New England winters can get wicked cold. This week, five of the region’s states launched a $450 million effort to warm more homes in the often-frigid region with energy-efficient, low-emission heat pumps instead of by burning fossil fuels. “It’s a big deal,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and...
Everyone hates gas-powered leaf blowers. So why is it so hard to ban them?
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...
FEMA’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year
As 2025 draws to a close, the departure of the beleaguered acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, caps a tumultuous year for FEMA. In January, President Donald Trump took office and vowed to abolish the department. Though the administration subsequently slow-walked that proposal, its government-wide staffing...
Dismantling the Endangered Species Act will hurt a lot more than just wildlife
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...
Rising heat, failing kidneys: Climate’s hidden toll on migrant workers
The beeping of old dialysis machines at the National Kidney Center in Kathmandu never stops. Nurses in dark blue scrubs rush around tending to the 55 people having their blood cleaned at any given time while cleaners squeeze by carrying stained sheets and buckets of bloody catheters. The facility, located...
Illinois has few remaining wetlands. A Trump administration proposal could decimate what’s left.
The Environmental Protection Agency calls wetlands “biological supermarkets” for the sheer abundance of food they supply to a broad range of species. Roughly 40 percent of all plants and animals rely on wetlands for some part of their lifecycle. These ecosystems also filter drinking water, blunt the force of flooding,...
How to make data centers less thirsty
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...
How gas stations can become the best place to charge your EV
Phillip Stafford has been converted. After two years driving a Tesla, he says there’s no going back to gasoline — the money he saves on fuel alone makes that clear. And since his work as a crisis counselor takes him all over Richmond, Virginia, he charges often. That’s made him...
Scorching Saturdays: The rising heat threat inside football stadiums
When Vanderbilt University football fan Douglas Dill set out with his son the morning of October 4 to watch their team play rival University of Alabama, he didn’t expect his game-day experience to include a gurney ride to a medical facility inside Bryant-Denny Stadium. But by the fourth quarter in...
10 years after the Paris Agreement, world leaders are letting go of its most famous goal
On the first day of this year’s United Nations climate summit, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised attendees that this conference would be different. The 30th annual Conference of the Parties, or COP30, would be the “COP of truth,” he said. The Brazilian president’s forceful remarks at the...