Recent News
2 Obscure Clean Energy Metals Are Caught in the Crosshairs of the US-China Trade War
After a Chinese export ban, can America get gallium and germanium from Canada — or will tariffs get in the way?
In the summer of 2023, Vasileios Tsianos, the vice president of corporate development at Neo Performance Materials, started getting calls from government officials on both sides of the Atlantic. Within the world of industrial material manufacturing, Neo is best known for making rare earth magnets, used in everything from home appliances to electric vehicles. But these calls weren’t about rare earths. They were about something considerably rarer: the metal gallium.
Neo recycles a few dozen tons of high-purity gallium a year, mostly from semiconductor chip manufacturing scrap, at a factory in Ontario, Canada. In North America, it’s the only industrial-scale producer of the metal, which is used in not only chips, but also clean energy technologies and military equipment.
China, the world’s leading producer by far, had just announced new export controls on gallium, apparently in response to reports that the United States government was considering restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China.
All of a sudden, people wanted to talk to Neo. “We’ve spoken to almost everyone” interested in producing gallium outside of China, Tsianos told Grist. 02-07-25
“We Feel Terrorized”: What EPA Employees Say About the Decision to Stay or Go Under Trump

Hundreds of career employees at the Environmental Protection Agency have quit since the reelection of President Donald Trump, but some staff members say his plans to reverse environmental protections have only strengthened their resolve to stay. Credit: Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images
More than 300 career employees at the Environmental Protection Agency have left. Those who remain face a painful decision: resign or work for an administration that plans to radically reshape the EPA while reversing environmental protections.
In the face of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency and drive out its workers, more than 300 career employees have left their jobs since the election, according to a ProPublica analysis of personnel data.
The numbers account for a relatively small share of the overall workforce at the EPA, but those who have departed include specialist civil servants crucial to its mission: toxicologists, lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxic waste specialists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts.
Gary Jonesi made the decision to leave on election night. An attorney who helped enforce environmental laws for almost 40 years, he had loved working for the agency under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But he feared what the incoming administration might do.
In the past weeks, as the Trump administration has signaled radical changes at the agency and attempted to entice workers into leaving, he feels he made the right choice. “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” said Jonesi, who worked on litigation related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as cases that involved both water and air pollution. “I feel for my old colleagues. And I feel for the American public, who are being put in danger.” 02-06-25
The ‘recycled’ Plastic in Your Shoes, Shirts, and Bags? It’s Still Destined For the Landfill.
Here’s why that matters.
In Seattle, as in most cities around the country, there are a number of items that you aren’t supposed to put in the curbside recycling bin: bubble wrap, for instance, or multilayer plastic packaging like potato chip bags and candy wrappers. This kind of trash is often too flimsy or contaminated to be accepted through the normal recycling stream.
Seattle-area residents who don’t want to send that stuff to the landfill have another option: Ridwell, a subscription-based waste collection service. Ridwell picks up people’s so-called “hard-to-recycle” refuse curbside, hauls it to warehouses, and sorts it into bales. Then — the main selling point — Ridwell says it will send those bales to reprocessing plants, where they can be converted into new products.
On a recent tour of Ridwell’s Seattle warehouse, representatives from the company showed Grist a number of those converted products. One was a black cube of landscaping material, made from discarded multilayer plastic packaging and meant to help water drain more slowly during a rainstorm. Another was a gravel substitute used for hydroponic plants and gardening. A third was a pot for small shrubs.
The products were nifty — unquestionably more so than the junk they were made from, which otherwise might have festered in a landfill. “Reduce where you can, Ridwell where you can’t,” the company’s CEO, Ryan Metzger, told Grist. 02-05-25
Trump’s Agenda Won’t Let His Energy Secretary Achieve ‘energy abundance’
Chris Wright is no hater of renewables, nuclear power, or transmission. But the Trump administration’s energy policy is a contradictory mess.
Chris Wright, a Colorado fracking executive, was confirmed on Monday by the U.S. Senate with a vote of 59 to 38 to become the next secretary of energy.
Wright’s nomination hearing, held last month before the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was a relatively amiable affair. Though there were interruptions by Sunrise Movement protesters and a heated exchange with California Senator Alex Padilla over Wright’s past comments dismissing the link between climate change and wildfires, Wright was not subjected to the contentious questioning that some of President Donald Trump’s other Cabinet nominees have faced. He was introduced by Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, as a personal friend, and four of the committee’s Democrats voted for his confirmation.
