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The Senate permitting plan would cut emissions from power plants in the near term and help keep electricity prices down, a new analysis finds. Why it matters: The study from scholars at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank, offers some of the most detailed independent modeling yet of the bill's effects. - It will help inform lobbying and advocacy around the bill ahead of a test vote looming on Nov. 9.
Driving the news: The analysis models how the bill would affect the power sector compared with current law and policies. Among the findings from its central scenario:
Oct 28, 2026 Ongoing drought declarations and questions from local officials have brought new attention to Cape Cod’s water supply. In recent months, Cape Cod Commission staff have shared updates on water conditions and long-term planning efforts recommended in the 2025 Regional Policy Plan (RPP). One of the RPP’s key goals is to maintain a reliable supply of clean drinking water while protecting the Cape’s ponds, streams, and coastal waters. Although we often talk about the aquifer as one system, Cape Cod’s groundwater is made up of six separate "lenses," which are distinct mounds of underground water separated by natural barriers. While they function similarly, they don’t naturally connect. Water moves between them only when we pump and pipe it for drinking water.
A Lancet report warns climate change is a global health emergency: heat-related deaths have soared, while droughts, floods and fires intensify. With COP31 approaching, will leaders put health—and a rapid shift from fossil fuels—at the heart of climate action?
Thirty-six governors are on the ballot this fall. Many of them are running, at least in part, on energy costs. Data centers have handed them a live issue in the form of a visible, concentrated load. If managed well, data center load growth could lower electricity costs, but in most cases it’s driving up household bills because of old habits and decades of misaligned incentives. The question every candidate has to answer is whether they have the staff capable of wrestling with the utility companies. Abigail Spanberger does. She won Virginia with about 57% of the vote on an “Affordable Virginia Plan” that was specific in a way most energy platforms are not. She connected electricity costs to healthcare costs. Virginia electricity prices had climbed roughly 6.7% over the prior year, and voters in the state with the world’s largest data center market were worried rates could spike higher. Her campaign promise had a built-in problem, however: the companies that set the bill don’t share the goal. A utility’s affordability goal and a governor’s are not the same thing. The governor is measured by what a household pays each month. A regulated utility is measured by how much capital it can put into its rate base and earn a return on. Most days these issues are not even noticed by the governor because they are not a big political issue. Data centers have put these issues front and center.
MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — Environmentalists, Indigenous groups and climate scientists are celebrating the reelection in Brazil of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which brings the prospect of a continued focus on stopping the illegal cutting of the Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world. But supporters also warned that a Congress increasingly dominated by the far right and the agribusiness caucus could undermine those efforts to protect the forest and combat climate change. Lula defeated Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, in Sunday's runoff with 51.78% of the vote to 48.21%. After trailing in the first round, Lula staged a comeback to win by 4.4 million votes.
The destructive 1982-83 El Niño, then the strongest on record, eroded cliffs, leaving homes hanging precariously over the edges. A coastal scientist explains the escalating risks. Along the central coast, waves and high-tide flooding eroded bluffs. In Pacifica, just outside San Francisco, the edge of a sandy cliff lost over 65 feet as it failed, collapsing onto the beach and forcing the relocation of a two-story building and removal of an entire row of mobile homes. This area of high but weak bluffs continued to erode over the subsequent decades, forcing the demolition of bluff-top homes and apartments. The El Niño now building in 2026-27 is forecast to be even stronger, and coastal homes are already seeing damage. I have studied coastal geology and oceanography in California for nearly six decades. With the conditions expected this year, coastal flooding, coastal erosion and landslides are likely, and more dramatic cliff collapses wouldn’t be a surprise, though every El Niño is different.
Within sight of a southeast Texas middle school stands a chemical plant that President Trump excused from new federal rules intended to curb its cancer-causing pollution. About a 30-minute drive from Pittsburgh, a steel-making facility has spewed carcinogenic chemicals near homes for years. Mr. Trump gave it a similar waiver from recent clean-air rules. And on the outskirts of Richmond, Va., the owners of an industrial warehouse emailed the Trump administration asking for their own waiver. Their wish was granted. Nine months later, the facility accidentally released a large plume of carcinogenic gas into the community. In total, since taking office again, Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from clean-air regulations that were going into effect.
The global transition to renewable energy often presents a stark environmental paradox: to save the planet with clean power, we must sometimes clear the very ecosystems that sustain it. Conventional ground-mounted solar farms can require extensive land clearing, a practice that can eliminate up to 98 percent of tree biomass. In response, South Korea is pioneering a visionary approach that harmonizes energy production with ecological preservation through the development of photovoltaic “solar trees.” Elevated PV Arrays Inside Living Forests Instead of razing forests, South Korean innovators are integrating solar technology directly into them.
