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,...
With SNAP in crisis, America’s epic food waste problem has become a lifeline
The government shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history, is making it much less likely that many Americans will have enough food to eat this month. Last week, before the funds for federal grocery benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, ran out due to the shutdown, District...
Rising energy bills are rewiring American politics
It has been a big week in energy news, with several resounding wins for efficiency and climate advocates. On Tuesday, voters in Georgia flipped two seats on the state’s Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities and sets rates. They installed a pair of Democrats on this little known, yet powerful,...
Here are the 5 issues to watch at COP30 in Brazil
Global leaders will gather in northern Brazil next week to begin the 30th annual Conference of the Parties, or COP30, the United Nations climate summit that takes stock of just how much the world’s nations are doing to address climate change — or, depending on your capacity for optimism, how...
The government froze food aid. Tribes are thawing old traditions.
On November 1, when the Trump administration announced it would not disburse benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, due to the ongoing government shutdown, tribal governments began to scramble. Approximately 25 percent of Indigenous households are considered food insecure and rely on SNAP as well as the...
In Georgia, power bills beat out party politics
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station. During his own victory speech on Election Day this week, Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens took a moment to celebrate some other candidates who’d also just won their races. “For those of you who don’t know...
Illinois takes steps to address high energy costs, betting big on battery storage
Electricity prices have been rising across much of the country, and Illinois is among the states seeing the sharpest increases. Over the past five years, prices have shot up by about a third on average across the state, and some regions have seen increases of nearly 50 percent. According to...
Climate change ‘is the new liberal arts’: Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees
On a Thursday this fall, hundreds of students at the University of California, San Diego, were heading to classes that, at least on paper, seemed to have very little to do with their majors. Hannah Jenny, an economics and math major, was on their way to a class on sustainable...