Environment

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36900956

Reading through speculation about what the **Monsterverse’s new kaiju Titan X aka Le Gran Dios de la Mar may be (such as the article linked above), it sounds increasingly as though she may be a new protective mother figure, impacted or possibly even responding to the effects of global heating on the oceans.

If so, this season’s Titan threat may put Monarch: Legacy of Monsters in a unique position among current major science fiction streaming shows in directly taking on a Climate Change/Emergency scenario with no gloss of allegory.

It is nonetheless absolutely in keeping with the long tradition of the broader franchise in critiquing the consequences of human actions on the planet.

The 70+ year Godzilla franchise is unique in embedding the impact of humanity on the Earth’s environment from its outset.

The narrative of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as later nuclear weapons testing and nuclear power plants, calling up kaiju, literally “strange creature”, is a constant within the franchise.

In addition to atomic/nuclear radiation, films such as Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971), with its smog monster, and the more recent Monsterverse film Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), which ends with Godzilla leading an ecological recovery, the franchise continues to underscore its deep theme that humanity shares the Earth and will bear the consequences for its actions.

Under the warm light of a hanging lamp, Marty Landorf carefully crumbled the dried flower head of a black-eyed Susan between her fingers, teasing apart the chaff to uncover its puny black seeds. Each one was destined for long-term cold storage alongside roughly 46 million other seeds at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Every seed in the garden’s vault is different. Some seeds have hooks. Others verge on microscopic. A few carry a sharp, deterring scent. And some, like the airborne seeds of the milkweed, the host plant for monarch caterpillars, are fastened to silky fluff that drifts everywhere, hitching rides on volunteers’ clothes and following them home.

“Fluff is fun,” Landorf said laughing, seated alongside five other volunteers cleaning, counting, and sorting seeds at a long metallic table in the garden’s seed bank preparation lab.

Carolyn Kuechler, left, and Marty Landorf, volunteers at the Chicago Botanic Garden, work on separating the seeds from the chaff at the seed bank in the Carr Administrative Center. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

For all their variation, these seeds share a common trait: They’re native to the Midwest. These species genetically adapted over thousands of years and sustain the region’s ecosystems. That evolutionary inheritance makes them indispensable for restoring the nation’s remaining prairies, wetlands, and woodlands.

The problem: Native seeds are in short supply. And climate change is intensifying demand.

“Climate change is affecting our weather and the frequency of natural disasters,” said Kayri Havens, chief scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. “Wildfires becoming more common, hurricanes becoming more common — that increases the need for seed.”

In 2024, the Chicago Botanic Garden, a 385-acre public garden and home to one of the nation’s leading plant conservation programs, launched the Midwest Native Seed Network, a first step in improving the region’s fragile seed supply. The coalition now includes roughly 300 restoration ecologists, land managers, and seed growers across 150 institutions in 11 states. Together, they are researching which species are most in demand, where they are likely to thrive, and what it will take to produce them at scale and get them in the ground.

The collaborative is compiling information on seed collection, processing, germination, and propagation while identifying regional research gaps and planning collaborative projects to close them. For example, the network is currently collecting research on submerged aquatic plants such as pondweeds, and other species that are challenging to germinate, like the bastard toadflax, a partially parasitic perennial herb.

“We’re addressing these local, regional, and national shortages of native seed that are really just hindering our ability to restore really diverse habitats, build green infrastructure, and support urban gardens,” said Andrea Kramer, director of restoration at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Sarah Hollis, research assistant at the Chicago Botanic Garden, tours the seed bank in the Carr Administrative Center. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

Last year, the network undertook its first major project: a large-scale survey of more than 50 partners across the region. The results were stark. They revealed that more than 500 native species in the Midwest are effectively unavailable for restoration. In some cases, it’s because no one grows them. In others, the seeds are available, but the cost — even at a couple of dollars per packet — becomes prohibitive when restoration projects require thousands of pounds. And for certain finicky species, the bottleneck is technical: Researchers and growers still don’t fully understand how to germinate them reliably or help them thrive in restoration settings.

