If you want to know what’s causing climate change and how it affects where you live, don’t turn to the Environmental Protection Agency for answers. The government agency purged basic facts about global warming from its website last week — including references to how human activity releases planet-heating carbon dioxide...
How a species of bamboo could help protect the South from future floods
In early 2024, Michael Fedoroff trekked out to Tuckabum Creek in York County, Alabama. The environmental anthropologist was there to help plant 300 stalks of rivercane, a bamboo plant native to North America, on an eroded, degraded strip of wetland: a “gnarly” and “wicked” area, according to Fedoroff. If successful,...
When Elephants Trample Your Farm, Who Do You Call?
When Krithi Karanth walks into a forest village in the shadow of India’s Bandipur National Park, she is often greeted by farmers with cell phones in hand — ready to report video of a night-time encounter with an elephant herd, or the fresh tracks of a leopard that passed behind...
The Navajo Nation said no to a hydropower project. Trump officials want to ensure tribes can’t do that again.
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...
Illinois families are going electric — for free
Jean Gay-Robinson said she “cried tears of joy” when utility ComEd switched all the polluting gas-fired equipment in her Chicago home to modern electric versions, at no cost to her. As a retiree on a fixed income, she is relieved that she’ll likely never have to buy another appliance, her energy bills are...
The Trump administration’s data center push could open the door for new forever chemicals
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...
The wealthy profit from public lands, and taxpayers pick up the tab
Stan Kroenke doesn’t need federal help to make a business flourish. He is worth an estimated $20 billion, a fortune that has allowed him to become one of America’s largest property owners and afforded him stakes in storied sports franchises, including the Denver Nuggets and England’s Arsenal soccer club. Yet...
After COP30, Indigenous advocates celebrate gains while warning of unfinished work
If there is one image that encapsulates COP30, this year’s global climate change conference in Belém, Brazil, it might be this: Indigenous activists, in traditional clothing and regalia, storming past security into a secure zone made for international negotiators and preapproved delegates. The action occurred on the second day of...
Zillow deletes climate risk data from listings after complaints it harms 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...
EV sales are way down. Here’s why that might not be a big deal.
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...