While he acknowledged that “climate change is a real and global phenomenon,” Wright also insisted that “there isn’t dirty energy and clean energy; all energy is different and they all have different trade-offs.” He pledged “to unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore our energy dominance,” to “lead the world in innovation and technology breakthroughs,” and to “build things in America again and remove barriers to progress.” Pressed on the policy particulars by the committee members, he expressed support for expanding nuclear power, renewables, and liquefied natural gas, and said he believed the nation’s transmission system needs to be expanded and that this should be prioritized in future permitting reforms. 02-04-25
‘Plastics are awesome’: Inside the Energy Department’s Partnership With the Plastics Industry

An expansive landfill with plastic debris stretches far into the distance. Plastic waste scavenged from river channels and dump sites in Kenya. Tony Karuma / AFP via Getty Images
Critics argue that the agency’s work with a lobbying group is a conflict of interest.
Nearly five years ago, the United States Department of Energy, or DOE, began an unusual partnership with the country’s largest lobbying group for the plastics industry.
In a memorandum of understanding with a plastics industry trade association called the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, the Energy Department pledged to “collaborate on the development of innovative plastics recycling technologies and strengthen the domestic plastics supply chain.”
According to a press release, the collaboration would involve research into “novel collection technologies” to keep plastics out of waterways, as well as new types of plastic that are “inherently designed for recycling.” But perhaps the most significant part of the agreement referred to research on so-called “advanced recycling” — a suite of technologies also known as “chemical recycling” that are favored by the ACC and other industry groups, and intensely scrutinized by environmental advocates.
Chemical recycling refers to processes that use high heat, pressure, or solvents to break plastics into their constituent building blocks, so they can — in theory — be turned into new plastic products again and again. This differs from conventional “mechanical” recycling, in which plastics are shredded or melted before being turned into new products. Under fire for the failure of conventional recycling to mitigate the plastic pollution crisis, the petrochemical industry has turned to chemical recycling, heavily promoting it in public communications and to state legislators despite difficulties getting it to work at a large scale. Environmental groups and many scientists say the technology will never work, and that it’s a diversion from calls to reduce the production of plastic, which is made out of oil and gas. 02-03-25
Climate Change Made Deadly Los Angeles Wildfires 35% More Likely: New Attribution Study

A firefighting helicopter drops water as the Sunset Fire burns in the Hollywood Hills with evacuations ordered on January 8, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The fires, likely to be the costliest in world history, were made about 35% more likely due to the 1.3°C of global warming that has occurred since preindustrial times.
Human-caused climate change worsened the ferocious January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires by reducing rainfall, drying out vegetation, and increasing the overlap between fire season and the winter Santa Ana wind season, according to a rapid analysis released today by World Weather Attribution, conducted by 32 researchers, including leading wildfire scientists from the U.S. and Europe. The fires burned over 50,000 acres, killed at least 28 people, and destroyed over 16,000 structures, according to Cal Fire. The study’s main findings:
The hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the fires were about 35% more likely and 6% more intense due to 1.3 degrees Celsius of global warming that has occurred since preindustrial times, caused primarily by the burning of oil, gas and coal.
These fire-prone conditions can be expected to recur about once every 17 years in the current climate, but will become a further 35% more likely if warming reaches 2.6 degrees Celsius by 2100, which is predicted to happen under three of the five main IPCC emission scenarios (from moderate to high-end).
Low rainfall from October through December in the current climate is about 2.4 times more likely compared to the preindustrial climate, but this change cannot be confidently attributed to human-caused climate change. 01-28-25
‘Paranoia and distrust’: How Trump’s Mass Firing of Government Watchdogs Will Affect Climate Policy

A flag with the United States Environmental Protection Agency logo flies at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Robert Alexander / Getty Images
Experts fear the president will replace the fired inspectors general with loyalists who will turn a blind eye to corruption.
In 2019, President Donald Trump appointed a lawyer named Mark Lee Greenblatt to root out fraud, abuse, and corruption in the Department of the Interior. Greenblatt quickly got to work, directing his 270 staff members to conduct audits, inspections, and investigations across the agency of 70,000 federal employees, which oversees 30 percent of the United States’ natural resources, 20 percent of its public lands, and its relationships with 573 Native American tribes and villages.
