.

It was a rare treat for locals used to grimmer ornamentation: Since 2001, colorful mountains of used clothing have been the main feature growing across the Atacama. By the time the largest mound was set on fire in 2022, it contained some 100,000 tons of discarded fabric, roughly the weight of an aircraft carrier. Today, piles like it continue to grow.

This fashion graveyard has become so large that some outlets have dubbed it the “great fashion garbage patch.” It owes its growth to the nearby duty-free port of Iquique, where Chile imports all manner of international goods without customs or taxes — including heaps of used clothing from the United States, Europe, and Asia. While the best items are resold to international markets, overwhelming volumes of cheap fast-fashion pieces don’t make the cut. Instead, they are dumped in the desert — an open secret that the government largely ignores. The burnings, whether they’re intended to destroy the evidence or make more space, fill nearby towns with smoky, unhealthy air. 12-15-25

The Chinese producer of electric cars BYD presents its vehicles (EV) on the 2nd day of the IAA MOBILITY 2025 automobile fair on September 10, 2025 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images)

EVs made up about 25% of global car sales in 2025. In the U.S., they only made up 10%.

The electric car market is booming – just not in the United States.

About one-quarter of new cars sold around the world so far in 2025 have been electric. That share is forecast to continue rising rapidly in coming years, reaching one-half in the early 2030s.

But the electric share of new car sales in the U.S. has plateaued at a mere 10% since 2023, and the Trump administration has implemented policies and regulatory changes that have slammed the brakes on a shift to EVs.

As a result, many developing nations in regions like Southeast Asia are passing the U.S. in EV adoption, while China and a number of European countries like Norway (as Will Ferrell comedically informed us in a GM advertisement) are leaving the rest of the world in their dust. On the sales side, China’s advanced EV manufacturing has allowed the country to take the lead in global auto exports.

Road transportation accounts for about 12% of global climate emissions. So electric vehicles are a key climate solution, “highly recommended” by the experts at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization that researches the most effective climate solutions. They estimate that widespread EV adoption could reduce climate pollution worldwide by over 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. 12-09-25

Photo Credit: Canva Teams

New Jersey lawmakers are advancing two PFAS measures that move on separate tracks—one providing fire departments a limited extension, and the other tightening product restrictions across several consumer categories.

The Assembly’s A5537, approved 76–0, grants fire departments an additional year past the existing January 1, 2027 cutoff for using Class B foams with intentionally added PFAS. The extension does not modify the containment, reporting, or storage requirements established in 2023; departments must still prevent releases to soil or water and retain documentation until the state identifies an authorized disposal method. Legislators indicated that many departments still have legacy foam supplies and have not fully transitioned to fluorine-free alternatives.

The Senate’s S1042, the “Protecting Against Forever Chemicals Act,” moves in a different direction. It would prohibit the sale of cosmetics, carpets, fabric treatments, and paper-based food packaging that contain intentionally added PFAS two years after enactment. Cookware containing PFAS on any food-contact surface would also require explicit labeling. The bill provides the Department of Environmental Protection with new enforcement tools and dedicates $5 million toward PFAS monitoring, public education, and source-reduction programs.

New Jersey’s proposals sit alongside a patchwork of PFAS-related laws across the country, each taking a different approach depending on local priorities.

AP / Carolyn Kaster

The U.S. Energy Secretary said allowing tribes to weigh in on energy projects on their land creates “unnecessary burdens to the development of critical infrastructure.”

Early last year, the hydropower company Nature and People First set its sights on Black Mesa, a mountainous region on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. The mesa’s steep drop offered ideal terrain for gravity-based energy storage, and the company was interested in building pumped-storage projects that leveraged the elevation difference. Environmental groups and tribal community organizations, however, largely opposed the plan. Pumped-storage operations involve moving water in and out of reservoirs, which could affect the habitats of endangered fish and require massive groundwater withdrawals from an already-depleted aquifer.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has authority over non-federal hydropower projects on the Colorado River and its tributaries, ultimately denied the project’s permit. The decision was among the first under a new policy: FERC would not approve projects on tribal land without the support of the affected tribe. Since the project was on Navajo land and the Navajo Nation opposed the project, FERC denied the permits. The Commission also denied similar permit requests from Rye Development, a Florida-based company, that also proposed pumped-water projects. 12-10-25

Man in a winter coat, hat, and jeans stand next to a red wellhead
Wayne Bezner Kerr at the Cornell University Borehole Observatory in Ithaca, New York (Maria Gallucci/Canary Media)

The university is drilling for geothermal energy to directly warm its campus upstate. The system could curb emissions without straining the grid.