Kramer said that, ultimately, the goal is to connect the people who need seeds with those who know how to grow them. While the network does not sell seeds, it works with organizations and partners that do. “We are using the network to help elevate what we all know and share what we know to make it easier,” she said.

The shortage itself is not new. In 2001, following sweeping wildfires in the West, Congress tasked federal agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service — which, combined, manage approximately one-fifth of the nation’s public lands — to craft an interagency, public-private partnership to increase the availability of native seeds. But according to a 2023 report, which identified the lack of native seeds as a major obstacle for ecological restoration projects across the United States, those efforts remain unfinished.

Kayri Havens, vice president of science and chief scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden, poses for a portrait in the Carr Administrative Center. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

Wildfires have scorched more than 170 million acres in the U.S. between 2000 and 2025, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In 2020 alone, the Bureau of Land Management purchased roughly 1.5 million pounds of seed to rehabilitate burned landscapes. In a bad fire year, the agency can buy as much as 10 million pounds.

The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law dedicated $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration over five years, including $200 million for the National Seed Strategy, a coalition of 12 federal agencies and various private partners established in 2015 to provide genetically diverse native seeds for restoration. The following year, the Inflation Reduction Act invested nearly $18 million to develop an interagency seed bank for native seeds. And in 2024, the Interior Department announced an initial round of $1 million for a national seed bank for native plants.

“The U.S. does have a major seed bank run by the [Department of Agriculture], and it mostly banks crops,” said Havens, the scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. “But we don’t have that kind of infrastructure in place for native seed.”

Momentum for establishing a native seed bank stalled following funding cuts by the Trump administration. In early 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency cut 10 percent of the staff at the National Plant Germplasm System, which is home to one of the largest and most diverse plant collections in the world.

Andrea Kramer, senior director of restoration at the Chicago Botanic Garden, said the network’s goal is to connect those who have access to seeds to those who don’t. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

“If something isn’t supported on a national level, then it becomes incumbent on states and regions to do that kind of work,” Havens said. “So that’s why we’re focusing right now in the Midwest.”

The network is the first of its kind in the Midwest, though similar initiatives have been active elsewhere in the country for years. Today, there are more than 25 similar networks operating across the U.S. In the western United States, these coalitions have come together in response to post-wildfire restoration projects.

“One of the reasons why we were among the first is because of this federal land ownership that we have in the West, whereas in the Midwest, it’s more private land,” said Elizabeth Lager, a professor at the University of Nevada in Reno and co-founder of the Nevada Native Seed Partnership. More than 90 percent of all federal land is located in 11 Western states.

Kramer said she hopes to run the seed availability survey again in 20 years and get a different response.

“I want them to say, ‘We have access to all the seed we need,’” said Kramer. “And we can move on to the next challenging question, like, ‘Why isn’t the seed establishing in my restoration? Or, how do we manage the next challenge coming with climate change?’”

Last Updated on February 28, 2026 Ecuador’s National Assembly has approved sweeping changes to the country’s mining framework, igniting opposition from Indigenous nations and their allies who say the reforms endanger biodiverse ecosystems and weaken Indigenous rights protections.

On Feb. 26, lawmakers passed the Organic Law for the Strengthening of the Strategic Mining and Energy Sectors by a 77–70 vote as part of a fast-tracked package promoted by President Daniel Noboa and his allies. Supporters argue the changes will ‘modernize’ regulation and make Ecuador’s mining sector more competitive.

But Indigenous leaders and civil society groups have condemned the measure as a threat to their lands and ways of life, raising alarms that the law erodes critical safeguards long championed in Ecuador’s constitution — including recognition of the rights of nature.

The national Indigenous federation CONAIE and regional Amazonian nations publicly rejected the legislation, saying it would accelerate mining activity in territories that have historically been protected from large-scale extractive projects.