He found that a gas marketing outfit conspired to defraud oil and gas companies on leased federal land, a Bureau of Land Management employee viewed pornography on a government computer, a tribal police officer stole $40,000 earmarked for a tribal youth diversion program, and three offshore oil rig workers and three companies acted negligently in a 2012 incident that resulted in a deadly explosion. And that was just in the span of two months in 2019.
Until last week, Greenblatt was one of 73 inspectors general working within the United States government — independent watchdogs that keep tabs on federal agencies, which all in all collect more than $4 trillion in revenue every year and spend more than $6 trillion. On Friday night, he and 17 of his colleagues were summarily dismissed, in contravention of U.S. law. “President Trump fired me last night,” Greenblatt wrote in a post on LinkedIn over the weekend. “It’s all just so surreal.” 01-29-25
Trump Says He’s Sending Water to LA. It’s Actually Going to Megafarms.
The president’s executive orders on California water will help irrigate Central Valley farms. They won’t do anything to fight wildfires.
While President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of far-reaching decrees during his first week in office, one relatively niche issue has received a disproportionate share of the president’s ire and attention: California water policy. That might make sense if the remedies he’s pursuing could help stem deadly fires like those that have killed at least 29 people in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks. Indeed, the president has claimed that “firefighters were unable to fight the blaze due to dry hydrants, empty reservoirs, and inadequate water infrastructure.”
But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones.
On his first day as president, Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state. Then, on Sunday he issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law. The order also suggested Trump could withhold federal wildfire aid if the state failed to comply to his satisfaction. 01-28-25
A UK Energy Company Received $762M in ‘green loans’ Despite Years of Pollution Violations in the South
Drax’s facilities in Mississippi have been fined millions of dollars for violating state pollution loans.
Drax, the British owner of wood pellet plants in Mississippi and Louisiana that has paid millions in fines and settlements for violating state pollution laws in recent years, has received at least $762 million in “green” loans during that same period, an investigation by The Examination, The Toronto Star, and Mississippi Today found.
The energy company ships out wood pellets made in North America for other countries to use as a power source to meet their carbon reduction goals. But state regulators in both Mississippi and Louisiana have come down on Drax over its local air pollution. Between penalties and settlements over the last five years, Drax has had to pay out over a combined $5 million to the two states.
Since 2018, banks have issued $1.5 trillion in low-interest “sustainability-linked loans,” or SLLs, to large corporations to motivate climate-friendly practices. Wood biomass companies, such as Drax, alone received over $76 billion in SLLs between 2018 and 2023, the investigation found using data from the London Stock Exchange and the Environmental Paper Network.
Drax received two such loans: one in 2020 that became the equivalent of $553 million — issued by a group of banks including Bank of America, Barclays, and JP Morgan — and another in 2021 equal to $208 million. 01-25-25a
The Fossil Fuel Industry Spent $219 Million to Elect the New U.S. Government
Most of that money went to Republicans.
The 119th Congress comes with a price tag.
The oil and gas industry gave about $24 million in campaign contributions to the members of the U.S. House and Senate expected to be sworn in January 3, 2025, according to a Yale Climate Connections review of campaign donations. The industry gave an additional $2 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign, bringing the total spending on the winning candidates to over $26 million, 88% of which went to Republicans.
The fossil fuel industry exerts substantial financial power within the U.S. political system, and these contributions are only the tip of the (melting) iceberg.
The 2024 presidential election saw over $4 billion in various contributions to the candidates’ campaign committees and outside groups supporting them. Most of the money in politics isn’t given to specific candidates. Rather, it goes to political action committees, known as PACs, and political party committees. This is called outside spending. 01-03-25
Trump Leaving the Paris Agreement is ‘mostly symbolic.’ What Does it Actually Mean?

German protesters respond to Trump’s first announcement, in 2017, that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Sean Gallup / Getty Images
The biggest impact on global emissions will be from the new president’s deregulatory agenda.
The United States’ second exit from the Paris Agreement wasn’t unexpected. Even before he was reelected, now-president Donald Trump had promised for months that he would pull the country out of the United Nations pact to limit global warming: the Paris climate “rip-off,” as he called it.
