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As a punishing heatwave bakes major East Coast cities, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright directed data centers in the mid-Atlantic this week to use their backup power supplies instead of using electricity from the public grid, in part to ensure there was enough electricity to power resident air conditioning. The heat index topped 100 degrees by 10 a.m. Thursday in every major metro from Washington, DC, to New York City. And as the mercury climbed, so did the energy used for air conditioning. “Maintaining affordable, reliable, and secure power in the PJM service territory is non-negotiable,” Wright said in a statement.
Landowners can now turn certain farms and timberland into business parks, suburbs despite local objections. An industry-backed state law that takes effect July 1 will make it easier for developers to turn farmland into suburban subdivisions over the objections of local governments and communities.
The National Park System, which will be flooded with visitors this summer, has a bipartisan pedigree. Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service law that established our system, but Teddy Roosevelt’s setting aside millions of acres of public lands gave it substance. Ulysses Grant signed the law creating the first national park, Yellowstone. There have been tensions between the parties over parks. James G. Watt, Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the Interior, was a zealous religious sagebrush rebellion conservative who tried to ban the Beach Boys from performing on the National Mall on July 4 because he thought they’d bring in a bad crowd. (Ron and Nancy loved the California band, and Watt became a goner.) No wonder Ken Burns named his documentary series on our national parks “America’s Best Idea.” It took the klepto-genius of Donald Trump to see the National Park Service as a pile of cash, as he continues his campaign to redo Washington in fetid neo-autocratic style. A comprehensive report on Trump’s raiding of the National Park Service's funds to pay for his gaudy, gold-leaf D.C. makeover. Michael Scherer unveils part of the scam in The Atlantic.
Autonomous-driving startup Wayve is riding a tide of investor interest. The London-based company has pulled in $2.8 billion from a roster of investors and strategic partners that includes big names across the technology and automotive sectors, from Nvidia to Mercedes-Benz and Nissan. In June, Wayve said it will deploy its system in robotaxis from Jeep maker Stellantis, to go on Uber’s ride-hailing network.
“We can take power from a plasma,” Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta Fusion, told TechCrunch. The milestone shows “what’s possible,” he added. For fusion startups, the hard part is over: Thanks to a groundbreaking experiment in 2022, we know that controlled nuclear fusion reactions can generate more power than they consume. But now companies need to prove their reactors can make enough electricity to be profitable. One option is to simply turn up the temperature, generating more heat to produce more steam to spin a bigger turbine. Another is to harvest electricity directly from the fusion reactions themselves, an approach that promises to be more efficient.
How weird is it that utility companies, who have their own interests in power generation and grid upgrades, control the means by which their competitors get online? For this episode of the Local Energy Rules Podcast, host John Farrell is joined by Dave Golembeski, Senior Program Manager with the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). Listen to the full episode and explore more resources below — including a transcript and summary of the episode.
State courts cannot find liability for labeling shortcomings in pesticides and similar products because such products are covered by federal law, the U.S. Supreme Court said Thursday in a decision backing agricultural giant Monsanto. The justices, in a 7-2 decision, threw out a $1.25 million verdict a Missouri court awarded to a man who said long-term use of the weedkiller Roundup caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. The herbicide, produced by Monsanto, does not include any warning of carcinogenic material. Monsanto and parent company Bayer deny there is any link and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has routinely found that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, does not likely cause cancer.
The ruins, which have become an illicit tourist destination, may reopen soon. The Palos Verdes Peninsula has received a lot of attention in recent years because of accelerated land movement, but one landslide in the area has been a draw for decades because of its dystopian state with fractured streets. Nearly 100 years ago, residents of San Pedro’s Point Fermin neighborhood had a dream of living by the ocean, but the cliffs became their undoing. A landslide slowly ripped Point Fermin apart. This southernmost part of Los Angeles County was given a new nickname to fit its troubled state: Sunken City.
“It’s time to turn the heat on the fossil fuel giants that caused this heatwave but are doing nothing to cover the costs."
West Texas is becoming a test case for one of the biggest questions facing the AI economy: who can deliver power fast enough to keep it growing? Chevron will supply dedicated power to a Microsoft-operated data center in West Texas under a 20-year agreement. Project Kilby is expected to deliver Chevron will supply dedicated power to a Microsoft-operated data center in West Texas under a 20-year agreement. The agreement sits under Energy Forge One LLC, a wholly owned Chevron subsidiary.