They argue the law opens the door to expanded mining without meaningful free, prior and informed consent, a right that’s enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution and international agreements like ILO 169, which Ecuador ratified.

According to Amazon Frontlines, “the bill also conflicts with landmark rulings such as the 2022 Sinangoe decision [and] international agreements including the Escazú Agreement and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.”

Leaders from the Achuar, Kichwa, Shuar, Sápara and Waorani nations have emphasized that their territories comprise some of the most intact forests on Earth, playing a critical role in biodiversity conservation and climate stability. In a public statement issued ahead of the vote, they called on legislators to reject the law, warning that it would fuel conflict and environmental degradation in the Amazon.

“So-called ‘responsible mining’ does not exist. Where mining enters, so do deforestation, river pollution, violence, and organized crime. The data confirms this: in 2024, 4,926 hectares were registered as open-pit mining sites in 105 Indigenous territories, and at least 23 protected areas have lost approximately 14,660 hectares of forest between 2001 and 2024*. This law will only exacerbate this damage,” they said.

“By dismantling environmental safeguards and transferring oversight responsibilities to extractive-sector institutions, the new law deepens tensions between Ecuador’s economic development model and the protection of human rights, biodiversity, and the global climate,” said Amazon Frontlines.

Protest mass environmental damage

Get sued for 400 million dollars

in bad country

Scientists have detected a massive lithium plume in Earth's upper atmosphere, traced to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that broke up over Poland in February 2025[^1]. Using ground-based laser measurements, researchers found lithium levels increased tenfold at 96 kilometers altitude, about 20 hours after the rocket's uncontrolled re-entry[^1].

The Falcon 9's upper stage, which contained an estimated 30 kg of lithium in its aluminum alloy tank walls, released significantly more lithium than the typical 80 grams that enters the atmosphere daily from cosmic dust[^1].

"This finding supports growing concerns that space traffic may pollute the upper atmosphere in ways not yet fully understood," according to the research paper published in February 2026[^1]. The scientists warn this could become a recurring issue as more satellites and rockets re-enter Earth's atmosphere.

The study marks two firsts: the initial measurement of upper-atmosphere pollution from space debris re-entry, and proof that ground-based lidar can detect space debris burning up[^1]. The research team used a specialized dye laser system in Germany that could detect lithium atoms in the mesosphere while maintaining strict safety protocols for aircraft[^10].

[^1]: The Register - Euro boffins track lithium plume from Falcon 9 burn-up

[^10]: ACS - How powerful lasers can measure air pollution from space debris

Particulate pollution fell 41% nationwide in the decade from 2014, and average life expectancy has increased 1.8 years, according to the University of Chicago's Air Quality Life Index (AQLI).

It was sunny and warm for the end of November on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation in northern Montana. Joseph Eagleman was standing on a grassy hill looking at a 20-panel solar array in the backyard of a Chippewa Cree elder.

It was built under the Solar for All program, a Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act-funded project that distributed $7 billion to build residential solar across the country. Here on Rocky Boy’s, around 200 homes would have received solar funded by the federal dollars.

This home was the first to get panels in Queensville, a small community of modest homes in one of the reservation’s valleys. The home is brown, two stories, and fully electric, which is one of the requirements to qualify for Solar for All funding. Eagleman met me there to give me a tour of the panels that all but eliminated the resident’s $200–300 monthly electricity bills, according to Eagleman.

Eagleman is the CEO of the Chippewa Cree Energy Corporation, an organization that manages energy development for the tribe. Here in the northern Plains, a coalition of 14 tribes received a $135 million grant. The money would have provided around $7.6 million for each reservation to build residential solar, and Eagleman would have managed the Solar for All funds for the Chippewa Cree.

Then came President Donald Trump. His administration cut Solar for All in August of 2025.

Joseph Eagleman, standing beneath the solar array, looks out onto the Rocky Boy’s Reservation.
Ilana Newman / Daily Yonder

“It’s terrible. We were getting ready to take off,” Eagleman said.