Still, the sound of Trump’s black Sharpie scratching across the signature line of an executive order — “Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements” — seemed to reverberate around the world this week, as climate experts, diplomats, and concerned laypeople watched the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases turn its back on the accord.
The 2015 Paris Agreement is a treaty signed by 196 countries that agrees to limit global warming to “well below 2 degrees Celsius” (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and, ideally, cap temperature increases at 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). Almost every year since then, countries have gathered annually to hash out the accord’s particularities and — in theory, at least — reach further consensus on how to address climate change. This annual conference, known as the “conference of the parties” or COP, is the main venue at which the United States’ withdrawal will be felt. 01-23-25
Trump Unravels US Climate Agenda as He Promises to ‘drill, baby, drill’
From declaring a “national energy emergency” to exiting the Paris Agreement, here is everything climate-related Trump did on Day 1.
Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former president Joe Biden.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and appointed oil industry executives and climate skeptics to his Cabinet. His first-day actions represent a complete remaking of the country’s climate agenda, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to energy and the environment over the next four years.
‘Drill, baby, drill‘Among the most significant actions Trump took Monday was declaring “an energy emergency,” which he framed as part of his effort to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living. He pledged to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure,” an unprecedented move that could grant the White House greater authority to expand fossil fuel production. He also signed an executive order “to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf,” and another expediting permitting and leasing in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “We will have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We are going to drill, baby, drill.” 01-20-25
The 8 Talking Points Fossil Fuel Companies Use to Obstruct Climate Action
New research highlights companies’ “aligned and coordinated” use of Twitter to deny climate change and delay solutions.
To the extent that X ever was the “public square” of the internet, it is clearly no longer such a place. The platform — known as Twitter until it was rechristened in 2023 by Elon Musk — has become an echo chamber for extremist conspiracy theories and hate speech — or, depending on what you’re looking for, a porn site.
Even before this transformation, however, years of research suggested that Twitter and other social media apps were vectors of misinformation and propaganda, including from fossil fuel interests. In 2015, oil and gas companies were active on Twitter during international negotiations over the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, promoting the incorrect notion that Americans did not support taking action on climate change. More recent research has shown similar industry messaging in the lead-up to climate negotiations in Glasgow and Dubai, and one multi-year analysis of more than 22,000 tweets from Exxon Mobil-funded think tanks and industry groups found that they have frequently disseminated the ideas that climate change is not threatening, and that former president Joe Biden’s energy plans hurt economic growth.
Other branches of the fossil fuel industry — including plastic producers and agrichemical companies, both of which depend on oil and gas and their byproducts — have also taken to social media to discourage actions to reduce the use of their products. In a new paper published last week in the journal PLOS Climate, researchers suggest that climate communications from these three sectors — oil and gas, plastics, and agrichemicals — are “aligned and coordinated … to reinforce existing infrastructure and inhibit change.” 01-21-25
Science Is Revealing the Social Disparities at the Root of Urban Ecosystems

Front, from right: NYU researchers Rafael Baez, Emerald Lin, and Valentina Alaasam collect data with birders in Prospect Park. Photo: Sydney Walsh/Audubon
When it comes to biodiversity, research shows not all neighborhoods are created equal. They’re defined by injustices past and present.
On a cloudy September morning in Prospect Park, a massive swath of greenery amid Brooklyn’s concrete sprawl, the fall migrants are flying fast and furious. A group of birders spin excitedly in a clearing, calling out as new species appear. “What a hotspot,” says Valentina Alaasam as she scribbles down each name in rapid succession: American Redstart, Scarlet Tanager, Black-and-white Warbler.
Alaasam will add the morning’s counts to a biodiversity database that she and her colleagues at New York University have been compiling for more than a year. The goal: to figure out whether parks in richer areas are also richer in wildlife. “I’ve always been really interested in this concept of luxury effects, where neighborhoods that are wealthier tend to get more investment from the city, and more trees, and more green spaces,” Alaasam says. To test how that may play out in New York, the team has been counting birds, bugs, frogs, and more across 11 city parks, including relatively well-maintained oases like Prospect Park and others that receive less upkeep.
The project will add to a growing body of research that’s revealing how economic and racial inequities shape urban ecosystems. In many cities, money has proven to be a major ecological boon: Wealthier neighborhoods host more of the street trees and park spaces that attract wildlife, while poorer areas have more uninterrupted concrete, leaving residents less likely to spot a flitting vireo or loping coyote. Yet such disparities didn’t pop up overnight, and in recent years, scientists have been peeling back the deeper layers that create these patchworks. 01-20-25
Joe Biden Was America’s First Climate President. Did it Matter?