New study shows America’s largest underground water source is depleting fast, raising risks for farming, food supply and price volatility. The largest underground water supply in the United States—responsible for sustaining a vast share of the nation’s farming—is steadily running dry, raising concerns about future food production and price volatility as supplies come under strain. The Ogallala Aquifer, which lies beneath eight Great Plains states from South Dakota to Texas, provides roughly 30 percent of the groundwater used for irrigation in the U.S. and supports around a fifth of the country’s agricultural output.
All the efforts to rewild a Northern California stream leads to salmon rewilding themselves. In California, a long-abused river has been reborn. For decades, humans disrupted its course and restricted its flows to the detriment of its ecosystem, only to lately reverse direction and restore it to a facsimile of its natural state. And salmon, the bellwethers of aquatic health, have responded, returning much faster and in greater abundance than anyone anticipated. This description applies not to the Klamath River — or not only to the Klamath, recently liberated from its four lower dams — but rather to the far less-celebrated Putah Creek.
Citizens suits are powerful tools to enforce the law, which is why the Trump administration is attacking them. If the government won’t protect you from corporations that pollute your community’s air and water, you have the right to sue them yourself. That right is now under attack. For more than 50 years, Americans have had the right to file “citizen suits” under federal law against corporations that illegally pollute their communities. The right of everyday people to hold the powerful accountable to the law is critical to protecting our health, our environment, and our democracy. While President Trump’s administration has done little to enforce environmental laws against polluters, it’s now attempting to give itself veto authority over this powerful tool communities have to fight back.
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Washington, D.C. – In a letter sent to Congress today, more than 520 organizations from 48 states called for the enactment of a full nationwide moratorium on the approval and construction of new hyperscale data centers. The letter was facilitated by the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch; other signers include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Americans for Financial Reform, Popular Democracy, People’s Action Institute, Good Jobs First and Honor the Earth.
Gov. Ron DeSantis characterized the clean energy goals the law bans as “radical climate policies,” although experts say the law will not necessarily upend the plans. A new state law limits Florida communities’ aims to offset greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the global climate and intensifying disasters such as hurricanes. Specifically, HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero emissions goals. At least 10 cities and counties have implemented such policies, including Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando and Leon County, where Tallahassee, the state capital, is located. But the new law will not necessarily upend these policies, said Bradley Marshall, senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group.
BOURNE, MA — Gov. Maura Healey’s office announced Wednesday that the Cape Cod Bridges replacement project has reached a major milestone after receiving federal approval of its Final Environmental Impact Statement and a Record of Decision from the Federal Highway Administration. The approval completes the federal environmental review process required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), allowing the project to move into its next phases of permitting and design while bringing Massachusetts closer to securing more than $1 billion in federal funding for construction.
Three electric school buses will kick-start the state’s groundbreaking vehicle-to-grid pilot program once school's out, with more EVs to be added in the coming months. After the school year ends in the Massachusetts towns of Acton and Boxborough, the district’s electric buses will mostly stay put in a parking lot. But they won’t sit idle all summer. The three vehicles will charge up their nearly 200-kilowatt-hour batteries overnight, when the power supply is at its cleanest and cheapest, then send energy back to the grid from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on days when the grid is strained. The district will earn revenue for the power it shares, perhaps even enough to cover the costs of charging up during the school year, said Kate Crosby, energy manager for the Acton-Boxborough school district. Plus, the strategy will help lower the emissions and cost of the region’s electricity supply.
The company may finally be ready to try to deliver on Elon Musk's years-long promise of launching a robotaxi network of its own. Tesla has begun testing a production version of its Cybercab that has two seats, but no steering wheel or pedals, in Austin, Texas. For now, the testing is being done with a safety monitor in the right passenger seat, according to a video posted on X, the social media platform owned by the electric car maker’s CEO Elon Musk. This test is happening nearly two years after Tesla revealed the design of the Cybercab, which is meant to be a fully autonomous robotaxi that can be hailed through Tesla’s app. Roughly a year ago, Tesla began testing a Tesla Robotaxi service in Austin with Model Y SUVs that have, at times, used safety monitors.
