Inside Climate News

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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The state’s latest lawsuit charges the administration with illegally targeting its authority to set tougher vehicle-emission standards. Ten attorneys general from states that follow those rules joined the suit.

By Liza Gross

President Donald Trump signed congressional resolutions Thursday morning to repeal California’s pioneering vehicle emissions standards, which he called a “disaster for this country.”

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Critics say it’s an unwarranted centralization of power that sidelines local officials, and they worry it will increase new fossil-fuel power plants.

By Jon Hurdle

Pennsylvania lawmakers heard conflicting views this week over whether the state should set up a board that oversees the siting and operation of new electric-generating plants amid national fears that growing demand for electricity will exceed supply.

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Republicans tout public lands sales they’ve pushed in the budget reconciliation bill as a solution to the housing crisis. Critics say the homes would be unaffordable, dangerous and environmentally degrading.

By Zoë Rom

A years-long effort to sell public lands has gained steam in this year’s federal budget negotiations as a proposed solution to the housing crisis, but critics say it’s just the latest attempt to render an unpopular political proposition more palatable.

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Toxic air spreads hundreds or even thousands of miles from where wildfires burn. Last week, Chicago felt the sting—and warnings weren’t enough to protect health.

By Leigh Giangreco

CHICAGO—As Canadian wildfire smoke moved south into the American Midwest last week, this city experienced not only some of the worst air quality in the United States, but in the entire world.

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Solar has been the fastest growing source of electricity in the U.S. Proposed federal cuts to tax credits could halt that progress.

By Carrie Klein

The loss of federal tax credits for rooftop solar could wreck the business that Allan O’Shea has built in Michigan. O’Shea, who runs his company along with his wife and sons, has been selling solar panels since the 1990s.

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An Alabama town is at risk of losing water access after it disputed rate rises and recent charges by a neighboring water board. The mayor says customers are being “bamboozled.”

By Lee Hedgepeth

CAMP HILL, Ala.—A dispute over soaring water bills for this town’s 1,000 residents has ended up in court this summer after Mayor Messiah Williams-Cole said that his town’s water contract has been violated by its neighbors in Dadeville, who control the flow.

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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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President Trump said he will begin dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency this year: “We want to bring it down to the state level.” 

By Dylan Baddour

The Trump administration will begin dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency later this year, the president announced on Tuesday, setting a tight timeframe for a breakup that many experts warned would likely harm the nation’s ability to respond to disasters.

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The Trump administration has long touted the downsizing and elimination of national monuments, and a legal opinion from the Department of Justice argues that the president has the power to do that.

By Wyatt Myskow

The Department of Justice, in an opinion issued Tuesday, argues President Donald Trump has the power to review and eliminate national monuments to make way for development and resource extraction on public lands—walking back a previous opinion from the department that found only Congress can dismantle a national monument.

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New research reveals a massive planned expansion of gas-fired electrical generation to power artificial intelligence and other heavy industries.

By Dylan Baddour

Companies plan to build more than 100 new gas-fired power plants in Texas in the next few years amid a race to meet enormous electrical demand from energy-hungry industries, according to a report released Wednesday by the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit.

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Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, thinks the state can shoulder the burden, but Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner warns of “bankrupting” states that suffer heavy hurricane damage.

By Charles Paullin

CHESTERFIELD, Va.—Virginia was one of several states in the Appalachian region slammed by Hurricane Helene’s rainfall last September. The storm caused the New River to crest at 31 feet a day after it battered the region. In one area of Damascus, homes were lifted up and washed away.

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At the U.N. Ocean Conference, Tonga’s princess called for recognition of whales’ legal rights. The move is one of several rights of nature initiatives happening at the conference.

By Katie Surma

Tonga, a Pacific Island nation with deep connections to the ocean and its non-human inhabitants, could become the first country in the world to recognize that whales have inherent rights.

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Strategies to combat heat stress have trade-offs, so context is key when trying them, experts say.

By Kiley Price

People across the United States are in for another scorcher of a summer, according to an outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Dozens of students and recent graduates have deepened their understanding of climate change reporting since the fellowship program began.