The outgoing Democrat’s climate agenda was a surprising success — and a cautionary tale.
When Joe Biden first became president, some found it hard to believe that he cared very much about climate change.
With a global pandemic raging, the former vice president and longtime senator pitched his 2020 campaign as a return to normalcy and a referendum on the erratic leadership of Donald Trump. His campaign pledges to ban drilling on federal lands and spend trillions of dollars to decarbonize the economy — though they amounted to among the most ambitious climate agenda ever put forward by a major-party candidate — were widely seen as consolation prizes to skeptical progressives and climate hawks, like those who had backed Senator Bernie Sanders or former Washington Governor Jay Inslee in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
It’s clear now that these skeptics underestimated the outgoing president. Biden’s climate agenda, broader and more ambitious than that of any U.S. president before him, is poised to stand as the most consequential feat of his presidency, especially given his self-evident failure to “heal the soul of the nation” by ushering it into a post-Trump era. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, a misleadingly titled law that amounts to an unprecedented subsidy for renewable energy and climate-friendly technologies like electric vehicles. The measure triggered a wave of investment that has begun to reshape the nation’s economy and finally put the U.S. within reach of its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 01-17-25
How Four Years of Biden Reshaped Food and Farming

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to guests gathered at the O’Connor Grain Farm on May 11, 2022 in Kankakee, Illinois. Biden visited the farm along with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to discuss the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on food supply and prices. (Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
From day one, the administration prioritized climate, “nutrition security,” infrastructure investments, and reducing food system consolidation. Here’s what the president and his team actually did.
During his first presidential term, Donald Trump attempted to cut funding to hunger programs, implemented agricultural tariffs, tax cuts, and record-setting payments to commodity farmers, and rolled back regulations impacting environmental pollution, labor standards, food safety, and nutrition.
Despite no big changes to agricultural policy as a result of a farm bill still stalled in Congress, President Joe Biden’s governing of the food system looked very different.
Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s priorities have centered on spending billions of dollars on food and farm infrastructure, paying farmers to implement climate-smart practices, finalizing new regulations related to the environment, labor, food safety, and nutrition, and distributing more dollars to food insecure families.
On December 29, 2024, during the final monthly meeting to track the progress of efforts launched after the 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack made the case that those efforts had paid off.
“Folks from across the country have pulled together towards our common goal of ending hunger, improving nutrition, and supporting the farmers, ranchers, farm workers, and food workers who grow and produce our food,” he said. “And through that work, we have collectively made progress in transforming the food system from farm to fork.” 01-15-25
The American Climate Corps is Over. What Even Was It?

Two AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps members participate in field training in California last summer.
AmeriCorps
Biden’s green jobs program was never what it seemed. Now it’s shutting down before Trump takes office.
Giorgio Zampaglione loved his two-hour commute from the town of Mount Shasta into the surrounding northern California forests last summer. The way the light filtered through the trees on the morning drive was unbeatable, he said. He ate lunch with his crew, members of the new Forest Corps program, deep in the woods, usually far from cell service. They thinned thickets of trees and cleared brush, helping prevent the spread of fires by removing manzanita — a very flammable, shoulder-high shrub — near campsites and roads.
“The Forest Service people have been super, super happy to have us,” Zampaglione said. “They’re always saying, ‘Without you guys, this would have taken months.’”
Zampaglione, now 27 years old, had previously worked analyzing environmental data and mapping, but he was looking to do something more hands-on. Then he saw an ad on YouTube for the Forest Corps and applied through the AmeriCorps site. He didn’t realize until his first week on the job last summer that he was part of the first class of the American Climate Corps, an initiative started by President Joe Biden to get young people working in jobs that reduce carbon dioxide emissions and protect communities from weather disasters. 12-15-25
Altadena Has Avoided California’s Fire Insurance Hell. That Won’t Last.
As they rebuild, residents of the middle-class enclave could face steep price hikes.
