Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to overtake Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre plot of land, she rushed into action, rapidly evacuating her family’s gaggle of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and goats to higher ground. When the...
This obscure Georgia election is about so much more than your power bill
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station. Georgians are currently voting in rare off-year elections for two seats on the Public Service Commission, or PSC — the only statewide races on the ballot this year. More Democrats are expected to turn out...
Good news! These ‘positive tipping points’ will help save the world
Earlier this month, scientists announced that humanity has kicked off the first major “tipping point” — in which an Earth system dramatically transforms, often permanently — as warm-water corals die en masse due to relentlessly rising temperatures. Think of such events like driving off a cliff: There’s no reversing back...
Trump killed a crucial disaster database. This nonprofit just saved it.
As the Trump administration deletes climate data and shutters resources that track the impacts of a warming world, nonprofits, state-level governments, and independent scientists are rushing to preserve the information. Last week, Climate Central resurrected one of the most prominent of those lost records: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s...
Scientists have a dire new warning about the state of the planet
As the end of 2025 approaches, regular folk take stock of the past year, and maybe ponder their New Year’s resolutions. Climate scientists, on the other hand, have been busy parsing mountains of data from the last 10 months, ranging from global temperatures to measurements of polar ice to the...
Toxic wastewater from oil fields keeps pouring out of the ground. Oklahoma regulators failed to stop it.
In January 2020, Danny Ray started a complicated job with the Oklahoma agency that regulates oil and gas. The petroleum engineer who’d spent more than 40 years in the oil fields had been hired to help address a spreading problem, one that state regulators did not fully understand. The year...
In New York, a pipeline proposal that just won’t die
They don’t build many basements in Breezy Point anymore, but Ed Power’s got one. Breezy Point is a remote stretch of New York City along the coast of the Rockaway Peninsula, colloquially known as the “Irish Riviera.” A longtime firefighter who retired as a deputy chief, Power grew up in...
What we lost when cars won
When automobiles first started tearing through American streets a century ago, they weren’t exactly welcome. One of the main problems was that they were killing children: in 1921 alone, 286 children in Pittsburgh, 130 in Baltimore, and 97 in Washington, D.C. Cities memorialized the dead with monuments and solemn marches....
The West’s new gold rush is the data center boom
A new kind of gold rush is sweeping the West, and this time the prize isn’t minerals but megawatts. From Phoenix to Colorado’s Front Range, data centers are arriving with outsize demands for power and water. In a new report, the regional environmental advocacy group Western Resource Advocates (WRA) warns...
How Hurricane Melissa got so dangerous so fast
History is unfolding in the Atlantic Ocean right now. Hurricane Melissa has spun up into an extraordinarily dangerous Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph, and is set to strike Jamaica Monday night before marching toward Cuba. This is only the second time in recorded history that...