On October 20, 2022, Jeffery Nang, chief of the Rumah Jeffrey people in Malaysia, went to a community meeting and was handed a letter by a government official in Sarawak, a state on the island of Borneo in Malaysia. The letter was an eviction notice for Nang and the 60-some...
Colorado’s rural electric co-ops are determined to go green
Eric Eriksen puts in long nights and weekends to keep the lights on in southern Colorado. As the CEO of the San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative, Eriksen leads a member-owned nonprofit that provides electric service to more than 7,500 people across seven rural counties in the Rocky Mountains —...
Trump calls program to help low-income Americans pay their energy bills ‘unnecessary’
Last year, the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, distributed nearly $4 billion to households struggling to pay their energy bills. It’s a lifeline for more than 6 million families, but in recent months the program has become a target for funding cuts. In early April, Donald Trump’s administration...
An $18M grant would have drastically reduced food waste. Then the EPA cut it.
Once a little girl roaming the vibrant fields of an organic lettuce farm in Kealakekua, Hawai‘i, Ella Kilpatrick Kotner learned how to live in harmony with the land before most kids learn how to tie their shoes. Nourishing the soils that gave her a regular supply of leafy greens was...
The Trump administration has all but stopped enforcing environmental laws
Protecting the nation from polluters is a core function of the Environmental Protection Agency. But in the last few months, federal enforcement of major violations of environmental laws appears to have ground to a halt. A Grist review of data from the Department of Justice and EPA found that the...
Why are all of America’s biggest cities sinking?
Cities sit unmoving on the landscape — a sprawling collection of roads, sidewalks, and buildings designed to last for generations. But across the United States, urban areas are silently shifting: The land beneath them is sinking, a process known as subsidence, largely because people are using too much groundwater and...
The head of FEMA defended the agency on Capitol Hill. Trump fired him.
On Thursday, the Trump administration forced Cameron Hamilton, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, out of his job. The move came one day after Hamilton told lawmakers that the agency, which the administration favors dismantling, shouldn’t be eliminated. “I do not believe it is in the best...
Plastics companies know about chemical recycling’s shortcomings — but still sell it as a solution
For years, the plastics industry’s narrative about recycling has been falling apart. Research and media investigations have revealed that it doesn’t make economic sense and that petrochemical companies have used it more as a public relations gambit than as a serious effort to mitigate the plastic pollution crisis. Conventional recycling...
Coming this summer: Record-breaking heat and plenty of hurricanes
With less than a month to go until summer, weather forecasters have been dropping some troubling news about what might be in store. AccuWeather had already predicted an especially active season — which begins June 1 — with up to 10 hurricanes out at sea, and its meteorologists are now...
A malaria-like disease spread by ticks is moving into Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia
Ellen Stromdahl was at a garden party in coastal Virginia in June 2023 when her friend Albert Duncan stood up from where he was sitting and abruptly fainted. Duncan is an outdoorsman in his mid-80s — still active and healthy for his age. Stromdahl, an entomologist who works for the...