EPA

It was a key pledge in President Joe Biden’s effort to show renewed international leadership on climate change: The U.S. government, the largest purchaser of goods and services in the world, would require its contractors and suppliers to disclose their carbon emissions and climate risks.  The biggest contractors would need to set carbon reduction targets […]

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency responded to a “surface water pollution emergency” on farmland 17 miles south of downtown in 1979, federal officials joined state regulators in removing 17,000 barrels of hazardous waste from an illegal dump site. It would become notorious nationally as the “Valley of the Drums.” But the EPA didn’t […]

Livestock agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but lawsuits against the industry for its role in the climate crisis are only now starting to land in courtrooms and could become critical tools for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A new analysis from researchers at Yale Law School, published Monday in the Columbia Journal […]

Virginia is seeking millions of dollars in federal funds this month for state and local government programs to reduce pollution and greenhouse gases. The state outlined its most urgent emissions-reduction strategies in a Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP) submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in March and must file its funding request by Monday.  […]

MOODY, Ala.—When Danielle Cusimano brought her newborn baby, Saylor, home from the hospital in December 2022, it was hard to keep the smoke out. The Cusimano family lived a few miles from the site of the Moody landfill just northeast of Birmingham where a month earlier, in November 2022, a fire had sparked to the […]

MOODY, Ala.—Richard Harp couldn’t believe his ears.  On Thursday, he heard for the first time from Inside Climate News that an EPA official had publicly confirmed what he already knew—the massive underground landfill fire near Moody, Alabama, just a football field away from his home, is still burning. In fact, the official told ICN, it […]

On a November afternoon in 2022, a 57-year old well tapped into an underground natural gas storage reservoir in western Pennsylvania started leaking, fast enough that people a few miles away heard a loud, jet engine-like noise.  By the time the leak was stopped nearly two weeks later, roughly 16,000 metric tons of methane had […]

When the town of Clairton, Pennsylvania, was founded a few miles south of Pittsburgh at the start of the 20th century, the only thing there was a steel mill. “At the beginning of 1901, the town of Clairton was a field,” a newspaper article from 1904 explained. “The Clairton steel mill first began operations in […]

WASHINGTON—A year ago, when Adam Ortiz, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Mid-Atlantic administrator, met with Shawn Scott here in the predominantly Black Ivy City neighborhood, she asked him a question with more than a little urgency. “‘Adam, can you smell it?’” he remembered her asking him, referring to a chemical manufacturer next door to her home […]

Aluminum is crucial for a clean energy economy, but its production is a leading source of greenhouse gas emissions as well as toxic air and water pollution, according to a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project on the “paradox” of aluminum.   The report comes as the federal government is offering billions of dollars in […]