Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation's first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, and in response, the Trump administration has sued, teeing up a legal battle over the most far-reaching crackdown on popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket.

It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything.

The expansion of cattle pastures, soybean farms and the exploitation of minerals and timber have long driven deforestation across the Amazon. While governments and markets have debated how to improve supply chains and curb environmental crime, a new and dangerous force has emerged in the region: Latin America’s powerful criminal organizations, fueled by drug trafficking profits.

Last week, Indigenous organizations from across the Amazon and Latin America sent a letter to the United Nations, warning that organized crime is driving violence and accelerating environmental destruction in rainforest communities. The letter, addressed to U.N. member states and agencies including the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said that expanding criminal networks threaten communities, ecosystems and local governance.

In conservative Utah, a coalition of cities and towns shows other communities how to bring new renewable energy to the electric grid in a unique way.

The share of power generated by wind and solar exceeded 30% in over a dozen states in 2025, which was a banner year for renewables even amid Trump’s attacks.

They can erase a rule from the Federal Register, but not the consequences written into soil, water, fire, and memory.

When the Trump administration finalized the rescission of the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, it did not merely erase a regulation from the federal register, it chose, in plain sight, to narrow the meaning of care. The rule it repealed, formally known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, had placed conservation, restoration, land health, and ecosystem resilience more firmly within the BLM’s multiple-use mission, which governs roughly 245 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of federal mineral estate, more land and subsurface mineral estate than any other federal agency manages in the United States.

14 May 2026 – CHATHAM, MA – When boats on Cape Cod lose their winter shrink wrap coats, a model program provides a way to recycles the material and keep huge mountains of plastic out of landfills.

While the wrapping keeps boats safe and secure during the cold snowy months it also leaves behind about 30 pounds of plastic waste – per boat. With Cape Cod’s population of boats that waste adds up to tons upon tons of plastic.

However, for the past several years a model program in Barnstable county flips what would be those mountains of bulky landfill waste into the recycle market instead.

When boats on Cape Cod lose their winter shrink wrap coats a model program provides a way to recycles the material and keep huge mountains of plastic out of landfills.

Diplomats in Vietnam warned Washington that halting USAID’s efforts to clean up the massive deposit of postwar pesticides would be a catastrophe for public health and relations with a key strategic partner in Asia.

Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.

And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.

The Defense Department has stopped once-routine reviews that even wind projects on private land need to pass, jeopardizing a power source that could help meet skyrocketing demand.

Even as Ocean Winds abandons two U.S. offshore wind leases, it’s staying the course on projects elsewhere, including a floating French array that flicked on this week.

AT&T has filed a suit in California seeking to preempt state requirements that it believes are preventing the company from retiring copper-based phone services, arguing that those requirements conflict with new FCC rules.

Alongside that suit, filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of California, AT&T is seeking permission from the FCC to discontinue plain old telephone service (POTS) in portions of California (the initial ask is for permission to discontinue 60% of its wire centers in the state, or about 360 wire centers) where it can offer a like-for-like alternative over fiber or wireless rather than via the operator's power-hungry copper networks. It could take until at least June for the FCC to undertake that process and come to a decision.

Susan Johnson, AT&T's senior EVP, transformation and global supply chain, told Light Reading that the 360 wire centers initially identified are in areas where AT&T has adequate fiber and wireless coverage to support a POTS replacement and address the concerns raised by state authorities. And the vast majority of customers in those areas, she added, also have three or more alternative service providers, she added. 

This past Sunday, I found myself walking across the snowless ski runs of Sierra-at-Tahoe in California, which sits on public land in the El Dorado National Forest. I had come to chase down a rumor.

Numerous Tahoe-area residents had told me the Forest Service’s plan to spray the controversial herbicide glyphosate—part of the agency’s forest restoration plan for about 75,000 acres scorched by the devastating 2021 Caldor Fire—had been delayed until 2028. A local news site, along with a major local environmental group—Keep Tahoe Blue—were telling people some version of that.

But I had my suspicions. I dug up maps from the Forest Service’s website, and headed to a spot where one of them indicated spraying might already be happening. It was strange to be standing in the middle of a ski run, with neither snow nor skiers around. But I knew if spraying were happening, it would be obvious.

Is waste heat from data centers affecting the weather? A new study says they are making their local environment hotter.

Data centers continue to spread across the U.S. landscape as demand for artificial intelligence, social media and digital services surges. Their impact on energy and water supply is well documented, but the first in a series of new studies has revealed another potential impact of data centers: They may be creating enough heat to affect temperatures around them and produce data center heat islands, or DCHIs.

