If you’re struggling to walk more, know that it’s not necessarily a failure of willpower. Planners designed American cities not just to prioritize the car, but to impede the pedestrian — too few sidewalks, fat thoroughfares slicing up neighborhoods, sprawling parking lots instead of parks. Yet study after study outlines...
Clearing debris after a storm is big business. For some communities, it’s also a burden.
Margie Huggins has spent her retirement tending her parents’ farm in Transylvania County, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She grew up there, and has tried to give back to the land by planting native shrubs and flowers. She’s intensified her work since Hurricane Helene...
A startup promised 45,000 EV jobs to struggling towns. They’re still waiting.
They came with promises of transformation: thousands of jobs, surging salaries, and a foothold in the booming electric vehicle market. Imola Automotive USA, a Boca Raton, Florida-based startup, pitched officials in small, struggling towns in Georgia, Oklahoma, and Arkansas on a bold vision. The company planned to build six EV...
After the Texas floods, when is the right time to ask what went wrong?
The finger-pointing began as soon as the waters started to recede. Within hours of last month’s floods in Kerr County, Texas, which killed more than 130 people, pundits were already battling over who — or what — was responsible. Over the next few weeks, people blamed insufficient warning systems, sleeping...
Trump administration reopens $5B EV charging program after losses in court
The Trump administration appears to be backing away from its fiercely contested efforts to freeze a $5 billion federal funding program for electric vehicle chargers. On Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled revised guidance for states to access their remaining share of $5 billion in formula grants from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or...
California is sunsetting oil refineries without a plan for what’s next
Within the past year, two major California oil refineries have announced plans to shutter — moves that will pull about one quarter of a million barrels from the state’s daily supply of gasoline. For a state that has been a standard-bearer in the push to get off fossil fuels, this...
The Trump administration’s assault on science feels eerily Soviet
In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics....
‘Consensus kills ambition’: UN plastics treaty talks end without an agreement
Diplomats from around the world concluded nine days of talks in Geneva — plus a marathon overnight session that lasted into the early hours of Friday — with no agreement on a global plastics treaty. During a closing plenary that started on Friday at 6:30 a.m. — more than 15...
The International Seabed Authority’s war with itself
For the last three decades, the United Nations-affiliated body called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, has been working in relative obscurity on negotiating the regulations that will govern a field of enterprise that remains purely speculative: deep-sea mining, or the harvesting of metal rocks known as polymetallic nodules off...
The tiny ocean organisms that could help the climate in a big way
Some of the littlest organisms in the ocean wield incredible influence, both on their ecosystems and on the planet. Like plants do on land, phytoplankton absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and expel oxygen. They process so much of those two gases, in fact, that they’re responsible for half of the...