A faded-red wellhead emerged in the middle of a pockmarked parking lot, its metal bolts and pipes illuminated only by the headlights of Wayne Bezner Kerr’s electric car. He stepped out of the vehicle into the dark, frigid evening to open the fence enclosing the equipment, which is just down the road from Cornell University’s snow-speckled campus in upstate New York.

We were there, shivering outside in mid-November, to talk about heat.

Bezner Kerr is the program manager of Cornell’s Earth Source Heat, an ambitious project to directly warm the sprawling campus with geothermal energy pulled from deep underground. The wellhead was the tip of the iceberg — the visible part of a nearly 10,000-foot-long borehole that slices vertically through layers of rock to reach sufficiently toasty temperatures. Cornell is using data from the site to develop a system that will replace the school’s fossil-gas-based heating network, potentially by 2035.

“We can’t decarbonize without solving the heat problem,” Bezner Kerr repeated like a refrain during my visit to Ithaca. 12-09-25

A sign on a rural Michigan road opposes a planned $7 billion data center on southeast Michigan farm land. UCG / Getty Images

The EPA is prioritizing review of new chemicals to be used in data centers. Experts say this could lead to the fast approval of new types of forever chemicals — with limited oversight.

In recent months, the Trump administration has opened a deregulatory floodgate in the name of building more data centers. Among other things, this has involved ordering rollbacks of clean water regulations and opening up public lands to coal mining.

Now, it’s turning its eye to chemical regulation with a new policy that could, experts say, potentially fast-track the approval of new chemicals for use in the U.S. — including new types of forever chemicals — with limited oversight.

In September, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would be prioritizing the regulatory review of new chemicals used in data centers or related projects. The announcement is part of a sweeping set of overhauls pushed by the Trump administration following several executive orders related to AI and a White House AI Action Plan, both rolled out in July. The Action Plan was formed after soliciting more than 10,000 public comments, which included hundreds from industry interests. These actions, the White House has said, will usher in a “golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance.” 12-07-25

Damage to Kipnuk, seen on Oct. 12.17. Credit: Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News, via Associated Press; Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, via Associated Press

After a devastating storm, the people who fled a remote coastal village face an existential question.

From the beige confines of Room 207 at the Aspen Suites Hotel on the outskirts of Anchorage, Maggie Paul and her daughter, Jamie, struggle to envision the future.

A little more than a month ago, the women were evacuated along with about 1,000 others from Kipnuk, their remote coastal village in western Alaska that was destroyed by the remnants of a typhoon. They were airlifted to safety; there are no roads to their community. Many landed in hotels about 500 miles away in Anchorage, which might as well be a different planet for all the ways the city differs from their tight-knit rural community.

It’s here the Pauls are wrestling with the kind of uncertainty facing more communities as the planet warms, weather grows more destructive and vulnerable places face repeated disasters.

Maggie Paul, 64, wants to return to Kipnuk and the way life used to be, before a series of floods and storms repeatedly bashed the village, with the most powerful blow yet landing on Oct. 12. However long it takes to put the decimated village back together, Ms. Paul said, “I will wait.”

Jamie Paul, 38, thinks the community’s only safe option is to move to higher ground, somewhere more protected. “The land is sinking,” she said, referring to the permafrost upon which the village was built and that is now buckling as rising temperatures cause it to thaw. “It’s not how it used to be.”

It’s a conundrum in search of clarity, with suspended lives in the balance. 12-05-25

Jeff Greenberg / Getty Images

The site removed the feature after real estate agents and some homeowners alleged that the scores appear arbitrary and hurt sales.

Zillow, the largest real estate listing site in the U.S., has removed a feature that allowed people to view a property’s exposure to the climate crisis, following complaints from the industry and some homeowners that it was hurting sales.

In September last year, the online real estate marketplace introduced a tool showing the individual risk of wildfire, flood, extreme heat, wind, and poor air quality for 1 million properties it lists, explaining that, “Climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions” for many Americans.

