In 2016, a surprise decision from the Supreme Court “sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions,” Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak wrote in an investigation published last week. The one-paragraph ruling halted the Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama’s signature environmental policy, which was aimed at reducing emissions from power…
A research arm of the Chinese government said it had published an atlas of deep-sea mineral deposits, highlighting Beijing’s ambitions to mine the ocean floor and underscoring its disputed claims to waters that neighboring nations consider theirs. Experts say the maps, in addition to pinpointing mineral deposits found in the deep ocean, give China’s military…
“Many of his contemporaries considered these ideas utopian, but today they feel more urgent than ever,” Riedl said of the artist, who lived from 1928 to 2000. The museum building itself grew out of Hundertwasser’s ecological philosophy. Warped floors mimic the undulating earth. Wonky windows and mosaics seem to swim up walls like microorganisms. What…
House Republicans had big plans for Earth Day this year: They would pass a bill to narrow protections for endangered species that they had long seen as federal overreach. It didn’t work out that way. On Wednesday afternoon, Republican leaders suddenly canceled a vote on the measure after an initial procedural vote showed shaky support…
The Environmental Protection Agency and Maryland regulators filed separate lawsuits Monday seeking to hold the Washington, D.C., public water utility responsible for at least 240 million gallons of sewage contamination that flowed into the Potomac River this winter. The utility, D.C. Water, was in the process of updating the Potomac Interceptor, a 60-year-old pipeline that…
It’s springtime and a lot of us are refreshing our wardrobes, retiring old clothes and picking up new ones for the warmer weather. But can we get rid of the used stuff responsibly? While it’s possible, it’s not as easy as a growing number of companies would have you believe. Just drop the used clothes…
For the artist Antti Laitinen, his childhood playground among the trees and streams of central Finland has become an experiment in how the world can survive. He only has to look at the lichen sprinkled around the region’s landscape. Yes, that colorful symbiotic mishmash of fungus and algae may offer hope for our future. It…
Olafur Eliasson shook up the contemporary art scene in 2003 when he installed a glowing replica of the sun inside London’s Tate Modern and watched visitors flock to it as if to the nearest beach. Recently, another of Eliasson’s outsized spheres drew large crowds, this time in Salt Lake City, Utah: a towering, globe-shaped screen…
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a series of decisions that wind and solar developers say have throttled hundreds of renewable energy projects across the country. Judge Denise J. Casper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit that a coalition…
Available for 28 days For 40 years scientists have been fascinated by the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Professor Jim Smith from the University of Portsmouth is one of those scientists, a frequent visitor over the past 20 years. He joins Inside Science to explain whether the region still suffers…
