For more than a century, Covington, Virginia has had one dominating feature: its paper mill. Smokestacks tower over the community of 5,500, many of whom work there. But according to a new report, the mill spews more nitrogen oxide, methane, and greenhouse gases than is generally known. “The snow is...
This Portland collective keeps the city clean — and helps unhoused people find stability
On a Thursday morning in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, two dozen people mill around a warehouse, waiting for the results of a lottery. At 7:45 sharp, a woman sitting in an interior office calls out three numbers in quick succession. She repeats the last one a few times before someone...
How Big Ag thwarted wetlands protections in Illinois and Iowa
Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. the Environmental Protection Agency significantly limited the agency’s ability to use the 1972 Clean Water Act to safeguard the nation’s wetlands from pollution and destruction. The decision determined that wetlands — waterlogged habitats that help filter water and...
Trump’s climate denial may help a livestock-killing pest make a comeback
To a throng of goats foraging in a remote expanse of Sanibel Island, Florida, the low whir of a plane flying overhead was perhaps the only warning of what was to come. As it passed, the specially modified plane dropped scores of parasitic New World screwworm flies through an elongated...
Illinois must protect the Great Lakes from invasive carp. A toxic mess stands in the way.
Last week, Illinois officials took possession of a 50-acre stretch of riverbed in Chicago’s shipping channel in a last-ditch effort to prevent an ecological disaster from reaching Lake Michigan. It is there, on a sliver of land where a coal-fired power plant once stood, that the state plans a last...
Solar apprenticeships give Virginia students a head start on clean energy
When Mason Taylor was getting ready to graduate from high school in 2022, he thought he would have to take an entry-level technician job with a company in Tennessee. Taylor grew up in the town of Dryden in rural Lee County, in the westernmost sliver of Virginia between Kentucky and...
Top winemaker ‘may have to leave its Spanish vineyards due to climate crisis’
A leading European winemaker has warned it may have to abandon its ancestral lands in Catalonia in 30 years’ time because climate change could make traditional growing areas too dry and hot. Familia Torres is already installing irrigation at its vineyards in Spain and California and is planting vines on land at...
The Kentucky tornadoes spur mounting anxiety over weather service warning systems
Sandra Anderson didn’t think the storm would be too bad. When her grandchildren asked if the dogs should be brought in, Anderson demurred, saying they’d be fine. But later that night, an alert on her phone warned her of a tornado tearing through her hometown of London, Kentucky. Seconds later,...
The weird way that penguin poop might be cooling Antarctica
In December 2022, Matthew Boyer hopped on an Argentine military plane to one of the more remote habitations on Earth: Marambio Station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where the icy continent stretches toward South America. Months before that, Boyer had to ship expensive, delicate instruments that might get...
Moderate Republicans defended Biden’s climate law — then voted to repeal it
After days of intense political infighting between ultra-conservative and moderate Republicans, the House of Representatives voted along party lines on Thursday morning to approve a sweeping tax bill that seeks to eviscerate the heart of landmark climate legislation passed by Democrats just three years ago. The 2022 climate law on...