pennsylvania

Once a month for nearly two years, Evan Clark, the Waterkeeper at Three Rivers Waterkeeper, a water quality advocacy organization based in Pittsburgh, has traveled by boat along the Ohio River to Shell’s enormous new plastics plant in Beaver County.  This facility is a cracker plant, using ethane from fracked gas to make ethylene and […]

Clutching a sheaf of typed notes with one hand and the steering wheel of her electric car with the other, Maya van Rossum was driving west on I-276 and practicing the message she planned to deliver to Pennsylvania’s governor later that morning when she realized—belatedly—that she was going to need a cough drop. The plan […]

ROLAND, Ark.—First came the gasps.  As the final sliver of sunlight disappeared behind the persistent moon, eclipse viewers at the Pinnacle Mountain State Park visitors’ center outside Little Rock were left in awe.  Nancy Carr had driven six hours from McCalla, Alabama, just outside Birmingham, to view the spectacle. As the sun’s corona began its […]

In Luzerne County, in northeast Pennsylvania, the Nanticoke Creek is dry most of the time because unless there’s a major storm, any water that flows into it disappears into underground voids created by coal mines that operated there for decades until the 1960s. The creek has long been a target for restoration by Earth Conservancy, […]

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 […]

HARRISBURG, Pa.—Barbara Brandom fought back tears as she contemplated the destruction of nature and a lost environment she fears her grandchildren will never experience as a result of climate change.  “If we continue to consume fossil fuels as we did in the past, by 2050, the air temperature will have increased another five degrees,” she […]

After meeting for months in secrecy, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s working group on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative on Friday endorsed participation in a “cap-and-invest” process to reduce utilities’ greenhouse gas emissions but stopped short of endorsing membership in RGGI. The group’s co-chairs said in a press release that they had “reached broad consensus” on […]

PITTSBURGH—As the federal government nears a decision on which of the nation’s proposed “hydrogen hubs” will share up to $8 billion in startup money, critics of the idea in the Appalachian region are asserting that the program would do little to curb greenhouse gas emissions or create jobs, while increasing electricity prices for consumers and […]