Residents had seen this solar array, which was built in the fall of 2024, and were excited about the possibility of free solar. Eagleman had a list of 40 households that were applying for the first round of the project. But only this home got a completed solar array before the program was stopped.

“It was a gut punch,” he said.

The reservation is about an hour and a half from the closest city, Great Falls, Montana, and has a population of 3,300. Driving down to meet Eagleman, I passed a cafe/casino/bar/gas station, a school, a skate park, and many residences, but little else. “There’s not a lot of opportunities, except for leaving the reservation,” said Eagleman.

Electricity costs are high on the reservation, as they are across rural America. Building and maintaining infrastructure without density drives up costs in these areas. Applicants showed Eagleman their bills to demonstrate why they wanted solar so badly, and some were up to $900 a month. Around 35 percent of the reservation’s residents live below the poverty line, more than double the rate for the United States. Solar installations like these cost thousands of dollars — money that most residents don’t have.

Eagleman had hired Zane Patacsil, a local resident who had experience installing solar, a month before the cuts. Patacsil joined us in the sunny backyard, overlooking the hills and valleys that make up the Rocky Boy’s Reservation.

Around 200 solar arrays would have been installed on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation in northern Montana with funding from Solar for All. This was the first, and ultimately the only one, installed in fall 2024. Ilana Newman / Daily Yonder

He said Solar for All would have brought some economic development to Rocky Boy’s and the other reservations that received the grant: an office and people to manage it, as well as training and hiring solar installers to do the labor.

“There were even members who were talking about starting their own solar businesses so they could be installing,” added Patacsil. “It was very disheartening to hear that news, because we lost all of that with it.”

A question of sovereignty

When protests raged against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016, Cody Two Bears was on the tribal council for the Standing Rock Sioux. He saw another layer to the dispute: energy extraction on tribal land that not only hurt residents, but also brought no relief for high energy bills.

Two Bears wanted to bring energy sovereignty to his community and other tribal nations. He started the nonprofit Indigenized Energy in 2017. “I do this because of energy and energy sovereignty as well, but it creates a sense of hope for our tribal nations,” he said.

Sovereignty and self-governance are what tribes allegedly gained in exchange for giving up traditional homelands when treaties were signed over the past centuries. Tribal sovereignty is not only about protecting culture and traditions; it’s also about self-sufficiency. It’s also legally protected by the U.S. Constitution. But that’s easier said than done without the resources to support true independence, which have been systemically removed by the U.S. government.

Native Americans are more food insecure and rely on Medicaid at higher rates than their white counterparts, depending on the U.S. government for subsidies while desiring the sovereignty that was promised. Energy independence is a way to regain a degree of that sovereignty, and Two Bears has made that his goal with Indigenized Energy.

Donica Brady outside Busby, Montana on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Ilana Newman / Daily Yonder

“My ultimate goal is to work myself out of a job. I want to build so much capacity into these tribes where they don’t need Indigenized Energy anymore,” said Two Bears.

But the funding picture changed dramatically when Trump’s administration slashed solar spending.

Indigenized Energy had already been building residential solar on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation for a few years, and it ramped up to prepare for more work through Solar for All. But when the program was cut, Indigenized Energy laid off around half its staff, including Donica Brady, the coordinator for the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana.

I first met Brady in September 2025, about a month after the layoff, and the pain of losing a job she loved was evident. Brady had spent the past couple of years building trust in a community where promises have been made and broken over and over again. Solar for All became yet another one.

Part of programs like Solar for All is job development within the solar industry. Brady was part of a training program through Red Cloud Renewable, funded by previous grants for solar on reservations. Solar for All would also have funded training and trade development on these reservations.

When I caught up with Brady again at her house in Busby, she was working two jobs, and the only time she had for me was at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, after her daughter’s choir recital. I found her in the garage with a kitchen knife in hand, skinning a deer her wife had shot a few days previously. She asked if I wanted to help and handed me a knife.

