The Trump administration appears to be backing away from its fiercely contested efforts to freeze a $5 billion federal funding program for electric vehicle chargers. On Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled revised guidance for states to access their remaining share of $5 billion in formula grants from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or...
California is sunsetting oil refineries without a plan for what’s next
Within the past year, two major California oil refineries have announced plans to shutter — moves that will pull about one quarter of a million barrels from the state’s daily supply of gasoline. For a state that has been a standard-bearer in the push to get off fossil fuels, this...
The Trump administration’s assault on science feels eerily Soviet
In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics....
‘Consensus kills ambition’: UN plastics treaty talks end without an agreement
Diplomats from around the world concluded nine days of talks in Geneva — plus a marathon overnight session that lasted into the early hours of Friday — with no agreement on a global plastics treaty. During a closing plenary that started on Friday at 6:30 a.m. — more than 15...
The International Seabed Authority’s war with itself
For the last three decades, the United Nations-affiliated body called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, has been working in relative obscurity on negotiating the regulations that will govern a field of enterprise that remains purely speculative: deep-sea mining, or the harvesting of metal rocks known as polymetallic nodules off...
The tiny ocean organisms that could help the climate in a big way
Some of the littlest organisms in the ocean wield incredible influence, both on their ecosystems and on the planet. Like plants do on land, phytoplankton absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and expel oxygen. They process so much of those two gases, in fact, that they’re responsible for half of the...
Installing heat pumps in factories could save $1.5 trillion and 77,000 lives
For several years now, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the United States. Instead of burning fossil fuels to generate warmth, these appliances use electricity — ideally provided by renewable sources like wind and solar — to transfer heat from even frigid outdoor air into a home. Many states...
For Indigenous communities, AI brings peril — and promise
When the United Nations marked the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples last week, it signaled a growing recognition of a new kind of extraction. Artificial intelligence, or AI, systems are being trained on massive troves of online data, much of it collected without the consent of the communities...
Factory farms don’t just stink — they make it harder to breathe, tooÂ
New research out this week underscores what many environmental justice advocates in the U.S. have long known: Animal feeding operations — another term for factory farming — pollute the air, and these environmental impacts are disproportionately felt by nearby communities, who are often people of color. The report, published Tuesday and...
A hidden fuel source beneath the Midwest? Scientists are investigating.
About a billion years ago, the United States was nearly ripped in half. Magma bubbled up as the Earth’s crust stretched thin somewhere around Michigan, nearly creating a new sea. Evidence of that scar, called the Midcontinent Rift, now curls around the upper Midwest, stretching from Ontario all the way...