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Boston and Cambridge’s decades-old district energy system is being retooled to shift away from gas and toward heat pumps and electric boilers.
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Experts warn of a global surge in PFAS production driven by AI and data centers.
As a United Nations expert reiterated a call for a global ban on nonessential uses of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a Swedish nonprofit on Monday released research on how rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and related data centers are helping to drive a surge in PFAS production.
Often called “forever chemicals” because they don’t easily break down in human bodies or the environment, PFAS are tied to range of health issues, including various cancers. For months, advocacy groups, journalists, and researchers have stressed that “data centers have a PFAS problem.”
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Big manufacturers planning to produce more of the forever chemicals to meet demand from datacentres.
Pfas companies are launching a “tidal wave” of forever chemicals production to meet demand from the AI industry, a campaign organisation has warned.
Despite alarm over the chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, a survey of the 10 biggest manufacturers found most had plans to increase production. Many frame their investments around the “AI revolution”, because of the role Pfas play in semiconductor production and next-generation datacentre cooling systems.
But opponents warn that the chemicals, which never degrade in nature, are a ticking timebomb for human and planetary health. They say increased production risks undermining nascent moves to restrict Pfas in Europe, the UK and parts of the US.
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A federal appellate court rejected the Trump administration's push to keep an aging Michigan coal plant open, a decision cheered by climate advocates fighting a range of similar orders.
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How batteries, grid connections and AI are turning energy from a network cost into an infrastructure asset.
What got me looking at this was Verizon.
During Verizon’s second-quarter call, Dan Schulman explained that the company is removing old copper equipment from thousands of central offices. That is freeing up buildings that already have power, permits, backup systems, and network connections. Verizon is starting to reuse some of them as small data centers for AI inference, and Schulman said an early trial sold out its available capacity within 24 hours.
At Goldman Sachs Communacopia this week, he went further. Verizon is already signing agreements around some of those decommissioned sites and expects the business to start generating noticeable revenue from inference and edge computing next year.
Mobile operators probably consumed around 310 TWh of electricity in 2025, roughly 1% of global electricity use, and spent around $52 billion on energy. Operators also consume billions of liters of diesel and gasoline every year, while networks account for more than three-quarters of their electricity use.
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A $2.5 billion factory in Georgia now produces solar panels from raw wafer to finished product, a milestone for U.S. manufacturing in an industry China has dominated for over a decade.
Inside the vast QCells factory in Cartersville, Georgia, workers and a bevy of robots move ultra-thin slices of polysilicon through a lengthy series of machines and chemical baths to get what are known as wafers.
“The $2.5 billion, the 3.5 million gallons of water, the 90 megawatts of power, the 60 tons of chemicals on site, and all of the football fields worth of infrastructure you've seen is to arrive at this,” said Scott Bell, vice president of external affairs at QCells, holding up one of the paper-thin blue wafers.
It’s the basic building block of a solar panel.
In June, the plant, about an hour northwest of Atlanta, expanded from assembling the major components of solar panels to bringing the whole production process under one roof. It’s a major milestone for the U.S. solar industry.
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El Niño can affect agriculture, marine life and economies in profound ways, including slowing commerce at the Panama Canal. This El Niño is likely to be the strongest in over a century.
El Niño is here, and forecasters warn that it’s likely to be bigger and stronger in 2026-27 than any El Niño event recorded in at least 150 years.
During strong El Niños, global air and ocean temperatures spike, and precipitation patterns shift dramatically – flooding rains deluge places that are normally dry, and drought strikes some of the wettest locations on earth. With this El Niño arriving on top of already high global ocean and air temperatures, it carries the potential for extraordinary impacts to millions of lives throughout the world. Globally, August 2026 was the hottest month on record, according to data from Europe’s Copernicus climate service.
Those effects are already showing up in Central and South America.