But Zillow has now deleted this climate index after complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the rankings appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged, and harmed house sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property data that Zillow relies upon.

Zillow said it remains committed to help Americans make informed decisions about properties, with listings now containing outbound links to the website of First Street, the nonprofit climate-risk quantifier that had provided the on-site tool to Zillow. 12-04-25

Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call via Getty Images

Analysts say electric vehicle adoption in the United States will continue to grow — but maybe not at the same pace as before.

Electric vehicle sales have cratered.

Across the country, dealers sold about 20 percent fewer used electric cars in October than in September and saw a staggering 50 percent drop for new ones, according to the latest data. No one was surprised. Congress voted in July to end the federal tax credits that helped consumers afford them on September 30, years before they were supposed to expire. That led to a rush of purchases before the deadline and a precipitous drop afterward.

The question now is whether this dip is a sign of a prolonged slump or a mere blip in an otherwise upward trajectory. While only time will tell, many analysts believe that electric vehicle adoption in the United States will continue to grow — albeit maybe not at the same pace seen before Congress killed the credits and automakers started second-guessing themselves.

“We’re definitely gonna see a slowdown,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. Eliminating the federal credit of $7,500 on new EVs and $4,500 on used ones is certainly taking a toll. But the price of batteries, and thus cars, also continues to come down. Used models are becoming more of a bargain, too. 12-03-25

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro in August. Matthew Hatcher / AFP via Getty Images

Governor Josh Shapiro pulled out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in exchange for a budget. Critics say he “got rolled.”

Last month, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro withdrew from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI (pronounced “Reggie”), a cap-and-trade program that establishes a regional limit on carbon emissions from power plants located in the Northeast.

Here’s how RGGI works: Each year, credits allowing the power plants to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide, up to the cap, are auctioned off. The proceeds from these auctions go to RGGI member states, which can reinvest them into clean energy and consumer affordability programs. Crucially, the emissions cap gradually lowers over time, theoretically ensuring that total emissions continue on a downward trend.

Pennsylvania is a giant within the program, because it has higher power sector emissions than all of the other RGGI states — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the District of Columbia — combined, so Shapiro’s exit sent shockwaves through the system. The Democrat withdrew from the program as part of a compromise to convince Republicans in the legislature to pass the state’s budget, which has been delayed since June, forcing schools and public transportation to dip into rainy day funds or take on debt to support services. 12-02-25

Dust blows over the Great Salt Lake. Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune

A new report lays out the case for action — instead of waiting for more data.

The dust blowing from the dry bed of the Great Salt Lake is creating a serious public health threat that policymakers and the scientific community are not taking seriously enough, two environmental nonprofits warn in a recent report.

The Great Salt Lake hit a record-low elevation in 2022 and teetered on the brink of ecological collapse. It put millions of migrating birds at risk, along with multi-million-dollar lake-based industries such as brine shrimp harvesting, mineral extraction and tourism. The lake only recovered after a few winters with above-average snowfall, but it sits dangerously close to sinking to another record-breaking low.

Around 800 square miles of lakebed sit exposed, baking and eroding into a massive threat to public health. Dust storms large and small have become a regular occurrence on the Wasatch Front, the urban region where most Utahns live. 12-01-25

Giving Thanks and Honoring Indigenous, Regenerative Farming Traditions

A Missouri turkey farmer reflects on his work with heritage birds and native ecosystems.

When I began raising turkeys, I thought I fully understood my responsibilities, like moving my flock from pasture to pasture, providing adequate water, feed, shelter, care, and protection for the birds while raising them for harvest. Eventually, other duties became apparent. Complicated ones, like balancing the production of heritage breed turkeys—our native North American livestock—while supporting and stewarding the native ecosystems on our farm in Northeast Missouri.

I am also responsible for providing the centerpiece of a very culturally loaded holiday meal. Thanksgiving is a day of mourning and protest for Indigenous nations on this continent, and for many non-Natives, it’s a faint story of gratitude covered with layers of interpretation and fraught historical context. It turns out that as a turkey farmer, I’m responsible for telling my own Thanksgiving story, through my birds.

The “traditional” Thanksgiving spread, including a bulging turkey, fat clouds of mashed potatoes, and glistening gobs of ruby-red canned cranberry sauce is a far cry from what any alleged first Thanksgiving meal resembled. Our modern Thanksgiving is also often a meal built on pure extraction of land, labor, and culture, a story we must actively redress through our choice of farming practices. 11-26-25

Sarah Dussault / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News via Getty Images

Cities and states are trying to ditch America’s most hated appliance. They’re running into challenges.

