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...
This new machine churns out carbon-storing biochar on the cheap
The food that makes it to your plate is but a fraction of what actually grew in a field somewhere. Cassava, corn, wheat, rice — all critical crops produce waste biomass that farmers might be burning or throwing into piles to rot, both of which send planet-warming carbon into the...
How climate change is fueling your sugar addiction
In the thick of summer, little else can seem more appealing than the promised respite of an ice cream cone or a chilled can of soda. Turns out that as climate change warms up the planet, that sugary siren song is getting louder: A new study published last week in...
This Pennsylvania settlement could set the standard for preventing tiny plastic pellet pollution
When Heather Hulton VanTassel went looking for plastic pellets in the Ohio River in 2021, she was simply trying to establish a baseline level of contamination. A new plastics facility was being constructed nearby, and she wanted to be able to compare the prevalence of pellets — known as “nurdles”...
‘Green’ diesel producer’s supplier linked to Amazon deforestation
Diamond Green Diesel, or DGD, a U.S. leader in renewable diesel production, imports beef tallow from a supplier fed by Brazilian slaughterhouses fined for illegal deforestation. These include a plant that purchased cattle from a rancher described by Brazilian authorities as the “largest destroyer of the Amazon” ever investigated. Repórter...