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10 September 2026 - CHATHAM, MA - Chatham Harvesters is the only fishing producer owned co-op in Massachusetts - and it wants to bring a counterbalance to the current seafood industry model of large centralized buyers and processors, focusing instead on a model where local fish gets eaten locally. What is Chatham Harvesters?Brett Tolley, co-founder and general manager of Chatham Harvesters says local fish have a bright – and tasty – future. “We really honed in on doing right by our Cape Cod community, feeding people the best fish that we got,” he said.
Chatham Harvesters is the only fishing producer coop in the state – and a company that suggests a new path for sustainable fishing fleets, fishing communities, consumers, and the ocean. If it seems like a big mission, it is. What does the cooperative do?
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A massive solar flare could seriously disrupt life on Earth – but new NASA missions and others in development will help monitor the Sun.
Most days, you can look up and see the Sun shining above. Even if it’s hidden behind clouds, you know it’s there, lighting up the sky. But while the Sun’s light might be relatively constant, its surface is surprisingly active. If you hopped on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe for a closeup view of the Sun, you might see spurts of charged gas called solar flares coming off its surface, or dramatic explosions called coronal mass ejections. These events travel outward from the Sun through space, and sometimes they interact with Earth’s magnetic field, causing space weather.
This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is tracking several coronal mass ejections that could lead to a minor geomagnetic storm in Earth’s atmosphere. People in Canada and the northern United States may be able to see an aurora the evening of Sept. 9, 2026.
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Today, at a recorded National Coal Council meeting, Trump EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the quiet part out loud to executives from coal and mining companies in the room:
“Many of the items that were on your wish list are now done.” While it’s been obvious that the Trump administration has been prioritizing the coal industry’s profits over the American people’s health and wallets for some time, it’s never been stated this directly and blatantly.
Administrator Zeldin also said his agency is "proud to do this work to protect, advance beautiful clean coal across the United States."
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Seattle-area startup targets early 2027 for first Pathfinder launch, with bigger Nova Block 2 due for 2029 debut.
Stoke Space says it has raised roughly $1 billion to get ready for the first launch of its fully reusable Nova rocket — and to scale up the rocket’s design for even bigger payloads.
To accommodate its grander ambitions, the Kent, Wash.-based startup is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, 175 miles to the east.
“We have confidence in the foundation that we’ve laid today, and now it’s time to scale,” Stoke Space CEO and co-founder Andy Lapsa told GeekWire.
The newly announced Series E financing round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and other investors.
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A watchdog group representing 9/11 first responders and survivors applauded New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday as his administration released a trove of long-buried files that shed new light on how New Yorkers were misled about air quality and health risks in the wake of the terrorist attack.
“I want to thank Mayor Mamdani for being the mayor, after 25 years, who finally begins to answer the question, ‘What did the city know about the dangers from the toxic cloud at ground zero, and when did it know it?’” said Benjamin Chevat, a longtime advocate for programs to help survivors and first responders, who leads the group 9/11 Health Watch.
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The designation could have far-reaching implications for frontier labs' products and for the EU's own rulebook, write Mathias Vermeulen and Laureline Lemoine.
On August 31, the European Commission designated OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE), placing the chatbot under the Digital Services Act's (DSA) most stringent tier of obligations. This decision was long in the making – in fact, we explored different options for how the EC could do this in an extensive paper three years ago.
This designation could have far-reaching implications, both for frontier labs' products and for the EU's own rulebook. Many of the questions it raises will only be answered as the Commission's supervision unfolds over the coming months.
The decision confirms the DSA's technological neutrality, or at least its ability to bring new kinds of services, ones that didn't exist when it was drafted, within scope.
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Wendell Berry called out the cruelty of the masters of the modern world, especially the ways they denigrated his neighbors and devalued the land in rural America.
But he understood that we all are implicated in the degradation of the ecosystems on which our own lives depend. He connected the real costs of our many labor-saving and pleasure-seeking devices to that degradation.
