As heat waves creep north, they are baking schools that previously did not need air conditioning. Fixing the problem will be neither cheap, nor easy.

By Anna Phillips and Veronica Penney

America’s aging school buildings are on a collision course with a rapidly warming climate.

Nearly 40 percent of schools in the United States were built before the 1970s, when temperatures were cooler and fewer buildings needed air conditioning.

That has changed. In recent decades, …

Hi Neil and Daryl

Let me start about something else than music for a moment. There are three people who have deeply inspired me over the last thirty years: Jane Goodall, Peter Singer and you, Neil.

I've been working with Jane Goodall as an animal advocate since around 1995. Here's an essay on factory farming and plant-based diets that Jane and I recently wrote together.

I hope you both like it, if you come to …

By Sarah Kaplan and Bonnie Jo Mount

In Qaanaaq, Greenland, residents live between the gargantuan Greenland Ice Sheet and the frigid waters of Baffin Bay. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

QAANAAQ, Greenland — Out on the ice, Toku Oshima often says, “there is no time.” No calendar but the migrations of sea creatures. No clock but the cadence of the tides. She can hunt and fish the same way her parents did, and their parents …

Rebecca Solnit
Columnist, Guardian US

Mexico latest country where government is considering passing new laws to criminalise environmental destruction

A growing number of countries are considering introducing laws to make ecocide a crime.

Mexico is the latest country where politicians are seeking to deter environmental damage – and to get justice for its victims – by criminalising it. Karina Marlen Barrón Perales, congresswoman for Nuevo León, has submitted a bill to the Mexican congress introducing …

By Catrin Einhorn

It’s not your average solar farm.

The glassy panels stand in a meadow. Wildflowers sway in the breeze, bursts of purple, pink, yellow, orange and white among native grasses. A monarch butterfly flits from one blossom to the next. Dragonflies zip, bees hum and goldfinches trill.

As solar projects unfurl across the United States, sites like this one in Ramsey, Minn., stand out because they offer a way to fight climate change …

By Andrew Higgins
Andrew Higgins talked to residents of Gornje Nedeljice, Serbia, the site of a planned lithium mine, and protesters in Belgrade, the capital, who are opposed to the project.
In the end, he was alone.

Their windows broken and roofs smashed, the abandoned homes in an otherwise bucolic valley carpeted with cornfields and orchards near Serbia’s border with Bosnia look like the wreckage of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

But the houses …

By Michael D. Shear, Katie Rogers, and Adam Entous
Reporting from Washington

In the end, he was alone.

Confined to a spare bedroom in his vacation home and fighting off bouts of coughing from Covid, President Biden was exhausted when he turned in for the night on Saturday, July 20. Whether he slept soundly or fitfully or not at all, people close to him said he took the long hours by himself to mull over …

Byline: Amy Westervelt
This story was published in partnership with Vox and was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

This spring, Democrats wrapped up a nearly three-year investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate disinformation, and asked the Department of Justice to pick up where they left off. In House and Senate Democrats’ final report and hearing, investigators concluded that major oil companies had not only misled the public on climate change for decades, …

BY CHARISMA MADARANG

A fake ExxonMobil ad shames the company for gaslighting the public YELLOW DOT STUDIOS

In February, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods pointed a finger at the public for failing to solve the climate crisis — suggesting that consumers were to blame for the toxic carbon emissions produced by the oil giant.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” …

By Lydia DePillis

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has a line about the state of small-scale agriculture in America these days.

It’s drawn from the National Agricultural Statistics Service, which shows that as the average size of farms has risen, the nation had lost 544,000 of them since 1981.

“That’s every farm today that exists in North Dakota and South Dakota, added to those in Wisconsin and Minnesota, added to those in Nebraska and Colorado, added …

By Patricia Cohen, Keith Bradsher and Jim Tankersley

For more than half a century, concerns about oil shortages or a damaged climate have spurred governments to invest in alternative energy sources.

In the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter placed solar panels on the roof of the White House as a symbol of his commitment to developing energy from the sun. In the 1990s, Japan offered homeowners groundbreaking subsidies to install photovoltaic panels. And in the 2000s, …

By Brady Dennis, Kevin Crowe and John Muyskens
Photos and videos by Jahi Chikwendiu

the worst days, when the backyard would flood and the toilet would gurgle and the smell of sewage hung thick in the air, Monica Arenas would flee to her mother-in-law’s home to use the bathroom or wash laundry.