Senior executives have resigned from a $25 billion US liquefied natural gas venture after its former chief executive alleged that Russian energy group Novatek was secretly financing the project and controlling its strategic direction without the necessary US authorization, according to a report by the Financial Times (FT).
Earlier in October, Finnish authorities ordered Google’s affiliate data center developer Tuike Finland Oy to immediately suspend the illegal cutting of some 1,300 acres of forest. The tech giant was given a week to draft a report explaining its actions, which soon became a flashpoint for Europe’s growing outrage over the data center boom. As the anger grew, reporters descended on the scene — and what they found is a clear-cut example of the AI revolution’s impact on the environment. Google's cut-first pay-later approach to Finland's boreal forests is leaving wild fauna without a place to call home. “We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” 53-year-old Otanmäki resident Anni Ranta told the Guardian. “They fled.” “I don’t want them here,” she continued, speaking of Google’s data centers. “I don’t want them in Finland at all. I don’t like the whole idea of AI and the world changing and the way it’s changing. It’s going too fast, too soon.”
The Trump administration’s campaign to compel hundreds of billions of dollars of new military appropriations out of Congress has been stalled in the Senate for months. The Trump administration’s campaign to compel hundreds of billions of dollars of new military appropriations out of Congress, citing new materiel needs downstream of its unsanctioned Iran War, has been stalled in the Senate for months. But one unexpected winner has emerged from the congressional stalemate over defense spending: an obscure investment office in the Pentagon known as the Economic Defense Unit (EDU). Earlier this year, Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg stood up the EDU and appointed George Kollitides, a one-time executive at Feinberg’s former private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, who recently was the subject of a ProPublica investigation for his role in steering a $350 million Department of Defense contract to a consulting firm where he was a partner until just weeks ago. The office was created by way of a memo from the deputy secretary, and has been operating without congressional authorization for months, taking center stage in the administration’s multi-billion-dollar effort to prop up domestic military and energy supply chains. Those deals have been heavily scrutinized for the ways they’ve favored well-connected Wall Street firms and have been set up to benefit the president and his inner circle.
A federal court in New York definitively ruled that the Office of Personnel Management violated the law when it disclosed millions of federal employee records to DOGE agents. The court will decide the remedy at a later date.
As electricity demand surges, data centers proliferate, utilities seek major infrastructure investments, and households confront higher bills, our states and systems are woefully unprepared. Consumers are rightfully wondering who will pay for, benefit from, and make decisions about the evolving U.S. electricity system. States have multiple policy options to meet consumer demands for affordability, agency, and accountability — but they are leaving too many of those options on the table. Almost every state earned a failing grade on ILSR’s 2026 Community Power Scorecard, which grades all 50 states and D.C. on policies that give communities and individuals greater control over their energy sources and protect ratepayers from abuses of utility monopoly power.
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Oct 28, 2026 The Town of Truro has taken a significant step in its long-standing commitment to climate action by adopting its first Climate Action & Resilience Plan, making it the second town on Cape Cod to develop a municipal climate action plan this year. The plan provides a structured roadmap to help Truro visualize, prioritize, and implement the strategies needed to meet its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Truro’s planning process combined technical analysis with extensive community engagement. Throughout 2025, the Truro Climate Action Committee reviewed climate action plans from across Massachusetts, including Eastham’s, as well as the Cape Cod Climate Action Plan and the state’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan. These documents provided useful frameworks and comparative insights. Truro’s team then translated statewide and regional strategies into actions tailored to the town’s size, needs, and capacity.
Exceptionally high tides flooded neighborhoods in Newport Beach and Long Beach this week. Experts say even higher ones are likely headed our way in the next few months. The tide gauge in San Pedro read 8.18 feet Tuesday morning, its highest measurement since records began more than a century ago, after already setting a new record on Monday. The previous record of 7.93 feet was set in 2005. Records were also broken at tide gauges in La Jolla and Santa Barbara.
"We are supercharging the ocean and the atmosphere," a WMO leader said of record greenhouse gas levels before COP31. "That means that heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and rainstorms are intensifying faster than our historical baselines prepared us for."
"The ultra-rich are setting the planet on fire and then charging the rest of us for the extinguishers." said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International’s executive director. “They profit from the pollution. They profit from the disaster. And they profit again from the clean-up.” The richest 0.1% of humanity generates more planet-heating carbon pollution than nearly half of the global population combined, according to an Oxfam analysis released late Monday as world leaders prepared to gather in Türkiye next month for the United Nations climate summit. The new analysis provides an updated look at global elites’ outsized contribution to a climate crisis that disproportionately impacts the poorest segments of the global population through increasingly devastating heatwaves, droughts, flooding, and other extreme weather, causing death, destruction, and mass displacement worldwide.