Yes, there are corrupt individuals and corrupting social systems to hold accountable, but part of the problem is our species’ acquisitiveness—what Berry’s mentor Wallace Stegner called “the things that once possessed could not be done without.”
In a 1989 essay, Berry didn’t exempt himself from this critique of the destructive habits that draw down the ecological capital of the planet.
“I still fly on airplanes, which have nothing to recommend them but speed; they are inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary,” he wrote. “I still cut my wood with a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults of an airplane, except it does not fly.”
We need to live with less, which is surprisingly hard.
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In what is being described as "another gift to the fossil fuel industry," the Trump administration plans to end rules limiting the release of planet-heating emissions from power plants that burn coal and gas.
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Google's emissions rose 48% since 2019, driven by AI energy demands, putting its 2030 net-zero goal under serious pressure.
Google published its 2024 Environmental Report in July 2024, and the headline number is difficult to spin: total greenhouse-gas emissions reached approximately 14.3 million metric tons of CO2e in 2023, up 48% from 2019, the company’s own baseline for its net-zero target. That 13% single-year jump came while Google was running some of the most energy-efficient data centers globally.
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Bill Gates-backed US nuclear fusion firm Commonwealth Fusion Systems has secured an investment from South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group to help build its commercial power stations. The funding was completed as part of a recent $1 billion capital raise, which will allow both organisations to explore engineering partnerships for commercial fusion power stations known as ARC.
“Fusion energy has the potential to play an important role in addressing growing global energy demand while supporting a more sustainable future,” said Hokeun Chung, Executive Vice President of Hyundai Motor Group.
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Ookla data identifies the individual Starlink satellites that powered Spain's emergency satellite service during its record wildfires, revealing how, where, and for whom the direct-to-cell layer worked.
In the last week of July 2026, the Sierra Oeste fire complex burned more than 60,000 hectares across Ávila, Madrid and Toledo. Officials described it as Spain’s largest wildfire on record, prompting the country’s first national wildfire emergency and knocking out mobile coverage across dozens of rural communities. Within 48 hours, MasOrange and Starlink opened their five-month-old satellite direct-to-device (D2D) pilot, free of charge, to Movistar customers as well as MasOrange’s own, under an exceptional permit from Spain’s telecoms ministry.
This analysis reconstructs the D2D activation from the device side using Ookla® background signal scan data, cross-checked against the constellation’s published orbital elements, official fire perimeters from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, and crowdsourced outage reports from Downdetector.
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Five newspaper publishers in New York City agreed in 1846 to pool resources in order to speed the delivery of news about the U.S. war with Mexico using a pony-express relay through Alabama to a telegraph office. Those beginnings gave birth to an organization that in many ways became the backbone of the news industry. The AP claims some 4 billion people, nearly half of the world’s population, see news produced by the company on a typical day.
Many don’t realize that.
For most of its history, the AP has effectively been a utility, providing material for other news outlets to print, broadcast or carry online, its journalists largely anonymous. AP reporters weren’t even identified with bylines until World War I. But the company has chronicled the nation’s big moments for much of the 250-year history of the American republic.
Although horses long since gave way to the internet, the journalism remains. Here are some stories behind the stories the AP has chronicled.
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September 2026 - CAPE COD, MA - My truck splashes through a puddle on a street where I have a landscaping project. A puddle isn’t news, but when it hasn’t rained lately and drought conditions are in effect, a puddle concerns me.
What’s even more disheartening is that this puddle is only about three houses back from the beach. A portion of the large lawn on the property where I am working, opposite that puddle, is like walking through a marsh. It’s wet, splashy and soggy but the grass is thick and green.
If you saw this home in a photograph, you might think it is the Pacific Northwest, but we’re here on arid Cape Cod. What’s wrong with this picture?What’s wrong with this picture?
Before these houses were built, this seaside area would likely have been a woodland of Oak and Pitch Pine with undershrubs like blueberry, beach plum, bayberry, huckleberry, maybe some sweet fern and asters. A grassy-looking groundcover, sedge, would have covered the ground. Sedge still grows in most of our wild places. Drought or no drought, these plants would have survived and thrived in the unrelenting salty wind and dry sandy soil.