“It was a nightmare,” Arenas, 41, recalled one evening in the modest house she shares with her husband and teenage daughter several miles …

Anne Mahrer and Rosmarie Wyder-Walti, of the Senior Women for Climate Protection, after their victory at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France on April 9, 2024. Christian Hartmann/Reuters

By Laura Paddison, CNN

(CNN) — An international court in France on Tuesday ruled Switzerland’s failure to adequately tackle the climate crisis was in violation of human rights, in a landmark climate judgment that could have a ripple effect across the globe.

The European …

The Canadian tar sands are a massive site of oil extraction in Alberta.
Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Alamy

Toxic emissions from the Canadian tar sands – already one of the dirtiest fossil fuels – have been dramatically underestimated, according to a study.

Research published in the journal …

By Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich March 14, 2024

Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.

Over the past year, electric utilities have nearly doubled their forecasts of how much additional power they’ll need by 2028 as they confront an unexpected explosion in the number of data centers, an abrupt resurgence in manufacturing driven by new federal laws, and millions of …

By Opinion by Bill McGuire
Editor’s Note: Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical & climate hazards at University College London and author of “Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

Are you frightened by climate change? Do you worry about what sort of world we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren? In the words of science writer and author of “The Uninhabitable Earth” David Wallace-Wells, “No …

Native American sacred site from destruction by a multinational mining giant, putting the case on a fast track to the Supreme Court. In Apache Stronghold v. United States, a rare “en banc” panel of eleven judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government can transfer the sacred site Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, a foreign-owned mining company that plans to turn the site into a massive mining crater, ending Apache …

Water panels for using renewable sun energy are placed on house roof. (Shutterstock / Roman023_photography)
By Michael J. Coren

In the early 198os, my dad installed a solar thermal panel on our roof in Florida. For a 5-year-old, the big black square looked like a portal into the future. The device, essentially a glass box with metal water pipes running through it, converted sunlight into hot water. By trapping solar energy like a greenhouse, it …

Wind power is being tested again on ocean freight, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. Rather than canvas, the devices resemble rigid wings. One system, called WindWings, was developed by Cargill with the British firm BAR Technologies and fitted to an existing bulk carrier, the Pyxis Ocean, which has now completed voyages beginning in Shanghai. The aim is twofold: less fuel burned, and less carbon released.

The retrofit forced practical fixes. The sails …

A waterfall installation on Monday in the public area of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Credit: Amr Alfiky / Reuters

The working draft made public at the U.N. summit in Dubai would not commit nations to phasing out the fossil fuels that are dangerously heating the planet.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Reporting from the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Environmental groups and negotiators from countries …

Cleanest week ever.

By Darren Orf, Popular Mechanics

- For the world to avoid the worst outcome of human-induced climate change, countries need to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy as soon as possible.
- For 149 consecutive hours in November, Portugal provided a stunning example of what that could look like, as it used a mix of solar, wind, and hydropower to provide more clean energy than the entire country needed.
- The …

Panamanians celebrate after the Supreme Court declared a 20-year contract with a Canadian copper mine unconstitutional, in Panama City, Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023. Panama’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the concession that has been the focus of widespread environmental protests was unconstitutional, after which the president of the Central American country said the process to close the mine would begin. (AP Photo / Arnulfo Franco)

By Kathia Martínez And Juan Zamorano, Associated Press

PANAMA CITY …

Anti-mining activists gather outside Panama's top court where deliberations started to rule on several constitutional challenges to First Quantum Minerals' FM.TO contract for the Cobre Panama mine, in Panama City, Panama November 25, 2023. REUTERS / Aris Martinez / File Photo

By Elida Moreno and Valentine Hilaire, Reuters

PANAMA CITY, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Panama's president said on Tuesday that Canadian miner First Quantum's lucrative copper mine Cobre Panama would be shut down, hours after …

The trees told us so.

By Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics

- Researchers believe they have reliable evidence that shows Vikings beat Christopher Columbus to the Americas by about 500 years.
- Tree species native to Canada and imported to Greenland were key to the discovery.
- The Vikings were likely making regular trips to stock tree farms.