The push to ban gas-powered leaf blowers has gained an unlikely figurehead: Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress. “Leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the Earth,” she said in an interview in March. Her complaints have gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. “It’s a metaphor for what’s wrong with us as a species,” Blanchett said. “We blow shit from one side of our lawn to the other side, and then the wind is just going to blow it back!”

Her complaints about leaf blowers — equal parts entertaining and earnest — stretch back nearly 20 years, and now the mood has caught up with her. Today, more than 200 local governments in the U.S. have restricted gas-powered lawn equipment or provided incentives to switch to quieter, less-polluting electric tools. The first bans date back to the 1970s, but the trend picked up after the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when newly homebound workers discovered just how inescapable the whine of their neighbor’s leaf blower can be.

“With every year that passes, more and more communities across the country are taking action to address the shocking amount of pollution and noise from gas lawn equipment,” said Kirsten Schatz, clean air advocate at the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, called CoPIRG. 11-26-25

Lance King / Getty Images

The Trump administration’s proposed rollbacks open the door for more drilling, mining, and logging.

For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has saved thousands of animals and plants from threats like poaching, habitat loss, and pollution. It brought bald eagles back from the brink of extinction, reestablished grizzly bear populations on public lands, and safeguarded the redwood forests that play host to dozens of vulnerable animals. In total, it has prevented the extinction of 99 percent of the species it has protected.

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration is weakening or eliminating key provisions of the bedrock environmental law that protect vulnerable species from extractive activities like oil drilling.

This isn’t the first time Trump has gutted the Endangered Species Act, or ESA. Back in 2019, his administration changed the act to make it easier to remove a species from the list, and to allow economic factors to be considered when determining whether to list a new species. Many of those changes were reversed during Joe Biden’s presidency, but may now be overturned once again. The new rollbacks were announced by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 11-25-25

Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

There’s a way to reduce both the climate and water harms of data centers: build them in places with lots of wind and solar energy.

Data centers are notoriously thirsty. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found that, in 2023, the facilities consumed roughly 17 billion gallons of water for their operations in the U.S. alone. But that’s only a small part of the picture: A much, much larger share of data center water-intensity is indirect, a byproduct of the facilities’ enormous appetites for energy. That’s because most power plants themselves require huge amounts of water to operate. This off-site, indirect water consumption amounted to a whopping 211 billion gallons in the Berkeley lab’s 2023 tally — well over 10 times the direct on-site usage. As Silicon Valley continues to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence and demand for data centers grows, these water needs are only going to grow in tandem.

However, new research from Cornell University shows that there’s a way to mitigate both the climate and water footprints of these facilities: build them in places with lots of wind and solar energy. “Location really matters,” said Fengqi You, an energy systems engineering professor at Cornell and co-author of the new study. Where companies choose to locate their data centers could alter their combined environmental footprints by a factor of up to 100. 11-24-25

A bald eagle sits on a branch while a seagull harasses it in Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The Trump administration announced plans to roll back protections for plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act.

The Trump administration announced proposals Wednesday to roll back protections for plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock environmental law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, American alligator, peregrine falcon and numerous other species from extinction.

The proposed changes to the way the half-century-old law is enforced come as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce regulatory red tape and expand U.S. fossil fuel production, which often occurs in the habitat of birds, insects and others animals at risk of vanishing.

The Interior Department said the Biden administration overreached when enacting its own protections for endangered species.

“This administration is restoring the Endangered Species Act to its original intent, protecting species through clear, consistent and lawful standards that also respect the livelihoods of Americans who depend on our land and resources,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. “These revisions end years of legal confusion and regulatory overreach.”

The proposed rules “will ensure federal wildlife agencies get a truer picture of local environmental and economic conditions” when making decisions, said Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Arkansas), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. 11-21-25

Brandon Bell / Getty Images

Advocates say a recent settlement is a win in the fight to hold industrial ag giants accountable.

