Today, Thursday, February 12, 2026, the Trump administration did something that sounds like a bureaucratic footnote and lands like a gut punch. It moved to revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” the formal scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. If you do not live in the weeds of federal regulation, you could be forgiven for thinking this is a bureaucratic footnote. It is not, it is closer to pulling a load bearing beam from the house and calling it renovation.

Because the endangerment finding is not just paperwork. It is the moment the federal government looked at the world we live in and said, out loud, in law, what people already knew in their bodies. Carbon pollution harms us, it is not an abstract “externality.” It is a threat that enters the air, the blood, the lungs, the weather, and the daily routines of families. It shapes whether a kid can run at soccer practice in August without heat sickness, whether a grandmother can breathe on smoke days, whether a coastal town can keep its schools open after the next storm. Revoking it is an attempt to make that threat legally unseeable.

CEO Chris Urmson called it a “superhuman” moment, adding that Aurora’s trucks can now carry freight faster than what a human driver can legally accomplish.

Aurora’s self-driving trucks can now travel nonstop on a 1,000-mile route between Fort Worth and Phoenix — exceeding what a human driver can legally accomplish.

The distance, and the time it takes to travel it, offers up positive financial implications for Aurora — and any other company hoping to commercialize self-driving semitrucks.

It takes Aurora about 15 hours to carry freight in its driverless trucks on the 1,000-mile journey, according to the company. Human truck drivers take much longer to complete the same distance due to federal regulations that limit how long they can be behind the wheel.

David Stevenson has solar on his roof and drives a hybrid. How did he become the leader of the movement that helped Trump crush offshore wind farms?

David Stevenson stood in a circle of friends and colleagues in an Orlando, Florida, hotel lobby. Everyone but him wore a lapel pin that read ​“I ♥ Fossil Fuels.” 

“You want one?” asked a conference attendee, offering me the pin with a smirk. ​“It can be a souvenir.” 

Stevenson, with a soft wave, gestured to the man to leave me alone. I was the only credentialed member of a legacy news organization attending this gathering, covering it for South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The Post and Courier, where I worked at the time. One organizer of the meeting, the Heartland Institute’s 2023 International Conference on Climate Change, blamed the media’s ​“constant lies” for the ban on some members of the press.

But Stevenson, then a policy director for the conservative think tank the Caesar Rodney Institute, had personally advocated for me to cover the event. He favored transparency and had no problem talking to me for hours about his primary political cause: making sure no offshore wind farms were ever built in U.S. waters. 

BOURNE – A significant project is in development connected to the new Cape Cod Canal bridges. Enbridge, the energy company responsible for Algonquin Gas Transmission, says its pipeline in the Canal…

Experts warn of a growing gap between real-world climate risk and economic analysis, and urge immediate action to prevent catastrophic warming.

A photo booth company that caters to weddings, lobbying events in D.C., and engagement parties has exposed a cache of peoples’ photos, with the revellers likely unaware that their sometimes drunken antics have been collected and insecurely stored by the company for anyone to download. A security researcher who flagged the issue to 404 Media said the company, Curator Live, has not responded to his request to fix the issue.

The exposure, which also includes phone numbers, highlights how we can face data collection even at innocuous events like weddings. It’s also not even the only recent exposure by a photo booth company. TechCrunch reported on a similar issue with a different company in December.

NANTUCKET – State officials have announced $343,985 in grants to restore and protect wildlife habitat, including almost $150,000 in funding to support a pair of projects protecting pitch pine and scrub oak habitats in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. 

Edgartown’s Trustees of Reservations was awarded $75,000 to thin out pitch pine and scrub oak habitat at the Wasque Reservation on Chappaquiddick, with the goal of mitigating the risks associated with southern pine beetle outbreaks. 

The Nantucket Island Land Bank received a similar allotment of $72,143 to thin out pitch pine forests at Gardner Farm, a 112-acre parcel adjacent to Hummuck Pond. 

POLITICO’s E&E News reviewed the steady dismantling of scientific and regulatory oversight functions happening largely under the radar.

The Trump administration has squelched both external and internal oversight of EPA’s deregulatory agenda with moves that silence forums for critics, among other impacts.

The erosion of scrutiny over the agency’s unparalleled and aggressive wave of environmental rollbacks has happened largely under the radar and with less fanfare than its blockbuster deregulatory announcements.

Take the firing of EPA’s in-house watchdog, along with ousting — and thus far not replacing — members of an advisory committee that has the authority to study the scientific basis for proposed rollbacks.

BARNSTABLE – Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell has filed an amicus brief opposing the Trump Administration’s effort to halt development of the New England Wind 1 offshore wind project, which is expected to power more than 300,000 homes.

Supporting developer Avangrid Power, Campbell argued that completing the project is essential to meeting growing energy demand, especially during winter with rising heating bills. 

With warming set to pass the critical 1.5-degree limit, scientists are warning that the world is on course to trigger tipping points that would lead to cascading consequences — from the melting of ice sheets to the death of the Amazon rainforest — that could not be reversed.

A focus on addressing climate change, including by producing wind and solar energy, has not helped Americans keep their electricity and heat on during winter storms, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Friday. Ahead of another major cold snap on the East Coast, Wright briefed reporters at the agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., on the […]

A US Judge has allowed the last of the five frozen offshore wind projects to resume development after federal pauses due to unspecified security concerns.

However, Seth Feaster with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says the pause wasn’t without its impacts, potentially costing billions of dollars in energy bills for consumers as electricity rates continue to climb and wind power being a potential, unutilized relief valve. 

Agriculture experts warn of financial crisis for US farms due to Trump's trade war policies. Tariffs and deportations harming rural communities.

FALMOUTH – The Falmouth Town Manager’s office says there has been a positive identification of the Southern Pine Beetle, which officials say has become one of the most destructive forest pests in the Northeast.

Southern pine beetles were first detected in low numbers in Massachusetts in 2015, and they have been killing trees across Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

The administration then ripped away hundreds of millions of dollars for clean energy projects on tribal lands. Now tribes are fighting to salvage their work.

Donica Brady lost her job after the Trump administration cut grant funding to bring solar power across the country, including to tribal nations. She picked up multiple jobs to make ends meet. That, in addition to caring for children, whittled down Brady’s free time. So she invited reporter Ilana Newman over when she found a quiet moment—while skinning a deer—to talk about what the loss of solar funding meant to her and her community. 

“When the opportunity came up to work and help us get something established…it was huge,” she said.

Brady was one of many Indigenous people working to build energy sovereignty for tribal nations—work that continues despite the administration clawing back federal funds.