Randy and Miki Quinton held hands as they walked uphill into what remains of their neighborhood in Altadena, the unincorporated Los Angeles suburb where they had lived for more than 20 years. After they entered the barricaded neighborhood through an open alleyway with two of their friends on Friday, the husband and wife confronted a scene of utter devastation: The Eaton Fire had incinerated hundreds of homes and cars in the middle-class neighborhood, leaving behind only ash-soaked chimneys and flaming gas lines. The Quintons’ own house had been vaporized, along with all their belongings.
“Twenty-four, forty-eight hours, and it’s all gone,” Randy Quinton told Grist.
The Quintons and thousands of other families now confront a living nightmare as they begin to recover from the most devastating wildfire outbreak in modern U.S. history. The Palisades Fire, which overwhelmed coastal neighborhoods about 30 miles away, and the Eaton Fire have together killed at least 24 people and destroyed well over 10,000 structures.
How the victims rebuild their lives will now depend largely on California’s beleaguered home insurance market. Unlike many fire victims in other parts of the L.A. area, the Quintons and many of their neighbors had been able to maintain their insurance policies in the leadup to the fire, even as companies dropped thousands of other fire-prone customers across California and in other states across the country. 01-14-25
Climate Change Threatens the Mental Well-being of Youths. Here’s How to Help Them Cope.

Abby Rafeek, a 14-year-old high school student from Gardena, California, says decision-makers aren’t doing enough to address climate change. Jenna Schoenefeld for KFF Health News
A 2022 poll of 1,500 U.S. teenagers found that 89 percent of them regularly think about the environment, “with the majority feeling more worried than hopeful.”
We’ve all read the stories and seen the images: The life-threatening heat waves. The wildfires of unprecedented ferocity. The record-breaking storms washing away entire neighborhoods. The melting glaciers, the rising sea levels, the coastal flooding.
As California wildfires stretch into the colder months and hurricane survivors sort through the ruins left by floodwaters, let’s talk about an underreported victim of climate change: the emotional well-being of young people.
A nascent but growing body of research shows that a large proportion of adolescents and young adults, in the United States and abroad, feel anxious and worried about the impact of an unstable climate in their lives today and in the future.
Abby Rafeek, 14, is disquieted by the ravages of climate change, both near her home and far away. “It’s definitely affecting my life, because it’s causing stress thinking about the future and how, if we’re not addressing the problem now as a society, our planet is going to get worse,” says Abby, a high school student who lives in Gardena, California, a city of 58,000 about 15 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
She says wildfires are a particular worry for her. “That’s closer to where I live, so it’s a bigger problem for me personally, and it also causes a lot of damage to the surrounding areas,” she says. “And also, the air gets messed up.” 01-12-25
The Climate Benefits of NYC’s Hard-won Congestion Pricing Plan
Driving into lower Manhattan is now more expensive, but the toll promises cleaner air, safer streets, and improved subways.
After months — and, for some, years — of anticipation, congestion pricing is live in New York City.
The controversial policy, which essentially makes it more expensive to drive into the busiest part of Manhattan, has been floated as a way to reduce traffic and raise money for the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s subways and buses, since the 1970s. But it wasn’t until 2017 that it seemed like it might finally catch on.
Still, getting it implemented has been an uphill battle. Last summer, New York Governor Kathy Hochul abruptly paused a carefully crafted plan that would have implemented $15 tolls on drivers heading into Manhattan below 60th Street, a mere 25 days before the plan would have gone into effect. Months later, in November, she said she would unpause the plan with lower tolls: $9 for passenger vehicles during peak hours and $2.25 during off-peak. After all the hubbub, New York City made history just after midnight on Sunday, January 5, when the cameras used to enforce the tolls turned on.
With this move, New York City becomes the first U.S. city to experiment with congestion pricing tolls, and joins a small cohort of other major cities — London, Stockholm, and Singapore — trying to disincentivize driving in order to unlock safer streets and a host of other environmental benefits. 01-10-25
The Conditions That Led to the ‘Unprecedented’ Los Angeles County Fires
Flames from the devastating Palisades Fire—the largest of four fires currently impacting Los Angeles County—have engulfed nearly 16,000 acres as of Wednesday afternoon since it was first reported by Cal Fire on Tuesday. About 1,000 structures have been destroyed, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone confirmed during Wednesday’s press briefing.
The wildfires, which spread due to the lack of precipitation, dry fuel, and strong winds measuring up to 99 miles per hour, have taken at least two lives so far, officials confirmed Wednesday. A “high number of significant injuries” have also been reported, though officials could not share a more exact number.
