The deals on used electric vehicles right now are shocking. In 2017, a brand-new Nissan Leaf carried a price tag of about $35,000; today, that same car is yours for less than $6,500. This story repeats across the market. A Hyundai Kona that rolled off the showroom floor in 2021...
Chicago has a lead pipe problem. Millions earmarked to address it remain untouched.
For years, Chicago has been struggling to replace its lead pipes. The city has more than 412,000 confirmed and suspected lead service lines — the most of any city in the country — but it doesn’t anticipate replacing all its pipes until 2076, some 30 years after a federal deadline....
The people behind America’s disaster recovery
When a disaster strikes, be it a hurricane, flood, wildfire, or other type of extreme weather, an army of workers assemble. They arrive in waves to ravaged areas ready to respond. First in are the personnel trained to navigate the immediate crisis. Emergency managers run local shelters and coordinate on-the-ground...
Meet the small business owners electrifying Maine’s rural coast
On a sunny, 85-degree day in August of 2025, some 9,300 oysters were loaded into ice-filled containers on southern Maine’s Casco Bay. The boat shuttling them from the warm, shallow waters of Recompense Cove to the marina two miles away hummed quietly. Notably missing: the roar of an engine and...
Trump DOJ seeks to kill Vermont law that makes Big Oil pay for climate harm
Donald Trump’s justice department has asked a judge to shut down a Vermont law which holds major polluters financially responsible for climate damages. In a brief filed on Monday in a federal court in Burlington, the administration said the policy was “unlawful on its face” and pushed the court to “end Vermont’s lawless experiment.”...
Who pays for wildfire damage? In the West, utilities are shifting the risk to customers.
Every spring, investors flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, where Warren Buffett holds court. Insiders call it “Woodstock for Capitalists,” and CNBC covers it with the fervor of Fox Sports on Super Bowl Sunday. Last year’s meeting held particular weight. Investors were watching closely to see...
Trump axes climate reporting program, ignoring international courts and frontline communities
Last week, the Trump administration announced that it plans to end a federal program for greenhouse gas emissions reporting from thousands of facilities such as power plants and oil refineries. “As the agency continues to Power the Great American Comeback,” the Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a press release announcing...
Wildfire smoke could soon kill 71,000 Americans every year
You may live many miles away from a wildfire, but it could still kill you. That’s because all that smoke wafting in from afar poses a mortal risk. The threat is so great, in fact, that any official tally of people killed in a fire most likely is wildly low,...
The politics of renewables are getting stranger. ‘Sun Day’ celebrates them anyway.
Electric bikes parading through city streets. The afternoon light glinting off clusters of floating solar panels. Neighbors guiding visitors through homes warmed by heat pumps, battery storage systems glowing on walls. These sound like scenes from a clean energy expo or a hopeful science fiction novel, but they’re neither. They’re...
Defending the Earth is deadly work. A new report illuminates how much.
Since the 1990s, Martin Egot has protected his tribe’s ancestral homelands near Nigeria’s Cross River National Park. Egot, who is Indigenous Ekuri, helped establish the Ekuri Initiative, an organization dedicated to protecting parts of the rainforest. In 2009, the Ekuri Initiative successfully pushed the Cross River government, a state in...