Sara Kehaulani Goo’s journey to save her family’s land on Maui began in 2019 with an email she read at her kitchen table in Washington, D.C. “Sara, the Hāna property taxes went up 500%,” her dad wrote. “If we can’t find a way to pay, then the trust funds will...
Trump’s budget bill is on the verge of transforming how America eats
Early this month, after some equivocation, President Donald Trump briefly endorsed the idea to hike taxes on the wealthiest Americans in his budget proposal to Congress. Economists were quick to point out the meager impact a new millionaire tax bracket would have on the ultra-rich, particularly in the context of...
What’s likely to survive from Biden’s climate law? The controversial stuff.
Dig down about a mile or two in parts of the United States and you’ll start to see the remains of an ancient ocean. The shells of long dead sea creatures are compressed into white limestone, surrounding brine aquifers with a higher salt content than the Atlantic Ocean. Last summer,...
‘Chilling and dangerous’: Grassroots groups sue over Louisiana law that censors air quality data
For several years, Amy Stelly has been partnering with the Louisiana State University School of Public Health in New Orleans to monitor air quality next to the Claiborne Expressway, a busy highway that runs northwest of the city’s iconic French Quarter. At a community meeting in April, Stelly, who runs...
How the Trump administration is putting hundreds of sacred sites at risk
Any time a federal agency wants to develop a project in Wyoming — an oil and gas lease, a pipeline, a dam, a transmission line, a solar array — it has to go through Crystal C’Bearing first. C’Bearing is Northern Arapaho and the tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for...
Mayors are making climate action personal. It’s working.
In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Bibb was living in a tight, one-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. He couldn’t open his windows because his home was an old office building converted to residential units — not exactly conducive to physical and mental well-being in the middle of a...
Paper plants can emit as much CO2 as oil refineries. They’re flying under the radar.
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...