But in our effort to make the Cape a sparkling emerald wonderland, we’ve largely relegated what naturally grows here to the forgotten edges of our neighborhoods. And that’s a problem because our verdant, unnatural landscapes are wholly dependent on water — and a lot of it.
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11 September 2026 -- CAPE COD, MA -- Cape Cod’s long-term drought has highlighted the patchwork of public water providers across the Cape Cod and the future need for coordination.
Does Cape Cod have multiple water suppliers?
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The Hawaiian Islands rarely see significant hurricane damage, but they just experienced the effects of their second hurricane in a year as Hurricane Lowell’s eyewall brushed Niihau, west of Kauai, on Sept. 8, 2026.
The hurricane brought heavy downpours, high surf and hurricane-force wind gusts that pounded both islands, knocking out power and flooding roads. Tropical storm conditions reached as far as Honolulu on the island of Oahu.
Lowell was the 14th named Pacific storm of 2026 and the fifth hurricane. The one that formed right after it, Hurricane Marie, sent big waves to Southern California, eroding coastal areas, and the Pacific hurricane season doesn’t end until Nov. 30. By some metrics, the season has had the most active start since 2021. In August, a near-miss by Hurricane Lala brought hurricane-force winds to the Hawaii’s Big Island for the first time since 1871.
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California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.
“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.
The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution and delivery center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.
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The Exploration Company (TEC) has raised $450 million to build reusable spacecraft, in what it describes as “the largest-ever Series C by a European space company.”
The queue to send objects into orbit is growing, but space infrastructure isn’t keeping up with demand. As the realization sinks in that Elon Musk’s SpaceX can’t be the sole answer, other companies are raising their hand — and money.
These include The Exploration Company (TEC), which operates out of Germany, France, Luxembourg, Spain, and Italy, and which has raised $450 million in what it describes as “the largest-ever Series C by a European space company.” But the race is global, with U.S.-based rival Stoke Space currently raising a $1 billion Series E round.
Rivalry aside, these rounds show that investors on both sides of the Atlantic are willing to back companies seeking to build reusable spacecraft. That’s a category pioneered by SpaceX, but that many players, both public and private, now believe it shouldn’t solely control as space gains strategic importance.
These sovereignty-related concerns create extra tailwinds for an EU-headquartered company like TEC. Led by Hélène Huby, a French national who spent two decades at Airbus and ArianeGroup, the company intends to use its funding to build the foundation for a reusable European heavy-lift launcher offering an affordable alternative to SpaceX.
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The obligations promise more accountability, but applying them to AI chatbots and gaming platforms raises new questions, writes Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat.
On August 31, the European Commission designated OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE) and named Roblox and Reddit Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) under the Digital Services Act (DSA). Four months from now, these services will have to comply with additional obligations, including that they must:
These new requirements kick in anytime an online platform or search engine becomes “very large,” meaning that it reaches at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU. The implications are substantial, particularly for transparency.
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Every time I write about China’s dirty energy consumption, there’s bound to be a reader or two who thinks I’m picking a fight. They say China is making major gains in renewables and that it’s only burning fossil fuels for now because the economy is still growing. If anything, these critics point the finger at the West, which consumes the goods China produces. So it’s the West’s fault, not the fact that China is (by choice) an integral part of the global capitalist economy. Yes, China is rolling out renewables at an amazing pace. There’s no denying it. And as far as individual consumption is concerned, the average person in the US burns a hell of a lot more fossil fuels, and the West is overwhelmingly responsible for getting us in this mess. The rub, however, is that, on a country-wide scale, China is now by far the largest contributor of fossil fuel emissions (roughly one-third of global fossil fuel and industrial CO2 emissions), and its government (not a typical Chinese citizen) plays an outsized role, directly dictating how its economy operates.
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