A wolf leaves Yellowstone National Park. It follows the scent of elk, crosses an invisible boundary and enters Montana. Nothing in the landscape tells it that the rules have changed. Yet an animal protected and studied inside the park can now legally be shot or trapped. We call Yellowstone’s wolf restoration a conservation triumph. Why, then, do we permit the killing of the very animals we worked so hard to bring back?
With diesel prices up sharply and digital plants speeding up training, the Redmond, Wash., startup is taking on new crops and new customers for its solar-powered weeding robots.
The Trump administration is threatening to cut out the public and speed the construction of AI data centers and their polluting power plants. The administration’s response to growing opposition to AI data centers has been to limit the public’s right to be heard, and to weaken environmental regulations. Last year, the administration vowed to repeal or weaken any regulations that hinder AI deployment and to promote the rapid buildout of data centers across the United States. The assault on the Clean Air Act on behalf of AI data centers escalated in recent months, including four actions that would severely undermine key pollution protections, exclude the public, and speed the construction of data centers and the power plants that supply their electricity.
15 October 2026 - CAPE COD, MA - As Massachusetts Cranberry Month rolls out, the economic impact of the tiny red berry continues on Cape Cod, where the whole industry began. What are cranberry bogs like in the fall? Cape Cod fall means the reds and golds … of a cranberry bog. As the days cool, the iconic native berry ripens and the world watches. “This is the glorious part, that is the most photogenic “ said Dave Ross owner/operator of Cape Cod Cranberry Realty Trust – based in West Barnstable and grower of cranberries in multiple bogs across Cape Cod. What is the economic impact of cranberries on Cape Cod?
Most smartphone traffic already runs over WiFi, and Musk is planning a terrestrial network. Telcos may keep carrying the traffic while losing the customer. During SpaceX’s Q3 2026 earnings call, Elon Musk made a comment that should concern mobile operators. “We will also have direct-to-cell, high-bandwidth direct-to-cell capability, and we will be building out our terrestrial network.” He was not describing Starlink as a satellite-only mobile service. He was describing a future network that combines space and ground infrastructure, with broad connectivity anywhere SpaceX is allowed to operate.
The root cause of Elon Musk’s ascent to de facto defense secretary is the federal government’s practice of contracting out the work it had formerly done itself. This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision to block Ukraine from the high-speed Starlink satellite alerts that enabled it to intercept Russian missiles and drones was made by SpaceX owner Elon Musk, either in conjunction with President Trump or in advance of Trump’s support for the action. Whichever version is more correct, Musk is either making or carrying out a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign and military policy—something that no private citizen has ever done in our 250-year history. Winchester made rifles, but it didn’t order the army to use them against native tribes. Boeing made the B-29s, but it didn’t order them to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the army purchased the Winchesters, and the Air Force, the B-29s, their manufacturers weren’t at the table or in the room where government leaders decided where, when, how—and in the case of Ukraine and Russia, why—they would or wouldn’t be deployed. They weren’t part of the kind of fundamental reorientation of foreign policy that Trump has wrought, in which his narcissistic and thuggish impulses have eclipsed the democratic affinities by which the U.S., at its all too intermittent best, has dealt with other nations. This month, that has meant Musk has played a key role in attempting to turn the tide in Russia’s favor in its war on Ukraine. This reductio ad absurdum of contracting out is also the result, of course, of the mind-meld between Trump and Musk, who, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out last week, is every bit as racist, xenophobic, and self-interested as our president.
Once again, Consumer Reports finds that the top Internet service providers are independently-owned, locally-owned, or publicly-owned ISPs. The magazine’s 2026 survey of its 105,000 members found that “a handful of [I]nternet service providers (ISPs) received stellar ratings and earned CR’s Recommended badge. But that was the exception, especially when it comes to value.” Of the 68 companies ranked, most "received middling or worse marks" with the "low scorers includ(ing) some of the country’s biggest ISPs, such as Cox, Optimum (Altice), Spectrum (Charter), and Xfinity (Comcast).” Consumer Reports finds that the top Internet service providers are independently-owned, locally-owned, or publicly-owned ISPs. Among the top 10 rated ISPs were Firefly Fiber Broadband, a subsidiary of the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative offering fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service to roughly 48,000 rural households in its region.
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