What Is A Heat Island?

A new Gallup poll has found that most Americans would really prefer not to live next door to a data center.

For the first time, the polling organization asked people what they think of data centers, the massive computer-warehouses required to operate (among other things) large AI models.

Data centers need significant space, energy and water to operate, and they don’t provide many jobs relative to the investment they require. And they’re often unpleasant neighbors: their cooling systems can be noisy, and many include onsite gas turbines that belch black smoke into the air.

Gallup found seven out of ten Americans would be opposed to a data center in their backyard, with nearly half of those surveyed (48 percent) “strongly opposed” to data centers in their area.

We often laud China for its boom in renewable energy projects, but seem to ignore the fact that it’s still building coal-fired power plants at a faster pace than any other country.

Experts are questioning whether China's gains in green energy will be clouded by the black smoke billowing from its robust fleet of coal plants. Air pollution in China kills 2 million a year.

On the topic of China’s “green” energy boom, it’s also important to note that many of the critical mineral operations key to its renewable projects are harming workers and the environment across South America and Africa. This week, as Trump landed for talks in Beijing, the feeble US Congress released a paper on China’s “mineral mafia”. The report wasn’t driven so much by criticism of China’s practices but by imperial jealousy. 

Exclusive: Commission says alert would trigger coordinated international response that could help avoid millions dying.

The climate crisis should be declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization, or millions more people will die unnecessarily, leading international experts have said.

The independent pan-European commission on climate and health, which was convened by the WHO, concluded the climate crisis was such a worldwide threat to health that the WHO should declare it “a public health emergency of international concern” (Pheic).

The international spread of vector-borne disease, such as dengue and chikungunya, as well as the health impacts of extreme weather events, global heating, food insecurity and air pollution make a Pheic necessary, said the commission’s report, which will be presented to European ministers on Sunday before the WHO’s world health assembly starts on Monday.

Reporting Highlights

• Taken for Granted: The Trump administration has granted more than 180 polluting facilities nationwide a two-year pause on compliance with Clean Air Act rules.
• Deregulating by Email: The administration set up an email address through the Environmental Protection Agency where companies simply had to send an email to make their request.
• Silenced Science: The EPA’s air quality experts played no meaningful role in determining whether a facility should be handed an exemption to the rules, according to the agency.

In March 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask.

No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.

Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their companies money but pollute the air breathed by millions of Americans.

At least 3,000 pages of emails were sent to and from this inbox in the weeks that followed. ProPublica obtained them via public records requests, giving the most complete look to date at a key aspect of what Trump’s EPA calls the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”

In a weird stroke of good fortune, Trump’s misrule provides a perfect context to press the correct argument about climate change.

In the second Trump administration, Democrats have been backing away from climate change messaging. Joe Biden apparently got no credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, his marquee climate policy bill, and Trump has since unceremoniously disposed of it.

The Searchlight Institute, a centrist think tank, presented polling last September indicating that while most Americans think climate change is a problem, they don’t think it’s a major one. Therefore, the first step to solving climate change is “don’t say climate change.” Luckily, as Matt Huber points out at The New York Times, tremendous progress in renewable energy means one can accomplish a lot, emissions-wise, without mentioning climate change at all. The “heart of any affordability agenda—housing, energy, transportation—overlaps with the sectors we must decarbonize,” he writes. “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”

In what is the 11th Cybertruck recall, certain models of Elon Musk’s embattled pickup could experience a sudden, unexpected wheel separation, thanks to the wrong grease and loose nuts.

Last year, nearly all Cybertrucks had to be recalled because Tesla used the wrong glue on a steel trim panel that the carmaker said could become detached while driving. Now, yet another embarrassing recall exposes that the electric pickup could see wheels come off certain models due to the use of the wrong grease.

In what is the 11th Cybertruck recall so far, alongside concerns that the stainless steel trucks could be rusting, Tesla is recalling its Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) Cybertruck Long Range over faulty brake rotors. In a notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla states that “brake rotor stud holes may crack and allow the stud to separate from the wheel hub.”

Tesla's description of the defect is as follows: “On affected vehicles, higher severity road perturbations and cornering may strain the stud hole in the wheel rotor, causing cracks to form. If cracking propagates with continued use and strain, the wheel stud could eventually separate from the wheel hub.” In which case, some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving along could be disconcertingly overtaken by their own wheels.

Poor Cybertruckers have enough to contend with without worrying about the wheels on their “apocalypse-proof” pickups falling off, so thankfully, Tesla says it will completely replace the wheel hubs, rotors, and lug nuts free of charge for all 173 trucks affected by the recall.