A new legal theory suggests that oil companies could be taken to court for every kind of homicide in the United States, short of first-degree murder. The idea of “climate homicide” is getting attention in law schools and district attorney’s offices around the country. A paper published in Harvard Environmental Law Review last week argues that fossil fuel companies have been “killing members of the public at an accelerating rate.” It says that oil giants’ awareness that their pollution could have lethal consequences solidly fits within the definition of homicide, which, in its basic form, is ca ..read more

The reality of climate change came home for Dr. Samantha Ahdoot one summer day in 2011 when her son was 9 years old. She and her family were living in Charlottesville, where Ahdoot is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. There was a heat wave. Morning temperatures hovered in the high 80s, and her son had to walk up a steep hill to get to his day camp.  About an hour after he left for camp, she received a call from a nearby emergency room. Her son had collapsed from the heat and needed IV fluids to recover. “It was after that event that I realized that I ..read more

In December, Catherine Muruparanga-Ikenn used a power tool to erase the words on a museum display of the Treaty of Waitangi, an 1840 document that asserted British sovereignty over Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand.  For years, many Māori, like Muruparanga-Ikenn, had criticized their national museum for displaying the English-language agreement that their ancestors did not endorse, wrongly suggesting the Māori people had agreed to relinquish their sovereignty. Activists had spent years waiting for the museum to change the display; when nothing happened, they took matters into their own ..read more

This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN. When around 70,000 Indigenous Maasai were expelled from their lands in northern Tanzania in 2022, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. For years, the Tanzanian government has systematically attacked Maasai communities, imprisoning Maasai leaders and land defenders on trumped-up charges, confiscating livestock, using lethal violence, and claiming that the Maasai’s pastoralist lifestyle is causing environmental degradation ..read more

To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year.  Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until re ..read more

This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN. Sometimes when a storm hits and the waves are high in the Straits of Mackinac, which connects Great Lakes Michigan and Huron, Whitney Gravelle wonders if she’ll get a call: Maybe there will be a breach, and oil from the Line 5 pipeline under the strait will spill into her homelands. Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, has been working to decommission Line 5, run by Enbridge Inc., for years. The p ..read more

Silica dust, thrown into the air while mining, has contributed to a staggering rise in cases of progressive, incurable, and deadly black lung disease in America’s coal miners. The insidious particulate is particularly common in the seams of low quality coal found in central Appalachia, yet the Mine Safety Health Administration, or MSHA, has for decades pegged safe exposure levels at about twice what the government allows for every other occupation. On Tuesday, the agency finally announced an updated standard, outlining not only a new threshold for exposure, but increased on-the-job safety meas ..read more

In much of the United States, groundwater extraction is unregulated and unlimited. There are few rules governing who can pump water from underground aquifers or how much they can take. This lack of regulation has allowed farmers nationwide to empty aquifers of trillions of gallons of water for irrigation and livestock. Droughts fueled by climate change have exacerbated this trend by depleting rivers and reservoirs, increasing reliance on this dwindling groundwater.  In many places, such as California’s Central Valley, the results have been devastating. As aquifers decline, residential wel ..read more

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Verite News. When a winter storm knocked out Texas’ power grid in 2021, the scale of the devastation it wrought was exacerbated by a singular fact about the Lone Star State: It has its own electric grid, an “energy island” that has long been uniquely isolated from the rest of the country, with just four transmission lines linking it to neighboring states. When the storm hit, Texas was unable to transfer enough emergency power from other electricity markets to keep the lights on. The death toll was in the hundreds. A new mult ..read more

As ocean water heats up, swaths of once-technicolor coral reefs have begun turning white, putting ecosystems across the globe at risk. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Coral Reef Initiative announced on Monday that the world is undergoing its fourth global coral bleaching event, marking the second such occurrence in the last decade. According to Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program, scientists have documented significant coral bleaching across every major ocean since early last year.  The current bleaching ..read more