Favorite In the early morning hours last Friday, Nick climbed out of his bunk at Mountain View Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, and stepped into a pool of water. As Hurricane Helene unleashed a torrential downpour over Western North Carolina, Nick, whose story was relayed by a relative and who requested to go…
All posts tagged Environment
The Dirty Business of Clean Energy: The U.K. Power Company Polluting Small Towns Across the U.S
Favorite In partnership with All Sheila Mae Dobbins wants is an apology. In 2014, an industrial facility producing wood pellets opened so close to her house in Gloster, Mississippi, that she could overhear conversations between managers and staffers as they worked and smell the fumes the plant pumped into the air. Dobbins, a 59-year-old mother…
They Protested a Military Base Expansion. So the FBI Investigated Them as Terrorism Suspects.
Favorite The protest did not go off as planned. In February 2023, government recruiters came to the student union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, stacking National Security Agency-branded plastic cups and splaying out pamphlets about Navy fringe benefits. The activists had come to protest the expansion of Camp Grayling, already the largest National…
Grizzly Bear Poachers Flout the Endangered Species Act — and Get Away With It
Favorite Co-published in partnership with High Country News and Montana Free Press. It was hunting season in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, and the Marine sniper was alone on a backcountry trail more than an hour’s hike from his vehicle. He carried a camouflage Remington rifle and was in sight of an elk herd when a…
The Rise and Rollout of AOC’s Green New Deal
Favorite Ahead of the publication of “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” right-wing media outlets, in a series of reports in Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and so on, wildly distorted the book. One of the chapters they mangled most aggressively was on the rise of the…
Leading News Outlets Are Doing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Greenwashing
Favorite In a recent episode of the podcast “Powered By How,” award-winning journalist Nisha Pillai leads a discussion on the energy transition. Over the course of 25 minutes, the guests — a business psychologist, a renewable energy investor, and the head of an innovation lab — describe the challenges of scaling new technologies to combat…
Unproven “Advanced Recycling” Facilities Have Received Millions in Public Subsidies
Favorite When oil and gas companies first launched their campaign to promote recycling to the American public, they pitched the process as a viable and sustainable solution to the plastic pollution problem. More than three decades later, however, the vast majority of plastic waste still ends up incinerated or dumped, less than one-tenth is recycled,…
When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics
Favorite William Nordhaus speaks during a press conference after winning the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on Oct. 8, 2018.Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His…
Inside the Campaign That Put an Oil Boss in Charge of a Climate Summit
Favorite John Kerry looked on from the front row as Sultan Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates took to the stage in Abu Dhabi in January. Next to Kerry on the plush white chairs reserved for VIPs were senior figures from the Emirati, British, and U.S. governments. It was Al Jaber’s first public appearance…
They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste
Favorite Co-published in partnership with The Assembly and Carolina Public Press. Head south on state Highway 96, past a stretch of soybean crops and tobacco fields, and you’ll arrive in Zebulon, North Carolina, population 8,665. There, on a quiet stretch of Industrial Drive, sits a nondescript commercial building. It’s easy to miss; the name on…