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....
Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis
The Arctic island of Svalbard is so reliably frigid that humanity bet its future on the place. Since 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — set deep in frozen soil known as permafrost — has accepted nearly 1.4 million samples of more than 6,000 species of critical crops. But, the...
Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher.
Eight years ago, when Debbie Wei Mullin founded her company Copper Cow, she wanted to bring Vietnamese coffee into the mainstream. Vietnam, the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee, is known for growing robusta beans. Earthier and more bitter than the arabica beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, and other coffee-growing regions near...
Trump’s environmental policies are reshaping everyday life. Here’s how.
Over the last six months, Americans have been inundated with a near-constant stream of announcements from the federal government — programs shuttered, funding cut, jobs eliminated, and regulations gutted. President Donald Trump and his administration are executing a systematic dismantling of the environmental, economic, and scientific systems that underpin our...
A long-awaited rule to protect workers from heat stress moves forward, even under Trump
Last summer, the United States took a crucial step towards protecting millions of workers across the country from the impacts of extreme heat on the job. In July 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, published its first-ever draft rule to prevent heat illness in the U.S. workforce....