Mexico City’s small urban farms — known locally as chinampas — practice a sort of agriculture in reverse: instead of bringing water to land as most farms do, chinampas bring land to water. The chinampas in use today go back about a thousand years, to when Aztec farmers began building rectangular fields on top of…
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it would stop tracking the cost of the country’s most expensive disasters, those which cause at least $1 billion in damage. The move would leave insurance companies, researchers and government policymakers without information to help understand the patterns of major disasters like hurricanes, drought or wildfires,…
In 2023, sewage plants in Maryland started to make a troubling discovery. Harmful “forever chemicals” were contaminating the state’s sewage, much of which is turned into fertilizer and spread on farmland. To protect its food and drinking water, Maryland has started restricting the use of fertilizer made from sewage sludge. At the same time, a…
A coalition of states led by Washington, Colorado and California sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, charging that it was unlawfully withholding billions of dollars allocated by Congress for electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law provided $5 billion to states to build stations around the country. So far, 71…
Eighteen states sued the Trump administration Monday over its halting of permits for wind-energy projects, arguing that its actions posed an existential threat to the burgeoning industry. “This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” said Attorney General Letitia James of New York, which is one of…
China, the world’s clean-energy juggernaut, faces a rival right next door. And one of its top customers, no less. India, a big buyer of Chinese solar panels and electric vehicle batteries, is using a raft of government incentives to make more green gear at home. It is driven not just by the need to satisfy…
When Don Pike takes his daily walk, he laces up his brown hiking boots, grabs his walking stick and bucket hat and heads outside. Ten feet later, he carefully slips past barbed wire and enters the Tonto National Forest. Unlike other parts of the Tonto, where the ground between native plants and trees is covered…
Vermont made history last year when it enacted the country’s first climate superfund law. It’s designed to let the state recover money from fossil fuel companies to help pay the rising costs of climate change. If the law can survive intensifying legal challenges, that is. On Thursday, the Justice Department filed federal lawsuits against Vermont…
The Trump administration last week dismissed the nearly 400 authors of the nation’s flagship climate report, saying in an email that the scope of the report was being reviewed. The move threw the future of the report, known as the National Climate Assessment, into limbo. On Friday, two major U.S. scientific organizations, the American Geophysical…
Few voters have as much power over climate change as an Australian citizen. Among democracies, only the United States and Canada come close to Australia in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emissions. The country is also one of the world’s biggest exporters of planet-warming fossil fuels, selling coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, as…