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...
How the Trump administration is fast-tracking logging in Illinois’ only national forest
When the Forest Service approved the sale of nearly 70 acres for commercial logging in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest in late 2024, Sam Stearns was furious. The Shawnee is the only national forest in the state, and one of the smallest in the nation. The agency initially billed the...
The country’s biggest magnesium producer went bankrupt. Who’s going to clean up the $100M mess?
Bill Johnson has witnessed the extent of US Magnesium’s pollution up close. He’s seen the wastewater pond that was so acidic it bubbled like a cauldron. He noted where the corrosive liquid had eaten through the soil beneath, and where it burned through earthen barriers and spilled into the neighboring...
Climate change primed Washington state for historic flooding
A long, warm plume of airborne water snaked its way from the subtropical Pacific Ocean toward the U.S. West Coast at the beginning of this month. As the so-called atmospheric river made its way north, it sucked up moisture from above-average sea surface temperatures. When the airborne river washed ashore...
Under Trump, the National Renewable Energy Lab is losing ‘renewable’ from its name
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado is getting a name change. The groundbreaking research institute will no longer have the word “renewable” in its title, the U.S. Department of Energy announced earlier this month, and will instead be called the “National Laboratory of the Rockies.” The announcement does not...