Shoppers have long sought ways to make more sustainable choices at the supermarket — and for good reason: Our food system is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The vast majority of emissions from agriculture come from raising cows on industrial farms in order to sell burgers, steak, and other beef products. Beef production results in two and a half times as many greenhouse gases as lamb, and almost nine times as many as chicken or fish; its carbon footprint relative to other sources of protein, like cheese, eggs, and tofu, is even higher.

If you want to have a lighter impact on the planet, you could try eating less beef. (Just try it!) Otherwise, a series of recent lawsuits intends make it easier for consumers to discern what’s sustainable and what’s greenwashing by challenging the world’s largest meat processors on their climate messaging.

Tyson, which produces 20 percent of beef, chicken, and pork in the United States, has agreed to drop claims that the company has a plan to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050 and to stop referring to beef products as “climate smart” unless verified by an independent expert.

Tyson was sued in 2024 by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a nonprofit dedicated to public health and environmental issues. The group alleged that Tyson’s claims were false and misleading to consumers. (Nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice represented EWG in the case.) Tyson denied the allegations and agreed to settle the suit. 11-21-25

Maps of aquifers in Texas are displayed at an informational hearing in Austin in September. Aaron E. Martinez / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

As fast-growing cities and suburbs scramble for new water sources, farmers in East Texas are turning to government regulation to keep their wells from running dry.

The farmers and ranchers who descended on City Hall in Jacksonville, Texas, had been told to “leave their pitchforks at the door.” While everyone ultimately arrived unarmed, the attendees of the June 19 board meeting of the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District were ready for a fight.

In the hallway outside the boardroom, wives tried to cool their husbands with handheld paper fans that flapped uselessly amid a sea of silver hair — stoic men with sweat-slicked brows beneath weathered cowboy hats, veterans’ insignia, and red MAGA ball caps. Near the chamber door, a uniformed officer stood sweating through his shirt, trying to enforce the fire marshal’s 150-person limit while the crowd swelled behind him. The sign-in table, barely visible through the crush, had already collected nearly 100 names — almost all were there to speak out against the water permits requested by two shadowy LLCs tied to hedge fund manager Kyle Bass and his investment group, Conservation Equity Management Partners.

The permit applications submitted by Bass’ Redtown Ranch Holdings LLC and Pine Bliss LLC collectively request permission to withdraw approximately 15 billion gallons of water annually from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer in East Texas, an amount residents fear will run their wells and farms dry. Without taking off their “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirts, the citizens of six East Texas counties where Trump took around 80 percent of the vote last November are now turning to their state government to protect them from billionaires. 11-19-25

Urban Gleaners volunteers harvest grapes at Thimbleberry Collaborative Farm in Boring, Oregon. (Photo credit: Cait Brigham)

Amid escalating food costs and cuts to food assistance, collecting surplus food offers an age-old solution.

It was too much of a good thing that brought a dozen volunteers to Wild Roots Farm in Troutdale, Oregon, on a blue-sky day in the middle of August. As the sun rose over the farm’s 1.5 acres, the volunteers began to harvest surplus basil, tomatoes, and zucchini.

Each crop had its own unique reason for being left in the field. More basil had flourished than could be sold; the tomatoes showed minor blossom-end rot from summer rain; and the zucchini was, by restaurant standards, oversize. For the farmer, it would have been more work than it was worth to harvest.

Not so for the gleaners.

Urban Gleaners, a Portland-based nonprofit, hosts weekly harvests at this farm. It then makes the surplus produce—plus excess food collected from supermarkets, restaurants, universities, corporate campuses, and event sites—accessible to community members through 47 distribution points, including 24 free-food markets throughout the city.

“We want our free-food markets to feel like a normal shopping experience at a grocery store or farmers’ market,” said Katy Hill, who began working with Urban Gleaners as a volunteer almost four years ago and now serves as its communications and development manager. “We want to serve these people with dignity and give them the power of choice.”

Nineteen years since their founding, Urban Gleaners now rescues about 1.2 million pounds of food per year and serves around 8,500 people per week—all with just one warehouse, 14 employees, and roughly 100 volunteers. 11-18-25

Grist / Getty Images / USDA

Cash-strapped farmers, gaps in the public safety net, and food inspection backlogs that could reshape who eats what in the years to come.

In a dramatic twist of political defections and contentious concessions, the longest-ever federal shutdown came to a close late last Wednesday as Congress finally managed to agree upon a deal to reopen the government. Government agencies are now beginning to resume operations, employees are returning to work, and federal payments are beginning to flow once again.

