Category: Health

Eight years ago, three little words took hold of the environmental movement: Green New Deal. Part popular slogan, part political philosophy, the phrase described a sweeping agenda to create jobs, advance social justice, and combat climate change through major public investment inspired by the New Deal of the 1930s. The...

Utah state Representative Raymond Ward was reading a story in The New York Times about a growing trend in Europe, and it sparked an idea to make energy more affordable and portable at home. Plug-in solar panels — sometimes called “balcony solar” — allow people to generate electricity by plugging...

Maine is now the first state to pass a moratorium on the development of large data centers, and others may follow. The Maine House and Senate this week passed LD 307, which prohibits state and local governments from approving data centers with at least 20 megawatts of electricity demand until at...

The future looked dire for renewable energy in the United States last spring. Republicans in Congress started gutting the Inflation Reduction Act, forcing its generous tax credits for wind and solar into an early retirement. The Interior Department then rolled out a series of byzantine regulations aimed at restricting clean...

Over the past few years, Kentucky sheep farmer Daniel Bell has been expanding his flock. Eventually, that meant he needed to build a new barn. His land is far from the power lines he’d need to heat it, so he figured rooftop solar would be ideal. To help pay for...

Something strange has been swirling in the waters around Antarctica. From the 1970s until a decade ago, the floating sea ice that radiates from the continent had been expanding, even with climate change already in full swing. Then, in 2016, it suddenly and dramatically contracted — and has yet to...

Sea levels are much higher than we thought. Real-world oceans are making a mockery of flood-risk forecasts based on crude global modeling. And to make matters worse, coastal lands almost everywhere are subsiding faster than anyone realized — often many times faster than the seas are rising.  These findings come...

Minnesota’s Boundary Waters comprise a vast stretch of wilderness bordering Canada, with over a million acres of untouched forest and thousands of lakes and streams. Accessible largely by canoe, it is an ecological gem and one of the most popular spots in the country for outdoor recreation. On Thursday, Senate...

The Afsluitdijk is a 32 kilometer causeway in the Netherlands that, since 1932, has been one of the country’s primary barriers against sea level rise. But after nearly a century of use it needed hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades. So, about a decade ago, the government turned to...