The Trump administration is expanding its deep-sea mining ambitions to the region around the Marianas Trench in the western Pacific, and is nearly doubling the proposed seabed mining area around American Samoa from 18 million acres to 33 million acres, an area bigger than Peru. The move disregards unified opposition...
How government shutdowns give polluters a free pass
It’s day 42 of the U.S. government shutdown, but an end is finally in sight. On Sunday night, the Senate voted to move forward with funding for the federal government through January 30. That vote, in which eight Democrats joined the vast majority of Senate Republicans, is expected to be...
The Pacific won a landmark climate case at the world’s top court. Now they want countries to act.
In January 2004, Cyclone Heta pummeled the shores of the island nation of Niue, uprooting trees and flooding homes with 184 mile-per-hour winds and 164-foot waves. As dawn approached, after an intense night, the winds died down, and Coral Pasisi began to worry about her neighbors. The storm had been...
‘We are not here for theater’: Can the ‘most Indigenous COP’ live up to the hype?
The United Nations-sponsored climate negotiations begin this week. Known as COP30, this year’s conference marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement and will be the first ever held in the Amazon. It is also being marketed as the most Indigenous of COPs. As the host country, Brazil is taking...
UN climate talks are built on consensus. That’s part of the problem.
When Christine Peringer attended her first United Nations climate conference in 2019, she was not exactly impressed. As a professional facilitator and a member of Mediators Beyond Borders International, she said she was “appalled” by the “lack of sophistication in their methods of running the meetings.” She described the typical...
Are we all living in Florida now? The rise of ‘don’t say climate’ politics.
Last May, as blistering-hot weather broke records across South Florida and smoke from distant wildfires in Mexico turned the sky hazy, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, signed legislation erasing most mentions of “climate change” from state law. “We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of...
The EV battery tech that’s worth the hype, according to experts
You’ve seen the headlines: This battery breakthrough is going to change the electric vehicle forever. And then … silence. You head to the local showroom, and the cars all kind of look and feel the same. WIRED got annoyed about this phenomenon. So we talked to battery technology experts about what’s really going on in electric...
Trump’s anti-climate agenda is making it more expensive to own a car
As President Donald Trump sees it, environmental regulations that attempt to improve efficiency and address climate change only make products cost more and perform worse. He has long blamed efficiency regulations for his frustrations with things like toilets and showerheads. He began his second term in office to “unleash prosperity through deregulation.” But...
The ocean has been hoarding heat. Now it is building up a massive ‘burp.’
Consider your morning cup of coffee. Your kettle’s heating element — or flame on a stove — warms up water that you infuse with beans and pour into a mug. Maybe you get busy and the cup of joe sits there for a while, releasing its heat into the atmosphere...
After Hurricane Melissa, Jamaica’s climate resilience plan faces its biggest test yet
Trelawney Parish sits in a rural, agricultural region of Western Jamaica that borders the country’s largest contiguous rainforest. Under normal circumstances, the parish is relentlessly green — covered in lush vegetation and long rows of orange trees — but the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa has “almost completely annihilated” the area,...