Donica Brady carves out meat from a deer in her garage in Busby, Montana. Ilana Newman / Daily Yonder

We chatted as we worked on the deer skin, cutting fat and sinew away from the dark red meat. She’d returned to her previous job as a bus driver and was hired by Freedom Forever, a solar installation company based in California. She’s still working in renewable energy, and Freedom Forever does work on reservations at times, but Brady’s job is no longer on the ground working with her community like she craves.

“I want my people to be able to be self-sufficient, not have to rely on funding or things like that that can be taken away,” Brady said. I heard this over and over: People don’t want to have to depend on the federal government for “handouts.”

As Brady cut out the tender backstraps and set them aside to give to her auntie, she talked about solar’s deeper meaning. “People call it progress, but I see it as going back to what we were taught, but in a new way,” she said. It’s more than just energy; it’s harnessing the sun, an important reflection of Northern Cheyenne culture.

The deer we were cutting up felt like a symbol summarizing everything we talked about. It was one way Brady could become self-sufficient and support those she loves. If only the power of the sun could be harnessed as easily as a deer skinned in a garage.

Residents are hurt most

Some time later, just outside of Lame Deer, Montana, the tribal headquarters of Northern Cheyenne, I got lost looking for Thomasine Woodenlegs’ house. My phone had no service, so all I had was Woodenlegs’ instructions: Look for a bright-green house at the end of the road. Many U-turns later, Woodenlegs welcomed me into her kitchen, where photos of loved ones covered the walls and two cats, one orange and one black, lounged on the couch.

Woodenlegs works for her tribe, and she has lived in this house for 50 years. She plans to pass it down to her family. But she knows she will be saddling them with a financial burden, too.

“How am I going to survive after I retire? And how is whoever inherits my house?” Woodenlegs asked. “I’ll need to warn them that the electricity runs like $400 or $500, and they’d have to have a really secure income to live here. Otherwise, they’d be without lights.”

Power lines cross the short grass prairie on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Ilana Newman / Daily Yonder

Woodenlegs saw solar panels from previous grant programs like the White River Community Solar Project, funded by the Department of Energy, going up around the reservation in 2020 and 2021. Back then, Solar for All’s big allocation for Indigenous communities brought more hope. She put in her own applications, feeling jealous of friends and acquaintances who received them, wondering when it would be her turn. She’s still waiting.

Tina Cady, another Northern Cheyenne resident, lives just outside of Busby and has applied for solar panels multiple times. She worked for the Indian Health Service for 25 years until she went on disability. Now she lives on a fixed income of about $1,000 a month, and her husband picks up as many hours as he can as an adjunct professor at the tribal college. She showed me her October electric bill, which was $225.13.

Brady handled her application and told Cady what she’d learned in the field so far: Cady was a prime applicant for solar panels and she should be at the top of the list. “I’m an elder, and I’m disabled,” Cady said. Plus, she owns her own land. But Cady never heard anything more about it.

I asked whether she felt betrayed by the funding cuts, after so many previous letdowns to tribal communities. Cady said no, because it wasn’t her money to be betrayed. But she was disappointed and disenchanted. “I have seen them do this before. You get so you don’t trust anybody anymore.”

The fight continues

Four different lawsuits have been filed in federal courts against the Trump administration for ending Solar for All. It was terminated after the One Big Beautiful Bill Actrescinded “the unobligated funds for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” which had provided the funding for Solar for All.

The lawsuits claim that Solar for All was already a year into operation, so the funds were obligated, and that taking away already obligated funds is illegal.

All the lawsuits are still active. One from Climate United will move into oral arguments in February. Another from a coalition of 22 states is seeking an injunction to keep the Solar for All funds available.

Eagleman hopes to find additional funding to build residential solar arrays like this one for many more Chippewa Cree elders. Ilana Newman / Daily Yonder

But even without results from the lawsuits, solar installers like Cody Two Bears and Joseph Eagleman plan to continue to fight for solar development on northern Plains reservations.

