New Hampshire Republicans are attempting to do away with a 50-year-old property tax exemption for households and businesses with solar, contending that the policy forces residents without the clean energy systems to unwittingly subsidize those who have them. Supporters of the exemption, however, say this argument is misleading, insulting, and at...
How thick is the ice on the Great Lakes? Scientists want your help.
Scientists in the Midwest are asking for help from the public this winter to measure ice thickness on the Great Lakes and other inland lakes in the region, which they plan to use to improve ice-forecasting models. Satellites do a good job at capturing how much ice coverage there is,...
EVs are already making your air cleaner
The logic behind electric vehicles benefiting public health has long been solid: More EVs means fewer internal combustion engines on the road, and a reduction in harmful tailpipe emissions. But now researchers have confirmed, to the greatest extent yet, that this is indeed what’s actually happening on the ground. What’s...
The biomass industry promised these Southern towns prosperity. So why are they still dying?
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....
Panic buying ahead of the winter storm isn’t preparedness. Here’s who it hurts.
Emptying supermarket shelves. Driving from store to store, hunting for milk, bread, and water. Ignoring the signs instructing shoppers to “Take one.” It’s a song and dance consumers across the country typically engage in when confronted with an incoming extreme weather event, and a pattern we’re seeing repeated as images...
Why the government is trying to make coal cute
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...
Climate news is written in a language most people can’t understand
In the summer of 2023, more than 19,000 people were forced to evacuate as wildfires swept through Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Emergency alerts were issued in French and English, but not in the nine Indigenous languages that are recognized as official languages in the territory, forcing some...
Solar farms can be havens for rare plants. Just ask the threecorner milkvetch.
The ostensibly barren Mojave Desert is in fact teeming with plants and animals, including a rare species known as the threecorner milkvetch. It’s a member of the pea family, splaying across the ground instead of climbing up a garden trestle. Given the harsh desert conditions, it waits until the arrival...
A Nebraska utility says that its coal plant poses no ‘significant’ health threat
On paper, the public power district serving much of eastern Nebraska has been trying to quit coal at its North Omaha plant since 2014. That June, its board voted to retire three of the plant’s five coal units in 2016 and convert the final two to natural gas in 2023....
Can cities make landlords care about energy efficiency?
With the federal government retreating from climate action, cities and states have increasingly stepped in to ease emissions and address the crisis. But new research finds that those efforts often fail to reach renters — one of the largest and most vulnerable segments of the housing market — leaving a...