Lead pipes are ubiquitous. At this point, no state has gotten rid of all of its toxic lead service lines, which pipe drinking water to homes and businesses. But some cities like Chicago, New York City, and Detroit, have more lead plumbing than others, and replacing it can cost tens...
What will it take to rebuild Jamaica’s food system after Hurricane Melissa?
In the three weeks since Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica, with destructive winds of up to 185 miles per hour, authorities have been busy addressing immediate crises and assessing the damage. The strongest hurricane ever recorded to hit the Caribbean nation, Melissa collided with houses and property and downed power lines...
Business With a Backbone
Ulrich Eichelmann has seen many rivers over his lifetime as the head of RiverWatch, an organization dedicated to protecting the world’s waterways. He’s spent time on the Tigris floating through Turkey and Iraq, on the Tagliamento in Italy, and traveled along the Danube as it winds across Europe. Yet none,...
Trump sets sights on Pacific seafloor near the Marianas Trench
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...