Eagleman said he’s going to keep looking for funding to help bring affordable electricity to the Chippewa Cree on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation. He’s been looking at other public funding through the Department of Energy, as well as private philanthropic options.

Two Bears said he is moving forward with his company’s list of families awaiting solar. Indigenized Energy is ready to break ground on a project on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, which was next in line when the funding was cut. He said they found private funding for that project, as well as another solar array for the Rosebud Sioux.

“So even though the money is not there, we’re still finding alternative resources and funding to make these possible and make ’em feasible,” said Two Bears. “It’s just going to take longer.”

Michigan researchers have gone back in time to get a picture of how ice cover on the Great Lakes has evolved since the late 19th century.

Using historical temperature records from weather stations around the region, researchers improved their understanding of where ice might have formed and for how long it lasted — spanning the last 120 years.

Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Data last month. Researchers said this new data record would deepen understanding of how climate change has impacted the region over time and clarify what life under ice looks like for declining iconic species such as lake whitefish. The new data could also help improve ice cover forecasting in winter, making it safer for recreation and for people who go out on the ice.

“Lake ice is really part of the system, part of our life. It matters [for] our culture, regional weather, safety, everything,” said Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome, one of the study’s co-authors and associate director for the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan.

There’s a “pretty good satellite record” of Great Lakes ice cover from the last 45 years, she said. But research into the region’s historical climate requires a longer timescale, and there isn’t good data specific to ice.

According to researchers, there’s a general gap in scientific knowledge about winter on the Great Lakes — data buoys get pulled out because of harsh conditions. There are good historic weather observations, though. And air temperature is a good proxy for ice cover on the lakes because ice typically forms when there’s been several cold days in a row.

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To peer into the past, researchers looked at temperature records from weather stations all around the Great Lakes, limiting their study to stations with the most consistent data since 1897.

They calculated ice cover using this information, and the end result was a dataset that can be compared to present-day conditions. Researchers said it can inform future research on how animals behave during the winter, for example.

“A lot of the biological conditions under ice are really poorly understood,” said Katelyn King, a fisheries research biologist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the study’s lead author. King is using the dataset to study the historic decline of whitefish in the Great Lakes, a regional species that’s important culturally and economically.

King said this dataset is a helpful baseline as the region continues to shift under climate change. Research shows that average temperatures in the region have increased in the last two decades, frost seasons are shortening, and heavy snow and rainstorms are becoming more frequent.

Still, year-to-year variability is the new normal. Ice cover on the Great Lakes was relatively close to average last winter, but followed historic lows the season prior.

So far this winter, cold temperatures in recent weeks have contributed to some of the highest ice cover on the Great Lakes in years, according to data tracked by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“These really extreme years where we have really cold weather or really warm weather is just a sign that long-term climate is changing,” King said. “It really affects all of us in our day-to-day.”

For more than a decade, the clean energy economy has been on a steep growth trajectory. Companies have poured billions of dollars into battery manufacturing, solar and wind generation, and electric vehicle plants in the U.S., as solar costs fell sharply and EV sales surged. That momentum is set to continue surging in much of the world — but in the United States, it’s starting to stall.

According to a new report from the clean energy think tank E2, new investment in clean energy projects last year was dwarfed by a cascade of cancellations for projects already in progress. For every dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.

“That’s pretty jarring considering how much progress we made in previous years,” said Michael Timberlake, a director of research and publications at E2. “The rest of the world is generally doubling down or transitioning further, and the U.S. is now becoming increasingly combative and antagonistic towards clean energy industries.”

Timberlake said the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy are the main driver of the slowdown. Companies began pulling back their investments shortly after the November 2024 election, when a victorious Trump telegraphed that he would promote fossil fuels over solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies. For instance, TotalEnergies, the French oil-and-gas giant, paused development of two offshore wind projects in late November 2024, citing uncertainty after Trump’s election. The company has not restarted the projects since.

