The practice dates back thousands of years among Indigenous tribes in the U.S., and it might hold the key to sustainable farming.

Water shortages, rising temperatures, and droughts caused by climate change have an immense impact on agriculture — and today’s farmers are desperate to find solutions. 

In the western United States, some are turning to dry-farming, a form of agriculture that doesn’t require irrigation. 

Here’s how it works: Dry-farmed plants take moisture stored in the ground, rather than sprinkled from above. 

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, at least one of whom works on counterterrorism, went to the home of a former member of a climate activism group for questioning last week, potentially signaling a new escalation in the Trump administration’s promise to criminalize nonprofits and activist groups as domestic terrorists. 

Two FBI agents, one from New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, told a former member of Extinction Rebellion NYC they wanted to ask him about the group at his home upstate on Friday, an attorney for the group told The Intercept. The visit followed a prior attempt to reach him at his old address.

The FBI’s apparent probe of Extinction Rebellion NYC comes as the Justice Department ramps up its surveillance of activists protesting immigration enforcement and the Trump administration creates secret lists of domestic enemies under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.

A group of 31 Democratic senators has launched an investigation into a new Trump administration policy that they say allows the Environmental Protection Agency to “disregard” the health impacts of air pollution when passing regulations.

Plans for the policy were first reported on last month by the New York Times, which revealed that the EPA was planning to stop tallying the financial value of health benefits caused by limiting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone when regulating polluting industries and instead focus exclusively on the costs these regulations pose to industry.

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.

More than three dozen Democratic senators have begun an independent inquiry into the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a huge change in how the agency measures the health benefits of reducing air pollution that is widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.

In a regulatory impact analysis, the EPA said it would stop assigning a monetary value to the health benefits associated with regulations on fine particulate matter and ozone. The agency argued that the estimates contain too much uncertainty.

Previously, the EPA placed a dollar figure on the benefits of cleaner air, factoring in outcomes such as fewer premature deaths and reduced illness, including asthma attacks.

Deep below the Pacific Ocean, far beneath the seafloor and well out of reach of any drill, scientists have found something that does not fit the textbook picture of our planet.

New seismic models reveal giant zones of unusually fast rock in the lower mantle that look like the remains of old tectonic plates, yet they sit under open ocean and continental interiors where no subduction zones are known to exist.

If that sounds puzzling, the researchers feel the same way. One of these structures lies under the western Pacific, roughly 900 to 1,200 kilometers down, in a region with no geological record of any plates having plunged into the mantle in the last 200 million years.

When Sang Dajie had a son, he knew things had to change. Working as a coalminer in eastern China was just too dangerous. “China always has accidents in coal mines,” he says. “A lot of things you just can’t control down there.”

So Sang moved up in the world—quite literally. As an electrician for Sungrow Power Supply Company, the 31-year-old now helps maintain the world’s largest floating solar farm on a lake formed on top of a collapsed and flooded coal mine just northwest of Anhui province’s Huainan city. A tapestry of 166,000 glistening panels bob and bask below an ochre sun, producing almost enough clean energy to power a large town, as fish break through the inky water all around.

“The coalmine was very hot and the air was bad,” says Sang. “But here I feel safe. The new energy is safe.”

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.