Experts say, though, that the shutdown has left behind fractures on the nation’s food system that are only beginning to appear. These cracks will only widen with time as they join with all of the other major food and farming policy changes enacted by the Trump administration — which altogether are affecting who eats what, where that food comes from, and which communities get left behind.

“When agencies like the USDA or FDA halt or scale back operations there are ripple effects through the supply chain because of the effect on crop payments, insurance, inspections, and nutrition programs,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist studying food insecurity and climate change at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “These, along with unpredictable policies, can erode public trust and market transparency, weaken these support systems, and increase vulnerabilities to shocks like disease outbreaks or extreme climate events.” 11-18-25

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In Florida, a new pilot program teaches doulas how to prepare pregnant people for hurricanes, flooding, and extreme heat — addressing a growing climate and maternal health crisis.

In the days leading up to Hurricane Irma’s landfall in September 2017, Esther Louis made preparations to flee Florida with her husband and four children. The Category 4 Hurricane was expected to hit the Florida Keys and make it’s way up the state, posing a risk to millions of residents. One of those residents was a client of Louis’ who was nine months pregnant and living in a home that the Miami-based doula feared was in too poor of condition to withstand the storm.

As a doula, Louis was trained to provide holistic care to her client, anticipating all the factors that may affect her health. She worried about how the stress of an impending hurricane and evacuation could impact her client’s pregnancy. So she offered to escort her client and her family toward Georgia, where Louis was headed and where her client had relatives.

The caravan of two families departed together, inching their way in evacuation traffic to the Georgia border. What would have been an eight hour drive took 24 hours. “It was stressful,” Louis said. Her client started to experience Braxton Hicks contractions which can be caused by stress. At times they would switch drivers so she could provide emotional support to her client, who was worried about all that could go wrong on the drive. “Sometimes people go to the worst possible outcome but I’m like, ‘We’re going to get there, OK? We’re going to work it out.’” 11-16-25

Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Metropolitan gardens and farms are extraordinarily powerful tools that can improve food security, lower temperatures, and create invaluable gathering spaces.

If you’ve spent any time on a roof, you know that it’s not especially pleasant up there — blazing in the summer, frigid and windy in the winter. Slap some solar panels up there, though, and the calculus changes: Shaded from gusts and excessive sunlight, crops can proliferate, a technique known as rooftop agrivoltaics. And because that hardware provides shade, evaporation is reduced, resulting in big water savings. Plus, all that greenery insulates the top floor, reducing energy costs.

Long held in opposition to one another, urban areas are embracing elements of the rural world as they try to produce more of their own food, in community gardens on the ground and agrivoltaics up above. In an increasingly chaotic climate, urban agriculture could improve food security, generate clean electricity, reduce local temperatures, provide refuges for pollinators, and improve mental and physical health for urbanites, among other benefits.

With relatively cheap investments in food production — especially if they’ve got empty lots sitting around — cities can solve a bunch of problems at once. Quezon City in the Philippines, for instance, has transformed unused land into more than 300 gardens and 10 farms, in the process training more than 4,000 urban farmers. Detroit is speckled with thousands of gardens and farms. In the Big Apple, the nonprofit Project Petals is turning vacant lots in under-resourced neighborhoods into oases. 11-14-25

Food Insecurity Predicted to Rise as New SNAP Work Requirements Take Effect

State agencies and aid recipients brace for delays in food assistance along with policy changes that are expected to kick millions off the program.

New work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) went into effect this weekend, and are expected to make millions ineligible for benefits during an already uncertain time.

Due to the government shutdown, November benefits have been delayed for many SNAP recipients. At the same time, states are implementing new work requirements included in the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), which will likely kick many off the program.

Following orders from two federal judges, the Trump administration said Monday it would use approximately $5 billion in contingency funds to partially fund SNAP benefits in November. It remains unclear how and when these benefits will be distributed. The full amount needed to cover benefits is estimated to be between $8 and $9 billion.

It could also take days for states to send benefits to recipients, anti-hunger advocates told Civil Eats. The amounts are also not yet determined, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said in a statement shortly after the administration’s announcement. 11-03-25

AP Photo / Annika Hammerschlag

Efforts to expand deep-sea mining are alarming scientists and Indigenous leaders, who worry mining risks fisheries and food security.