Trump followed through on those promises once in office: One of his first actions in office was to pause leasing and permitting for offshore wind. The freeze resulted in several wind developers indefinitely pausing or abandoning their projects while lawsuits trickled through the courts. (Federal judges have issued judgments in favor of the wind companies in recent months.) Trump’s administration also pulled billions of dollars in funding for a range of clean energy projects and cancelled or retooled Biden-era policies favorable to the industry, such as energy-efficiency measures, IRS tax guidance, and loans for a transmission line expected to carry solar and wind power.

Congress, at the behest of Trump, also passed the One Big Beautiful Act over the summer. In addition to sunsetting lucrative tax credits for renewable energy production, the law hammered the electric vehicle industry from multiple sides: It ended investment credits supporting the buildout of battery manufacturers, and simultaneously nixed the $7,500 tax credit available to American consumers who purchase EVs.

Timberlake cautioned against pinning clean energy’s disappointing year on any one policy. While the One Big Beautiful Act was the “biggest signifier” of the shift, “the overall policy and regulatory attack” is to blame for the glut of project cancellations, he said. “It’s not an environment that encourages more investment because no one knows what six months from now will look like.”

Electric vehicle and battery manufacturing have been hit the hardest over the past year. Each sector lost roughly $21 billion in investment over the past year, according to E2’s analysis, which includes some overlapping projects that serve both purposes. The industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs. These two industries likely lost the most investments because they had been growing the fastest in recent years, meaning they had more projects in the pipeline to cancel or downsize once President Trump was elected. The EV industry’s outlook, in particular, changed once Congress repealed consumer tax credits made available by former President Joe Biden. That, along with the general policy uncertainty, led to automakers revising their expectations for EV demand in the U.S. and reallocating their investments accordingly.

Some states were hit harder than others. In 2025 alone, Michigan lost 13 clean energy projects worth $8.1 billion — more than twice as many as any other state, due to its role as the capital of the U.S. auto industry. Illinois, Georgia, and New York also lost billions of dollars in investments.

Many automakers that scaled back electric vehicle plans last year redirected those investments rather than abandoning them outright. Ford, for example, had originally planned to build all-electric commercial vehicles at its $1.5 billion Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake. But after revising its EV ambitions, the company pivoted the facility toward gas-powered and hybrid vans. Because Ford did not scrap the plant altogether, Timberlake said, facilities like Avon Lake could still be retrofitted for electric vehicle production if market conditions and policy outlooks improve.

“The silver lining view is they’re hopefully maintaining those facilities so that when there is certainty, those factories will still be available for making EVs down the road,” said Timberlake.

Kathleen Watts’ flowers bloom much brighter now that the wind no longer blows black. Pulling weeds in the garden outside her redbrick house, she recalled when coal dust would sometimes drift through her quiet corner of northern England, a rolling patchwork of farms and villages under the shadow of what was once the United Kingdom’s largest coal-burning power station.

“When the dust came our way, we’d have to come out and clean our windows,” said Watts, who has lived in the North Yorkshire village of Barlow for more than 30 years. “And when we’d get snow in winter, there’d be a lot of black over it.”

Thankfully, she said, the wind usually blew northeast, pushing the station’s smoke and dust toward Scandinavia. Locals liked to joke that the air pollution was mostly Norway’s problem. There, it caused bouts of acid rain that damaged forests and poisoned lakes.

The U.K. has quit coal — a lengthy process culminating in the closure of the country’s last deep-pit coal mine in 2015 and the shutdown of the U.K’s last coal plant in 2024.

The giant station near Barlow, however, is busier than ever, fueled now by American forests rather than English coalfields. Trees felled, shredded, dried, and pressed into pellets in Louisiana and Mississippi are shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, loaded onto trains, and then fed into the station’s immense boilers. Operated by Drax Group, the station gradually stopped burning coal until it made a full switch to wood in 2023. It now burns enough pellets to generate about 6 percent of the country’s electricity.