By ICN Editors

Eleven young journalists are joining Inside Climate News as reporting fellows this summer.

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Neighbors of the Pattison Co. quarry say the Department of Natural Resources is failing to meaningfully investigate the potential consequences on aquifers as it considers granting a mammoth water withdrawal permit.

By Anika Jane Beamer

The Pattison Co. quarry in Garnavillo, Iowa, pumps nearly 1 billion gallons of groundwater each year, pulling it from the bedrock in order to mine limestone, sandstone and silica sand used in oil fracking.

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On the anniversary of the Antiquities Act, the law that allows presidents to create monuments, locals gathered at sites across the nation to urge for their protection.

By Wyatt Myskow

IRONWOOD FOREST NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz.—Standing in front of a crowd of 100 people Saturday, Mike Quigley pointed out into the distance to a nearby copper mine. “We can have that,” he said. Then he gestured to the mountain behind him. “Or we can have this.”

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The Supreme Court declined to hear a religious freedom case against the Resolution Copper mine proposed for Oak Flat, but two more lawsuits against the project aim to prevent the federal government from transferring the land to the company.

By Wyatt Myskow

PHOENIX—A federal judge ruled Monday that the U.S. Forest Service cannot transfer land containing Oak Flat, a site sacred to the Western Apache, to a copper mining company until two cases against the project are settled after the Forest Service publishes its final environmental review for the project. The ruling resurrects the legal efforts by the tribe and environmental groups to stop the proposed mine.

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Ocean acidification has crossed “planetary boundaries” in some parts of the ocean, deepening a crisis facing the planet’s marine ecosystems.

By Georgina Gustin

A critical measure of the ocean’s health suggests that the world’s marine systems are in greater peril than scientists had previously realized and that parts of the ocean have already reached dangerous tipping points.

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Marine experts say governments must protect fragile ecosystems from destructive practices such as bottom trawling and deep sea mining to combat the climate crisis.

By Teresa Tomassoni

NICE, France—The deep sea—Earth’s largest and least-explored biome—is taking center stage at the United Nations Ocean conference this week, where marine experts are demanding world leaders end bottom trawling for fish and impose a moratorium on deep sea mining.

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As world leaders gather to address a global marine crisis at the UN Ocean Conference, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution demonstrate promising tech to monitor and restore dying reefs.

By Teresa Tomassoni

ST. JOHN, U.S. Virgin Islands—Thirty-five feet deep in clear turquoise waters, a three-foot-long yellow underwater robot maneuvers over a coral reef at a popular snorkeling site named Tektite.

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Renewable energy advocates point to a 2021 law and state dollars as reasons for optimism in a challenging time.

By Douglas J. Guth

Illinois saw unprecedented solar growth in 2024, adding 2.5 gigawatts of capacity to nearly double its total generation potential from the year before. But this year, the state faces some big speed bumps.

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Firefighters, heroic tenants and a change of winds spared a home on Quadro Vecchio Drive in Los Angeles during the January wildfires. What comes next for the home—and the families who love it—is complicated.

Story and photos by Nina Dietz

After the Fires*: Second in a series about health risks following the Los Angeles wildfires that destroyed Pacific Palisades and Altadena. This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.*

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Now that hurricane season has arrived, hundreds of waste lagoons could be flooded by climate-amplified storms, threatening yards, drinking water wells, rivers, creeks and wetlands.

By Lisa Sorg

As soon as the skies clear after a hurricane hits eastern North Carolina, Larry Baldwin climbs in the passenger seat of a single-engine plane, usually with his friend and pilot Rick Dove, and surveys the industrialized swine farms inundated with flood water.

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Planned programs to protect dunes and beaches on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens are eroded by broken promises from Trump’s EPA.

By Lauren Dalban

Adriana Jovanovic clambered cheerfully over the metal railing next to the dunes along Rockaway Beach. She landed in a patch of sand where she and her team, nicknamed the “dune squad,” had sown native roses and goldenrod among other native plants.

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