Not only did the Vikings travel to the Americas hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus, but it appears …

1.9 trillion gallons of water are taken from the Colorado River system. But most of that water goes to cows, not cities.

From Mother Jones

The Colorado River seen flowing south from Lake Powell through the Navajo Nation (Russel Albert Daniels)

By Scott Carrier, Mother Jones

IF YOU DRAW it on a map, the Colorado River has the shape of a tree, with its trunk rooted in the Sea of Cortez and the branches reaching into the mountaintops of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Botanists call the shape of a tree a habit. It is a common form …

Scientists have unearthed the remnants of more than 1,700 viruses from deep inside a glacier in western China. Most of these viruses are new to science.

With this discovery, the number of ancient viruses recovered from glaciers has grown fiftyfold.The viruses, gathered from a 1,000-foot ice core taken from the sprawling Guliya Glacier on the Tibetan Plateau, date back 41,000 years and span three major shifts from cold to warm.

Scientists say the viruses differed …

By Becky Ferreira

Scientists have discovered new evidence that the rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, abruptly ending the age of dinosaurs, was a bit of an oddball.

The nature of this apocalyptic object, known as the Chicxulub impactor, has inspired intense debates, including a long-running dispute over whether it was a comet or an asteroid. But evidence has been mounting in recent years that the roughly six-mile-wide impactor belonged to a …

First of all, imagine it. Dream it.

The more we picture people Loving the Earth, the more we become those people ourselves. We sing about it, this future, and the future moves toward us and takes us in.

We keep singing and working like we would for a loved one, and our love is the Earth. We are working as a part of an intense planet-wide change. Unprecedented change. This new kind of intense Evolution …

The collapsed house at 24131 Ocean Dr. in Rodanthe, N.C. (National Park Service)

By Brady Dennis

Rising seas and eroding shorelines have now claimed a half-dozen houses in Rodanthe in the past four years.

Another home has crumbled into the sea in Rodanthe, N.C., the scenic Outer Banks community where rising seas and relentless erosion have claimed a growing number of houses and forced some property owners to take drastic measures to retreat from the …

Telitha Solis, an airplane cabin cleaner, recalls sweating, shaking and feeling nauseated at work. “Any kind of air cooling would make a big difference,” she said.Credit...Mark Felix for The New York Times

By Coral Davenport and Noah Weiland

For more than two years, a group of health experts, economists and lawyers in the U.S. government has worked to address a growing public health crisis: people dying on the job from extreme heat.

In the coming …

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

By John Reid

Our Once-Abundant Earth

Protecting species from extinction is not nearly enough.

When Otis Parrish was a kid in the 1940s, abalone were abundant. Each abalone grows in a single, beautiful opalescent shell, which can get as big as a dinner plate. Parrish’s father showed him how to pry the abalone off the rocky shoreline at low tide with an oak stick or the …

By Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes

In the month since federal authorities announced an outbreak of bird flu on dairy farms, they have repeatedly reassured the public that the spate of infections does not impact the nation’s food or milk supply, and poses little risk to the public.

Yet the outbreak among cows may be more serious than originally believed. In an obscure online update this week, the Department of Agriculture said there is now …

The camels had thump-thumped for seven days across northern Kenya, ushered by police reservists, winding at last toward their destination: less a village than a dusty clearing in the scrub, a place where something big was happening. People had walked for miles to be there. Soon the governor pulled up in his SUV. Women danced, and an emcee raised his hands to the sky. When the crowd gathered around an enclosure holding the camels, one …

The United States still gets most of its energy by setting millions of tiny fires everywhere. Cars, trucks, homes and factories all burn fossil fuels in countless engines, furnaces and boilers, creating pollution that heats the planet.

To tackle climate change, those machines will need to stop polluting. And the best way to do that, experts increasingly say, is to replace them with electric versions — cars, heating systems and factories that run on clean …

Yuval Haran (front row in hat) and Meirav Leshem Gonen to his right. Photo: Emine Sinmaz / The Guardian.

Thousands had marched for five days to demand action by the Israeli prime minister to bring home the 240 people captured by Hamas

By Emine Sinmaz in Jerusalem, The Guardian

“I am wounded and bleeding. Mummy, I think I’m going to die,” were some of the last words Romi Gonen, 23, said to her mother, Meirav …