This Isn’t Over Yet. The Keystone Pipeline Can Still Be Stopped.
Oliver Contreras/ZUMA The Nebraska Public Service Commission removed a major regulatory roadblock to the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on Monday. Though that might seem like the final judgement in the nine-year battle waged by the US environmental movement against it, nothing about the fate of the once-dead, then-revived pipeline has ever been certain. Even though the commission…
When Jacksonville Floods, the Rich Don’t Worry; the Poor Fight to Get Through
Bastiaan Slabbers/Zuma This story was originally published by CityLab and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Jacksonville’s Northside region was covered with swampland before the 1950s. The floodplain was home to some bait and tackle shops, commercial fisheries, and luxury waterfront homes, but all that changed as the fledgling city grew. Builders constructed middle-class white suburbs…
Will Washington State Pass the Nation’s First Carbon Tax?
Downtown Seattle, with Mt. Rainier.kanonsky/iStock/Getty Last November, some environmentalists in Washington state went to the polls hoping voters would back an initiative creating the nation’s first tax on carbon pollution. Initiative 732 went down to defeat as the country’s attention focused on Donald Trump’s shocking electoral college win. But now, one year later and buoyed…
California Will Get Half its Energy From Renewables by 2020
California Coastline along State Road 1Robert Bohrer/Shutterstock The US fight against climate change hasn’t exactly made much progress recently. Just this week, for instance, the Trump administration spent its time at the UN conference on climate change in Bonn praising the benefits of coal. But there is actually one bit of good news. A report released Monday from the California Public Utilities Commission shows that the state will get half of its…
Here’s What Climate Change Is Doing to the West
A wildfire burns in Medford, Ore.Usfs/Planet Pix/Zuma This story was originally published by High Country News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The complexity of climate change means it’s hard to trace simple lines from cause to effect in daily life, much less plan for the future. That’s one reason the federal government updates its…
Guess Which Country Was AWOL at the UN Climate Conference?
Andy Kroll A door. That, more or less, is the extent of the United States government’s public presence at the 23rd United Nations climate change conference, hosted this year in Bonn, Germany. During the Obama years, the US dispatched scores of delegates to Copenhagen, Marrakech, Doha, and Lima for climate negotiations. They represented the country’s…