Europe’s mortuaries are overflowing, America’s watchdogs are being leashed, public lands are being opened to more drilling, and the control room is still pretending this is a messaging problem. There are days when the metaphor arrives wearing a little hat, waving politely from the edge of the news, asking if it may please be included somewhere between the congressional dysfunction and the latest judicial renovation of American democracy. Then there are days when the metaphor is a mortuary in Paris with no room left. Europe is in the grip of record heat, the kind that makes the old maps look quaint and the old warnings sound less like warnings than apologies issued too late. In France, funeral homes have reportedly been overwhelmed by the number of dead, especially older people, as temperatures pushed past 104 degrees and the heat settled into cities like a verdict. One mortuary owner told reporters, “We’re facing a really catastrophic situation,” which is the kind of sentence that should stop a government in its tracks, make every serious person in a serious office look up from the latest polling memo, and begin moving with the urgency of people who understand that reality doesn’t negotiate.
Attorney General James Uthmeier says Roku will come into compliance with state law under a settlement of a legal complaint he filed last year. Engineering to bring the company into compliance with Florida’s Digital Bill of Rights will cost it $25 million, Uthmeier’s office said. However, the agreement, Uthmeier said, does not include any finding of wrongdoing or a fine. “Our resolution ensures that meaningful safeguards will be implemented to protect the privacy and personal data for our children. Parents have a right to control the upbringing of their kids,” Uthmeier said in a video posted to social media.
Some environmental movements, like Earth Day, have been around for decades. But have you ever heard of Plastic Free July? Environmental groups across L.A. and Orange counties — such as Heal the Bay, L.A. Waterkeeper and the Surfrider Foundation — are all gearing up for the month-long challenge to raise awareness about the prevalence of single-use plastics in our lives, and how we all can take steps to reduce our usage. I had so many questions. Why hadn’t I come across this initiative before? How come I hadn’t seen it on my social media? What does this challenge entail? So I got to researching.
Permitting delays pushed by the Trump administration threaten to derail 92 gigawatts of clean power, even as electricity demand from AI data centers skyrockets. Already, permitting changes and federal funding withdrawals have led to the cancellation of 7 gigawatts of generating capacity on federal land in 2025, according to a new study from consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. The additional scrutiny could cancel another 12 gigawatts on federal land and 80 gigawatts on private property. The Trump administration's moves threaten $121 billion in new solar and wind power, two energy sources that are the biggest contributors to new capacity in the U.S.
The country is dependent on the global giants that call Dublin home. Irish ministers can’t be trusted to chair vital European digital sovereignty talks, says Irish civil liberties campaigner Johnny Ryan. On the face of it, Ireland behaves like a good European by being a staunch advocate of human rights and a beacon of progressivism on the western edge of the continent. But there is one vital area in which its record is less than perfect – one that should cause concern when the Irish government takes over the rotating six-month presidency of the EU on 1 July. The EU’s tech and AI rulebook will be renegotiated during the same period, but the Irish state and economy have been captured by big tech. Ireland is so compromised that as president of the Council of the EU, it should recuse itself from all tech and digital sovereignty negotiations. The last time Ireland held the EU presidency was in 2013, during negotiations on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A leaked Facebook memo describes a 2013 meeting where the company’s executives met Ireland’s then prime minister to complain about the proposed data privacy rules. They left understanding they had Enda Kenny’s assurance that Ireland would use its “significant influence” as EU Council president to deliver what Facebook called a “positive outcome”. The executives also attended “a dinner hosted by senior Irish politicians to work through the various ways that the Irish could be helpful”.
The world's largest wildlife crossing will soon allow cougars and other animals to traverse the heavily trafficked 101 freeway. On a rare, clear day, one can look due west from the Mount Wilson Observatory, perched at nearly 6,000 feet on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and see the wide basin of the San Fernando Valley. A natural bowl flanked by mountains, the valley floor once teemed with life, as foxes, hares, deer, and coyotes coursed through its trough, occasionally plucked by skulking cougars, also known as mountain lions. For much of that time, this valley also served as a primary transit corridor for the Chumash people, who traveled between inland fields and the coast to gather acorns and seeds, as well as to trade with the Tongva and other tribes. As in so many places, the trails these tribes followed were largely based on the tracks of elk and other nonhuman animals, who had already discovered the most efficient routes from place to place.
As the administration dismantles guardrails for industrial fishing, it's also threatening critical marine ecosystems that are sacred to Indigenous Pacific peoples. When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn’t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on O‘ahu, but like a lot of Native Hawaiians, he had never had the opportunity to visit the uninhabited islands and atolls scattered to the west of the main islands. What he saw changed his life. “There’s no places left in Hawai‘i, or very few places, where the environment is so wild and intact that you have your ancestors who are embodied in the environment communicating with you every second: Birds hovering over you, monk seals swimming up to you, fish trying to bite you,” he told Grist. “It’s so raw, the experience up there.”
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