A forthcoming Supreme Court decision is poised to weaken a bedrock law that requires federal agencies to study the potential environmental impacts of major projects. The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, concerns a proposed 88-mile railroad that would link an oil-producing region of Utah to tracks that...
The Trump administration says it wants a ‘nuclear renaissance.’ These actions suggest otherwise.
In March, in a thunderous op-ed in Power Magazine, a trade publication covering the electricity industry, Republican senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee called for President Donald Trump to make some major institutional changes in the Tennessee Valley Authority, America’s biggest public utility.  A couple months earlier, TVA’s...
Despite global opposition, Trump just fast-tracked deep-sea mining
President Donald Trump wants federal agencies to fast-track applications for deep-sea mining in an effort to make the United States a global leader in the nascent industry. Trump issued an executive order Thursday declaring that U.S. policy includes “creating a robust domestic supply chain for critical minerals derived from seabed...
How Italy got its citizens — and me — to adopt a rigorous recycling scheme
Of all the sources of culture shock I might have anticipated after my partner and I bought a home in 2022 in northern Italy, trash collection never crossed my mind. I didn’t know going in that Italy had become the top overall recycling country in the EU and one of...
How your showerhead and fridge got roped into the culture wars
Efficiency standards for home appliances were once the conversational equivalent of beige — neutral, but aggressively uninteresting. But as political polarization has deepened, dishwashers, laundry machines, showerheads, and other household staples have begun to take on a new charge. With Republicans now in control of the White House and both...
Oak Flat is sacred to Western Apache. The Trump administration intends to approve a plan to destroy it.
The Trump administration signaled last week it intends to approve a land transfer that will allow a foreign company to mine a sacred Indigenous site in Arizona, where local tribes and environmentalists have fought the project for decades and before federal courts rule on lawsuits over the project. Western Apache...
A simple tweak to tax law has helped bring solar power to the communities that need it most
Last year, the Boston Community Solar Cooperative announced plans for its first community solar project: 81 kilowatts of panels atop an affordable housing complex in a low-income, historically Black Boston neighborhood. The success of the project depends, in large part, on tax credits the Inflation Reduction Act established in 2022....
Trump’s latest USDA cuts undermine his plan to ‘Make America Healthy Again’
Early in the morning last Monday, a group of third graders huddled in the garden of Mendota Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. Of the dozen students present, a handful were busy filling up buckets of compost, others were readying soil beds for spring planting, while a number carefully watered freshly...
Your guide to the 2025 UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
Last Thursday, Hanieh Moghani, a legal scholar from Iran, was scheduled to attend a private meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York City with more than a dozen Indigenous experts from around the world. But Moghani was more than 5,000 miles away in Iran, waiting for her visa to...
Wildlife, not livestock: Why the Eastern Shoshone in Wyoming are reclassifying buffalo
Jason Baldes drove down a dusty, sagebrush highway earlier this month, pulling 11 young buffalo in a trailer up from Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. His blue truck has painted on the side a drawing of buffalo and a calf. As the executive director of the Wind...