@The Convergence of ICT, the Environment, Climate Change, EV and HEV Transportation & Distributed Renewable Energy

(HYANNIS) – Cape Cod and the Islands are bracing for another possible winter blast late Sunday night into Monday, with the possibly of a Nor’easter just off the coast of Massachusetts. The National…

On Thursday, the Trump administration rescinded the central scientific finding that underpins much of the nation's climate pollution rules, its most aggressive action yet to halt initiatives that address planetary warming.

The 2009 Environmental Protection Agency endangerment finding was a determination that pollutants from developing and burning fossil fuels, such as methane and carbon dioxide, can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The EPA now argues that the Clean Air Act does not give it the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

"Under President Trump's leadership today, the Trump EPA has finalized the single largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America," said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin at the White House, with President Trump at his side.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its underlying authorities have long been a top target of Trump’s deregulatory agenda as the administration and its industry supporters endeavor to return the country to an era of rampant smog and choking air pollution.

During the first year of his second presidency, Trump and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin have jettisoned billions of dollars in clean energy investments while propping up the corpse of the coal industry to power data centers. They have delayed implementation of stricter standards for methane emissions by oil and gas companies leasing federal lands, weakened limits on Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in our drinking water, and rolled back basic tailpipe emissions and fuel economy standards for automobiles.

The list goes on and on and on (as we’ve documented in our Environmental Policy Tracker). But last week, the administration dropped the biggest hammer to date—repealing the EPA’s endangerment finding.

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.

The EPA revoked the finding that greenhouses gases threaten public health and welfare, then weakened vehicle emissions standards.

But it’s not game over for future climate action—and understanding why allows for a more nuanced picture of where the climate fight actually stands now.

It fell to Doug Burgum, once the governor of North Dakota and now the Secretary of the Interior, to offer something resembling a scientific explanation for the Trump Administration’s decision to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” which states that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide pose a risk to the planet’s health. “CO2 was never a pollutant,” Burgum said. “When we breathe, we emit CO2. Plants need CO2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO2.”

Considering that, in recent weeks, Burgum has also appeared in a cartoon with a lump of coal known as Coalie (“Mine, Baby, Mine!”) on social media, such reasoning is perhaps the best that one can hope for. It’s roughly the equivalent of explaining to a drowning person that you’re not going to throw him a life preserver because water is a building block of life. Carbon dioxide is, in fact, among the most dangerous substances at work on the Earth; as it collects in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, it is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature, melting its poles, and setting off endless rounds of flood and fire.

The latest warning came this past week, from a global team of scientists who noted, in a journal paper, that “we may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.” Indeed, recent weeks have produced predictions that a new El Niño is in the offing for later this year and, with it, the near certainty of new and dire temperature records.

President Trump's executive order mandating the production of glyphosate, a known carcinogen, has left many outraged. How can we prioritize defense readiness over public health?

As a child, Marcel Mazur had to hold his breath in parts of Kraków thick with “so much smoke you could see and smell it”. Now, as an allergy specialist at Jagiellonian University Medical College who treats patients struggling to breathe, he knows all too well the damage those toxic gases do inside the human body.

“It’s not that we have this feeling that nothing can be done. But it’s difficult,” Mazur said.

Kraków, long known as the smog capital of Poland, is proof that politicians wield the power to save lives by cleaning the air. A drop in soot levels since 2013, when the city announced it would ban coal and wood in home heating, has averted nearly 6,000 early deaths over a decade, according to an expert assessment shared exclusively with the Guardian.

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.