A new study published this month in the journal Environmental Politics reveals that efforts to repress climate and environmental protest are growing worldwide through a combination of new legislation, novel uses of existing legal processes, police actions, vilification of activists, and both violence and killings. The authors contend that acts...
We’re all at risk if Trump dismantles this legendary lab
You may not know it, but you’ve benefited from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. For more than half a century, the federally funded lab has been instrumental in the development of weather models that have improved the forecasting of extreme events like hurricanes, thus saving lives. Your go-to weather...
How the devil is in the details of greener new jobs
What makes a job sustainable — both eco-friendly and liable to stick around? That question is at the center of new research from the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University’s Policy School, commissioned by the City of Boston to help meet its ambitious Climate Action Plan goals. The plan lays out...
The year the US doubled down on critical minerals
President Donald Trump spent most of 2025 hacking away at large parts of the federal government. His administration fired, bought out, or otherwise ousted hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Entire agencies were gutted. By so many metrics, this year in politics has been defined more by what has been...
How the Trump administration is fast-tracking logging in Illinois’ only national forest
When the Forest Service approved the sale of nearly 70 acres for commercial logging in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest in late 2024, Sam Stearns was furious. The Shawnee is the only national forest in the state, and one of the smallest in the nation. The agency initially billed the...
The country’s biggest magnesium producer went bankrupt. Who’s going to clean up the $100M mess?
Bill Johnson has witnessed the extent of US Magnesium’s pollution up close. He’s seen the wastewater pond that was so acidic it bubbled like a cauldron. He noted where the corrosive liquid had eaten through the soil beneath, and where it burned through earthen barriers and spilled into the neighboring...
Climate change primed Washington state for historic flooding
A long, warm plume of airborne water snaked its way from the subtropical Pacific Ocean toward the U.S. West Coast at the beginning of this month. As the so-called atmospheric river made its way north, it sucked up moisture from above-average sea surface temperatures. When the airborne river washed ashore...
Under Trump, the National Renewable Energy Lab is losing ‘renewable’ from its name
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado is getting a name change. The groundbreaking research institute will no longer have the word “renewable” in its title, the U.S. Department of Energy announced earlier this month, and will instead be called the “National Laboratory of the Rockies.” The announcement does not...
How the planet fared in 2025 — the good, the bad, and the ugly
If we’re being honest, 2025 did not start out great. For basically the whole month of January, a series of wildfires raged across Los Angeles, killing hundreds (more on that number below). On the other side of the country, an Arctic blast brought historic snowfall and bitter cold deep into...
What your cheap clothes cost the planet
The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth...