Inside Climate News

The global goal of protecting 30 percent of the world’s ocean by 2030 remains paramount to attendees who call for accelerated action to halt biodiversity loss and climate change.

By Teresa Tomassoni

NICE, France—Resolute about their efforts to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s global ocean by 2030, world leaders agreed to sweeping but nonbinding commitments at last week’s United Nations Ocean Conference to designate vast stretches of their territorial waters as marine protected areas.

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Demand for low-carbon nuclear energy could boost uranium prospects on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. But residents of the small village of Elim fear a mine would pollute the river they depend on.

By Max Graham, Northern Journal

This story was published in partnership with Northern Journal and is the second in a two-story series.

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Researchers found that students with asthma in the Mon Valley were more likely to miss school on days with higher air pollution.

By Kiley Bense

In 2020, Dr. Deborah Gentile helped lead a study that showed children living near major sources of industrial pollution in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County were diagnosed with asthma at triple the national rate—and quadruple for African American children. Among the students with asthma in the study, 59 percent suffered from uncontrolled symptoms.

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Ahead of a hotter than normal summer, activists call for immediate action to protect workers from deadly temperatures. “We shouldn’t be waiting for Donald Trump,” one said.

By Liza Gross

A father died last summer. His son sat on the porch with a baseball glove waiting for a game he never got to play. The man didn’t die in a fire or a fall from a scaffold. He collapsed under the sun on a job site with no shade, no breaks and no water.

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Protesters are at the mercy of Mother Nature during outdoor demonstrations, which could become riskier as climate change accelerates.

By Kiley Price

Last Saturday, Laurie Marshall joined hundreds of people in El Paso, Texas, for the city’s “No Kings Day” protests, part of a nationwide series of actions in opposition of what organizers say is authoritarian behavior by the Trump administration.

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At a Bonn conference on climate, some participants say there’s a chance to make progress with the world’s biggest economy, America, no longer in the room.

By Bob Berwyn

For the first time since the United Nations started its annual climate talks in 1995, the United States is not sending an official government delegation to one of the biannual global negotiation sessions.

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Vancouver, British Columbia, home to dozens of companies searching the world for minerals, has a special interest in the northernmost U.S. state.

By Max Graham, Northern Journal

This story was published in partnership with Northern Journal and is the first in a two-story series.

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The biggest funders of fossil fuel expansion are U.S. banks that, like those in other countries, are retreating on their climate commitments.

By Georgina Gustin

The world’s biggest banks continue to bankroll the expansion of the fossil fuel industry and have largely retreated from their climate commitments, even as the world heads toward breaching thresholds for a livable planet.

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Almost 8,000 acres of forest in Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw Delta was in danger of becoming the site of a wood pellet mill. Instead it is now protected as the E.O. Wilson Land Between the Rivers Preserve, honoring the world-famous biologist and Alabama native.

By Dennis Pillion

Long before he was writing bestselling books that defined the understanding of biodiversity, Edward O. Wilson was a boy in Mobile, Ala., exploring the bayous and backwaters of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and marveling at its wildlife.

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As another punishing summer edges into Karachi, a Stanford researcher and a former climate minister confront the same crisis—extreme heat—from opposite ends of Pakistan’s most populous city.

By Aman Azhar

KARACHI, Pakistan—Inside a sprawling estate in Karachi’s elite Defense neighborhood, air conditioning hummed in a low-frequency buzz. Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s former federal minister for climate change, walked into a chilled study room and clutched her shawl tighter around her. “Turn this down,” she told an aide. “It’s freezing in here.”

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A newly identified species is already in danger of extinction. A proposed massive data center in Alabama would “nuke” its habitat, scientists say. 

By Lee Hedgepeth, Lanier Isom

BESSEMER, Ala.—A newly identified species of fish in central Alabama is already endangered due to human development, experts say. Now, plans to build a massive hyperscale data center could turn an already dire situation into an extinction event.

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Computing facilities require lots of water to operate, putting the burden of allocating resources on municipalities.

By Susan Cosier

Illinois is already a top destination for data centers, and more are coming. One small Chicago suburb alone has approved one large complex and has proposals for two more.

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Former utility executive and amateur wrestler Mark Ellis is exposing the little-known factors that raise electricity bills and threaten the energy transition. People across the country are starting to listen.

By Dan Gearino

SAN DIEGO—On a walk near his house, with views of the ocean, Mark Ellis speaks with urgency about how the utility business—the industry that long employed him—is harming the public with unsustainable rate increases.

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Red Feather, which works to improve housing on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, is just one of hundreds of groups that have had grants meant to help disadvantaged communities terminated by the Trump administration.

By Wyatt Myskow

TUBA CITY, Ariz.—When Carol Parrish built her first fire using her new wood-burning stove, tears streamed down her face.

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Record heat and volatile storm patterns have pushed the Chesapeake Bay’s health score down, sparking debate over recovery efforts and the need for granular monitoring.

By Aman Azhar

The Chesapeake Bay’s health has taken a downturn, according to a new report card, with the estuary relegated from a “C+” to a “C” as climate extremes and runaway pollution limit restoration efforts.

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The secretaries of energy and the interior and the EPA administrator joined Gov. Mike Dunleavy at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference to encourage more extraction of oil and gas in the state.

By Kate Furby

The Department of the Interior announced a proposal last week to cancel its protections of 13 million acres of Alaskan landinside a previously created reserve**.**

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A proposal in the state Legislature that would require a steep drop in non-recyclable packaging faces fierce opposition from businesses that would have to meet new package and recycling demands.

By Lauren Dalban

New York City knows it has a waste management problem. The average city household generated 1,899 pounds of trash in 2023. Only around 17 percent of the city’s curbside waste is recycled, despite efforts to change, such as the city’s 2020 plastic bag ban.

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Natural history museum collections can help backfill environmental pollution data, a new study argues.

By Kiley Price

In the early 20th century, more than a million miners in Britain made a daily descent into the depths of the Earth to extract coal, the country’s main source of energy at the time. Joining them on their journey to the harsh, dark underground: bright yellow canaries, about the size of a coffee cup.

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If cuts mean there’s not enough money for the state to regulate mines, the federal government could end up on the hook to do the job, Alabama’s chief mining regulator said.

By Lee Hedgepeth

JASPER, Ala.—If federal funds designated for Alabama’s mining regulator dry up—there is a 16 percent cut in state grants now being debated in Congress—director Kathy Love believes she has a quick and compelling rebuttal.

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To learn about how polar ice sheets melted during an ancient era, scientists examined fossil coral reefs in the tropics.

By Bob Berwyn

A new set of detailed clues gleaned from ancient fossil reefs on the Seychelle Islands shows an increasing likelihood that human-caused warming will raise the global average sea level at least 3 feet by 2100, at the high end of the projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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As the Trump administration makes the economic case for the repeal of climate policies, sobering numbers emerge on health and energy costs.

By Marianne Lavelle

In a week when the Trump administration moved forward on multiple fronts to repeal U.S. climate policies, a new analysis quantified the potential costs for public health, households and the economy—including a stunning $1.1 trillion reduction in U.S. gross domestic product by 2035.

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A longtime critic of U.S. biofuels says an expansion of biofuels policy under President Donald Trump would lead to more greenhouse gas emissions and fewer food crops.

By Georgina Gustin

The American Midwest is home to some of the richest, most productive farmland in the world, enabling its transformation into a vast corn- and soy-producing machine—a conversion spurred largely by decades-long policies that support the production of biofuels.

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The debate over the failed bills showed how business interests beat out some conservative lawmakers’ efforts to limit the wind and solar industries now seen as pivotal to the state’s energy landscape.

By Arcelia Martin

Four bills aimed at limiting renewable energy projects in Texas failed during the last legislative session as lawmakers, facing increasing energy demands, found constituents and industry leaders alike turning up in Austin to describe wind and solar projects as now pivotal to the state’s economy and grid.

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Costa Rica has protected 30 percent of its marine territory, and the small Central American country wants more care for the ocean, including a moratorium on deep sea mining.

By Teresa Tomassoni

Costa Rica is helping to shape the global agenda on marine protection and ocean governance this week as co-host, with France, of the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice.

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The New Jersey city will see another power plant built, a resource the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission decided was necessary to prevent outages in the face of storms.

By Emilie Lounsberry

The Ironbound neighborhood in Newark, N.J., has two distinct sections: an immigrant-rich area of rowhouses, ethnic restaurants and shops, and a clogged industrial zone with three power plants, the state’s largest incinerator and biggest sewage facility, a slew of factories and a near-constant parade of diesel trucks.

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