The Trump administration is expanding its deep-sea mining ambitions to the region around the Marianas Trench in the western Pacific, and is nearly doubling the proposed seabed mining area around American Samoa from 18 million acres to 33 million acres, an area bigger than Peru.

The move disregards unified opposition from Indigenous leaders in American Samoa, who imposed a moratorium on seabed mining last year. Governor Pulaali’i Nikolao Pula has asked the Trump administration not to proceed without the territory’s consent, but the federal government plans to move forward with an environmental review. “Our fisheries are essential for food security, recreation and the perpetuation of our Samoan culture,” said Nathan Ilaoa, director of American Samoa’s Department of Marine & Wildlife Resources, last week in the Samoa News. Tuna makes up 99.5 percent of the territory’s exports. 11-12-25

Chen Mengtong / China News Service / VCG via Getty Images

Though the current political showdown is nearing an end, new research shows that government shutdowns leave polluting legacies.

It’s day 42 of the U.S. government shutdown, but an end is finally in sight. On Sunday night, the Senate voted to move forward with funding for the federal government through January 30. That vote, in which eight Democrats joined the vast majority of Senate Republicans, is expected to be followed by approval from the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and President Donald Trump. With many Democratic officials condemning the capitulation of their Senate colleagues, a revival of the shutdown is a distinct possibility after funding expires again next year.

One of the many adverse effects of the current shutdown is that, for weeks now, the nation’s top environmental cop has been off duty. While it’s too early to know the exact consequences of the dysfunction, analogous situations in the recent past indicate that polluters often increase their emissions during periods of relaxed enforcement. With such periods becoming regular features of the U.S. political process, the cumulative environmental fallout could be significant. 11-11-25

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Talking about climate change may be politically radioactive, but adjusting to its effects is no longer optional

Last May, as blistering-hot weather broke records across South Florida and smoke from distant wildfires in Mexico turned the sky hazy, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, signed legislation erasing most mentions of “climate change” from state law. “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots,” he wrote on X.

Back then, it felt like just another Florida story, a fresh example of the culture war overriding reality. In hindsight, it was a preview of where the country was headed.

President Donald Trump’s second term has plunged the United States into “don’t say climate” politics. Even as horrific floods and fires unfolded around the country this year, Republicans in Congress reversed the country’s only climate plan. The administration has deleted “climate change” from hundreds of government webpages and dismissed facts about the warming planet as “brainless fear-mongering rhetoric.” Rather than pushing back, Democrats have been talking about climate change less since the 2024 election, emphasizing “cheap energy” instead.

Even if talking about climate change is politically radioactive, adapting to its effects is no longer optional. Florida tops some lists for the state most at risk from climate change, facing a combination of heat, drought, fires, flooding, and hurricanes. Miami Beach and towns in the Florida Keys have been raising their roads as the sea begins to rise. DeSantis has committed more than $1 billion to Resilient Florida, a grant program that helps local governments address some of these problems. 11-10-25

Sebnem Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images

When humans manage to cut enough emissions and eventually reduce global temperatures, new research shows the Southern Ocean could kick warming back into gear.

Consider your morning cup of coffee. Your kettle’s heating element — or flame on a stove — warms up water that you infuse with beans and pour into a mug. Maybe you get busy and the cup of joe sits there for a while, releasing its heat into the atmosphere of the room, until it reaches equilibrium with the indoor temperature. In other words: It got cold.

Now consider that the expansive Southern Ocean, which wraps around Antarctica, could one day do much the same thing. Since the Industrial Revolution kicked off, humans have dialed up the kettle to its max, adding extraordinary amounts of heat into the atmosphere, more than 90 percent of which has been absorbed by the sea. (It’s also taken up a quarter of our CO2 emissions.) Under climate change, the Southern Ocean has been storing warmth which, like your morning jolt, can’t stay there forever, and will someday return to the atmosphere.

New modeling suggests that this “burp” of heat — the scientists called it that, by the way — could be abrupt. In a scenario where humanity eventually reduces its greenhouse gas emissions and then goes “net negative,” finding ways to remove those planet-warming pollutants from the atmosphere, global temperatures fall. But suddenly the Southern Ocean belches its accumulated heat, leading to a rate of planetary warming similar to what humanity is causing right now. And the thermal burping would continue for at least a century. 11-07-25

Natalia Lebedinskaia / Getty Images

Tuesday’s election results suggest energy costs may be moving the political needle in ways that other issues, like climate change, have not.