“This is a tragic time in our history,” said Los Angeles County Police Department Sheriff Jim McDonnell during the press briefing Wednesday. “These are…unprecedented conditions, but also unpredictable as the fire continues to spread and pop up in different locations, none of us know where the next one is going to be.”
The devastating nature of the fires is in part due to climate change, experts say, which has exacerbated the size, intensity, and damage caused by the wildfires in recent years. The southwestern U.S. is undergoing the driest 22-year period in the last 1,200 years.
As temperatures have risen, so has the aridity, or dryness of the vegetation, which proved disastrous when coupled with the gusty Santa Ana winds. “The hot and dry Santa Ana winds that often affect the southern California region and fuel large wildfires such as the ongoing one, only make things worse,” said Imperial College London Professor Apostolos Voulgarakis in a statement. “Research has shown that the occurrence of Santa Ana winds in the autumn are also likely to get worse with climate change, leading to even drier vegetation, fast fire spread and more intense late-season wildfires.” 01-08-25
California and Environmental Groups Sued Exxon Over Plastics. Now Exxon is Striking Back.
In a retaliatory lawsuit, Exxon says claims against it are motivated by “sordid for-profit incentives and outright greed.”
On Monday, Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of environmental groups over their criticism of the company’s plastics recycling initiatives.
In the complaint filed in federal court in Beaumont, Texas, the oil giant accuses Bonta and the advocacy groups of mounting a “smear campaign” motivated by “foreign influence, personal ambition, and a murky source of financing rife with conflicting business interests.”
“This is a suit … about the corrupting influence of foreign money in the American legal system,” Exxon writes in the suit’s introduction, “and the sordid for-profit incentives and outright greed that tries to hide behind so-called public impact litigation.”
Exxon’s new lawsuit is a response to two legal complaints brought last September by Bonta and four environmental groups — Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, the Sierra Club, and Surfrider Foundation — in which the plaintiffs alleged that Exxon Mobil had engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis.” 01-07-25
House Republicans Pledge Drilling and Make It Easier to Shed Federal Land

Representative Mike Johnson, on the dais with raised hand, was sworn in as speaker on Friday.Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times
The newly elected Speaker said the party would make it a priority to “restore America’s energy dominance.”
Moments after his election as House speaker on Friday, Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, wasted no time in highlighting energy as one of his top priorities. He said the Republican Congress would expand oil and gas drilling, end federal support for electric vehicles and promote the export of American gas.
“We have to stop the attacks on liquefied natural gas, pass legislation to eliminate the Green New Deal,” he said in a floor speech after accepting the gavel. “We’re going to expedite new drilling permits, we’re going to save the jobs of our auto manufacturers, and we’re going to do that by ending the ridiculous E.V. mandates.”
The Green New Deal to which Mr. Johnson referred was proposed legislation that Congress never passed but that Republicans have seized on as shorthand for policies designed to help the United States transition away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet. Likewise, there is no mandate that requires Americans to buy electric vehicles. Instead, there are federal subsidies to encourage consumers to buy electric vehicles and new regulations designed to cut tailpipe pollution and get automakers to sell more E.V.s.
Still, Mr. Johnson was clearly signaling that energy policy would be on the front burner. “It is our duty to restore America’s energy dominance and that’s what we’ll do,” he said. 01-03-25
Biden to Ban Offshore Oil, Gas Drilling in Vast Areas Ahead of Trump Term
U.S. President Joe Biden will ban new offshore oil and gas development along most U.S. coastlines, a decision President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to boost domestic energy production, may find difficult to reverse.
The move is considered mostly symbolic, as it will not impact areas where oil and gas development is currently underway, and mainly covers zones where drillers have no important prospects, including in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The White House said on Monday that Biden will use his authority under the 70-year-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect all federal waters off the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska. The ban will affect 625 million acres (253 million hectares) of ocean.
Biden said the move was aligned with both his efforts to combat climate change and his goal to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
He also invoked the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the low drilling potential of the areas included in the ban did not justify the public health and economic risks of future leasing.
“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.”
Around 15% of U.S. oil production comes from federal offshore acreage, mainly in the Gulf of Mexico, a share that has been falling sharply in the last decade as drilling onshore booms, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 01-06-25