Tuesday, September 8, 2026
A data center facility in the Utah desert. Photo: Swilsonmc / CC BY-SA 3.0

Federal appeals board halts first data center approved on public land

The Bureau of Land Management now has until September 21 to explain why it treated a 167-megawatt data center as the same project as the solar plant it originally approved.
Satellite imagery of forest loss near Kisangani, in DR Congo's Tshopo province, home to the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory, public domain

What conservation rumors reveal about climate projects in the Congo Basin

Researchers spent years listening to villagers' rumors about a Congo Basin science station before realizing the rumors were making an argument of their own.
A beaver dam and wetland at Yates Mill Pond. Photo: ncwetlands.org / CC BY 2.0

How beavers can help create fire breaks as part of a drought preparation plan

A pilot scheme reintroducing beavers has created a green, wet corridor which could be valuable during hot, dry summers.
Vehicle tailpipe emissions, the kind of pollution the disputed waivers regulate. Photo: DeFacto / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Federal judge blocks EPA attempt to strip California’s clean air waivers

The agency tried to hand the repeal to Congress instead of going through its own rulemaking process.
Chinook salmon, one of the species the lawsuit says the herbicide would harm. Photo: Dan Cook (USFWS), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

EPA approves forever chemical herbicide its own review calls a likely carcinogen

Three advocacy groups are suing to block the pesticide, arguing it also threatens four endangered fish species.
Wildfire smoke haze over the Minneapolis skyline. Photo: Chad Davis / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

UNEP: World will Exceed 1.5º C., Bringing Catastrophes and Unknowable Risks

UNEP's own modeling now points to a peak above the treaty limit, not a gradual approach to it.
Taiwan's Central Mountain Range, home to the Bunun and other Indigenous communities. Photo: Lord Koxinga, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Displaced by a typhoon, Taiwan’s Bunun people fear for the future of their culture

Nestled high on a mountain slope in southern Taiwan, Tengjhih was a key settlement of the Bunun Indigenous people. Today, however, little remains but memories of the hamlet.  Wild grass sprouts around abandoned houses. Stray dogs have made the empty streets their territory.
A Mojave desert tortoise, a species opponents said the data center project threatened. Photo: Pacific Southwest Region USFWS (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Federal panel halts first data center planned for US public land

The board found regulators reused a three-year-old environmental review written for a solar plant, never studying the data center's own effect on water, power or a threatened desert tortoise.
Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, one of the low-lying Pacific nations facing rising seas as the 1.5°C target slips away. Photo: mrlins, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A landmark UN report says the world will overshoot the 1.5°C climate target. What...

It’s no longer possible to hold climate change to 1.5. But it’s not game over – it’s game on.
The Salem and Hope Creek nuclear plants in New Jersey, among the US reactors subject to NRC radiation exposure rules. Photo: Peretz Partensky / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Nuclear regulator moves to drop 50-year-old radiation safety standard

The rule NRC officials are preparing to eliminate has required the nuclear industry to keep exposure below legal limits, not just under them.