For more than a decade, The Metals Company has poured millions of dollars into researching and developing technology for mining seafloors at extreme depths, funding scientific studies to evaluate the environmental impact, and persuading investors and political leaders to support their vision of scraping minerals like cobalt and copper from...
Trump has always hated offshore wind. Now he’s moving to kill it.
The Department of Interior abruptly paused the leases for five of the nation’s largest proposed offshore wind projects on Monday. That effectively halts all ongoing offshore wind development in the United States. The moves come as electricity demand in the U.S. is growing for the first time in years, driven...
Ford is retreating from EVs — but embracing grid batteries
Ford, a century after it launched the modern automotive era, has given up on its early ambitions to charge into the electrified future. The company announced that it will delete nearly $20 billion in book value to extricate itself from its EV investments, an eye-popping loss that amounts to one of the biggest corporate impairments...
What a crumbling power grid means for disabled Americans
During the power outage following the winter storms of 2021 — known in Texas as Winter Storm Uri — Rita, an Indigenous woman who lives with severe mental illness and congestive heart failure, tried with her then-partner to stay warm in brutal conditions in a tent on the streets of Austin...
One word sums up climate politics in 2025: Greenlash
The years leading up to 2025 were marked by a rare optimism that the United States would finally do something about climate change. Former president Joe Biden called the crisis an “enormous opportunity,” and during his term, Congress passed the biggest climate law in the country’s history. It felt like...
Alaska’s $44 billion bet on natural gas
An arctic wind cut across Prudhoe Bay, sending spindrifts swirling as Energy Secretary Chris Wright stepped onto a podium hastily erected among oil wells and pump stations. The gray summer sunlight scattered over ice-rimmed ponds, shadows gathering in the hollows of low heaves and stretching over the tundra. But the...
Here’s the global playbook being used to crack down on climate protest
A new study published this month in the journal Environmental Politics reveals that efforts to repress climate and environmental protest are growing worldwide through a combination of new legislation, novel uses of existing legal processes, police actions, vilification of activists, and both violence and killings. The authors contend that acts...
We’re all at risk if Trump dismantles this legendary lab
You may not know it, but you’ve benefited from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. For more than half a century, the federally funded lab has been instrumental in the development of weather models that have improved the forecasting of extreme events like hurricanes, thus saving lives. Your go-to weather...
How the devil is in the details of greener new jobs
What makes a job sustainable — both eco-friendly and liable to stick around? That question is at the center of new research from the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University’s Policy School, commissioned by the City of Boston to help meet its ambitious Climate Action Plan goals. The plan lays out...
The year the US doubled down on critical minerals
President Donald Trump spent most of 2025 hacking away at large parts of the federal government. His administration fired, bought out, or otherwise ousted hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Entire agencies were gutted. By so many metrics, this year in politics has been defined more by what has been...