It has been a big week in energy news, with several resounding wins for efficiency advocates.

On Tuesday, voters in Georgia flipped two seats on the state’s Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities and sets rates. They installed a pair of Democrats on this little known, yet powerful, body for the first time in nearly two decades. Further north, Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey handily won after making rising energy prices a centerpiece of their campaigns. The victories came just a few days after The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly reconsidering plans to eliminate the popular Energy Star program.

Taken together, these developments suggest that energy costs could be moving the political needle in ways that other issues, like climate change, have not. And, with next year’s midterms on the horizon, it’s an issue both political parties will increasingly have to grapple with.

“When the costs of climate change become evident, there’s a political necessity to find policy that works,” said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman who represented South Carolina and has become a leading conservative voice on climate change. “When people see them on their utility bills and they see them in their property tax bills, that’s when they start asking, is there any way to head this off?” 11-06-25

A set of glass doors that say Climate Action Lab
Many classes that meet UCSD’s climate literacy requirement are taught in the university’s Climate Action Lab. Olivia Sanchez/The Hechinger Report

University of California, San Diego, requires all students to learn about climate change, while other schools have added environmental sustainability requirements.

On a Thursday this fall, hundreds of students at the University of California, San Diego, were heading to classes that, at least on paper, seemed to have very little to do with their majors.

Hannah Jenny, an economics and math major, was on their way to a class on sustainable development. Angelica Pulido, a history major who aspires to work in the museum world, was getting ready for a course on gender and climate justice. Later that evening, others would show up for a lecture on economics of the environment, where they would learn how to calculate the answer to questions such as: “How many cents extra per gallon of gas are people willing to pay to protect seals from oil spills?”

Although most of these students don’t aspire to careers in climate science or advocacy, the university is betting that it’s just as important for them to understand the science and societal implications of climate change as it is for them to understand literature and history, even if they’re not planning to become writers or historians. UCSD is perhaps the first major public university in the country to require all undergraduate students to take a class on climate change to earn their degree. 11-05-25

Photo Credit: Canva Teams

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) offering up to $100 million to refurbish and modernize existing coal-fired power plants. The funding follows the Department’s September announcement of a $625 million initiative aimed at revitalizing the coal industry by improving efficiency, reliability, and plant lifetimes.

“For years, the Biden and Obama administrations relentlessly targeted America’s coal industry and workers, resulting in the closure of reliable power plants and higher electricity costs,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “President Trump has ended the war on American coal and is restoring common-sense energy policies that put Americans first.”

According to DOE, the funding supports projects that:

Develop advanced wastewater management systems capable of cost-effective water recovery and byproducts;
Enable fuel switching between coal and natural gas without compromising performance; and
Deploy advanced co-firing systems designed to maximize gas-coal flexibility while minimizing efficiency penalties.

The initiative is part of President Trump’s executive orders on “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry” and “Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid.” 11-03-25

Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities / AP

As Typhoon Halong swept through western Alaska, it laid bare how centuries-old policies made Native villages particularly vulnerable to climate change.

A week after Typhoon Halong passed through Japan in early October, its remnants crossed the Pacific and struck western Alaska. Nearly 50 Alaska Native communities across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta near the Bering Sea were met with towering wind speeds, record storm surge, and widespread flooding. At least one person died, and 1,500 adults and children, who were mostly Yup’ik, were displaced from the villages. Initial estimates have reported that the storm decimated 90 percent of homes in the coastal village of Kipnuk and 35 percent in Kwigillingok, which has also experienced toxic chemicals spilling into its freshwater supply.

“It’s going to take years to recover from the disaster,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski at the Alaska Federation of Natives’ annual convention last month. “After the floodwaters recede, and after the damage to the homes and the fish camp is calculated, there’s so much work that remains, and so much healing that is needed.”

State and federal resources are being mobilized to respond to the disaster. On October 22, alongside Governor Mike Dunleavy’s state emergency declaration and release of disaster relief funds, President Donald Trump authorized a federal emergency declaration and $25 million in funds for recovery and rebuilding efforts. State agencies such as the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management have also begun moving evacuees into long-term housing. 11-03-25

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