Trees tumbled, trucks flipped, and solar panels flew through the air in Guam as Typhoon Mawar pummeled the U.S. territory in the western Pacific on Wednesday morning. The slow-moving, Category 4 super typhoon unleashed hurricane-force winds, gusting over 150 miles per hour and leaving tens of thousands of people without power. Floods from a surging […]
Given America’s penchant for gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs, you might be surprised to learn that the country’s gasoline usage is going down, maybe for good. Even though only about 1 percent of cars on the road today are electric, some say the United States has already passed “peak gasoline” — the pivotal moment when […]
In 1984, when Andrew Bader was 5, his parents took him on a cross-country train from California to New York. It was a special trip, one of the last experiences Bader shared with both parents before they split up. Decades later, in 2021, Bader decided to reenact a portion of the trip with his father […]
The Biden administration has put a pause on plans to erect a copper mine in Arizona on land known as Oak Flat, a site sacred to the San Carlos Apache and other Indigenous nations in the area. The U.S. Forest Service has told a federal court it is not sure when an environmental impact statement […]
The 1987 Montreal Protocol, which phased out the production and use of chemicals that were depleting the ozone layer, has long been considered one of the most successful environmental treaties in history. New research finds that the global pact achieved another unforeseen benefit: delaying the melting of Arctic sea ice. In a study published Monday […]
Two decades ago, when the world was wising up to the threat of climate change, the Bush administration touted ethanol — a fuel usually made from corn — for its threefold promise: It would wean the country off foreign oil, line farmers’ pockets, and reduce carbon pollution. In 2007, Congress mandated that refiners nearly quintuple the […]
Of the 300 or so tribal nations with reservations in the United States, just 47 can say with certainty that their water meets the health and safety standards the federal government established 50 years ago. That means more than half a million people cannot be sure that the rivers and lakes they swim and fish […]
Before a bipartisan Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, cities pumped raw sewage into lakes, mining companies discharged acid waste into streams, and factories poured chemicals into rivers, which occasionally caught on fire. The Clean Water Act made such pollution illegal and expanded the federal government’s authority to regulate waterways across the country. […]
Beyond the fields of berries, grass seed, and wheat at Jacque Duyck Jones’s farm in Oregon, she can see distant plumes of exhaust spewing from factories in Hillsboro, just outside Portland. Years ago, Jones and her family didn’t worry much about industry creeping closer to their land. A 50-year-old state law that restricts urban growth, […]
Even America’s favorite pastime is not immune from climate change. A new study from researchers at Dartmouth College says that a warming atmosphere could be causing more home runs in professional baseball. The research, published last week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, looked at 100,000 Major League Baseball games and found that […]