In the first seven months of President Donald Trump’s second administration, the federal funding landscape has been radically changed — especially for the people who grow, harvest, and distribute food. Thousands of government staffers were terminated; entire programs have been stripped down; and a grant freeze has immobilized state, regional,...
Climate disasters are killing small businesses
The United States is home to millions of small businesses that form the backbone of countless communities. Even during the best of times keeping shops solvent can be a struggle, but when climate-driven disasters strike, the impact on mom-and-pops can be particularly devastating — and prolonged. “The news coverage has...
New York becomes first state to commit to all-electric new buildings
New York just took a big leap toward zero-emissions buildings. On July 25, the State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council approved an all-electric building standard, making New York the first state in the nation to prohibit gas and other fossil fuels in most new buildings. Legislators and climate advocates celebrated the move,...
Hundreds of old EV batteries have new jobs in Texas: Stabilizing the grid
East of San Antonio in Bexar County, 500 electric vehicle batteries at the end of their automotive lives will soon be repurposed to provide energy storage for Texas’ electric grid, a California company, B2U Storage Solutions, announced on Tuesday. The batteries, housed in 21 cabinets the size of shipping containers,...
Texas lawmakers grill Kerr County officials as flood recovery plods on
On Thursday, for the first time since flash floods along the Guadalupe River killed at least 138 people and left thousands of homes and buildings in ruins, Texas lawmakers questioned local emergency and disaster preparedness officials in Kerr County, the epicenter of the disaster. Unlike some of its neighbors, the...
Can protecting nature be nonpartisan?
In early July, the Bureau of Land Management quietly announced plans to trade away 2 million acres of public land along Alaska’s Dalton Highway. The immense stretch of boreal forest totters into tundra, an area almost three times the size of Rhode Island. It will be handed over to the...
Data centers, drought, and dispossession: The real nightmares in Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’
The film Eddington opens at night as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) sits in his Chevy Tahoe on the edge of a New Mexico desert. On duty, he’s bathed in blue light, watching YouTube: a video on how to convince your spouse to want a child. More cops pull up,...
Floods, fires and false confidence: America’s disaster problem is personal
Many Americans remain dangerously unprepared for floods, fires, and other natural catastrophes, and their level of readiness is strongly shaped by factors like age, gender, employment status, and past experience with disasters. Climate-driven calamities are becoming more frequent and severe, as shown by last month’s devastating floods in Texas. Twenty-eight...
The USDA announced the cancellation of $148M in ‘woke’ grants. Then it went dark.
The Department of Agriculture under President Donald Trump has charted a new course — the full-scale reduction of federal funding and staffing throughout the agency. A set of the president’s early executive orders targeted climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion; the USDA has since complied with those...
Trump’s EPA is attacking its own power to fight climate change
In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threatened public health and welfare. This “endangerment finding,” as it’s known in legal jargon, may have sounded self-evident to those who had been following climate science for decades, but its consequences for U.S....