Purple flowers crowd a field near the Drax power station in Drax, England. The former coal plant now runs entirely on wood pellets, which the company markets as “sustainable biomass.” Tristan Baurick / Verite News

The U.K. government, in a bid to meet its ambitious climate goals, is giving Drax the equivalent of $2.7 million a day in subsidies to keep burning pellets, which the company touts as “environmentally and socially sustainable woody biomass.”

But a growing number of Brits aren’t buying it. After years of celebrating the shift away from coal, U.K. residents are realizing that wood pellets aren’t the cleaner, greener alternative they were supposed to be.

“I still have difficulties in my little brain figuring out how you can grow wood at the other end of the Earth, chip it, ship it to here … and then burn it, and say, ‘Isn’t that nice and green?’” said Steve Shaw-Wright, a former coal miner who serves on the North Yorkshire Council.

Burning wood for power instead of one of the dirtiest fossil fuels offers the illusion of sustainability and robust climate action, said William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University. But in reality, it’s doing more harm to the environment than burning fossil fuels, he said. “England is off coal — isn’t that wonderful?” Moomaw said. “But there’s no mention of the fact that it’s because they’re now burning wood from North America, which emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt of electricity than does coal.”

Sawdust piles up at Drax’s wood pellet mill near Urania, Louisiana. The mill presses sawdust into pellets that are burned in a former coal plant in Yorkshire, England. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

The Drax station in North Yorkshire emitted more than 14 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, making it the largest single source of CO2 in the U.K., according to a report last year from the climate research group Ember. That amount is more than the combined emissions from the country’s six largest gas plants and more than four times the level of the U.K.’s last coal plant.

A Drax spokesperson called Ember’s research “deeply flawed” and accused the group of choosing to “ignore the widely accepted and internationally recognized approach to carbon accounting,” which is used by the United Nations and other governments.

But several scientists say burning wood can’t help but produce more emissions. Wood has a lower density than coal and other fossil fuels, so it must be burned in higher volumes to produce the same amount of energy. Between 2014 and 2019 — a period when coal was in steep decline — the country’s CO2 emissions from U.S.-sourced pellets nearly doubled, according to a report by the Chatham House research institute in London. “Almost all of this U.K. increase was associated with biomass burnt at Drax,” the report’s authors wrote.

The station’s cross-continental supply chain is also heavy on emissions. For every ton of pellets Drax burns, about 500 pounds of CO2 are released just from making and transporting the product, according to Chatham House. About half of Drax’s supply chain emissions are tied to production, while transportation via trucks, trains, and ships accounts for 44 percent, according to the company’s estimates.

The switch from coal to pellets created a new pollution problem in Louisiana and Mississippi, where most of the station’s fuel is produced. Drax’s pellet mills have repeatedly violated air quality rules at its two Louisiana mills, located near Bastrop and Urania, and its mill in Gloster, Mississippi. The mills emit large quantities of formaldehyde, methanol, and other toxic chemicals linked to cancers and other serious illnesses, according to regulatory findings and public health studies. Residents of these poor, mostly Black communities say the mills’ dust and pollution are making them sick. In October, several Gloster residents sued the company, alleging that Drax has “unlawfully released massive amounts of toxic pollutants” in their community for nearly a decade.

The Drax spokesperson said the company is improving its mills’ pollution controls in line with a longstanding dedication to “high standards of safety and environmental compliance.” On its website, Drax says the company is “committed to being a good neighbor in the communities where we operate,” offering funding for environmental education programs, ensuring its wood is sourced from “well-managed forests,” and supporting land conservation efforts, including the establishment of a 350-acre nature reserve near Watts’ home in Barlow.

Much of the timber that Drax harvests comes from private lands in the Southern United States that function more as tree farms than natural forests. But in recent years, Drax has sourced an increasing share of its wood from western Canada, including from British Columbia’s treasured old-growth forests.

In 2024, Drax agreed to pay a nearly $32 million penalty after U.K. energy regulators determined the company had been misreporting data on where it sources its wood and how much of it comes from environmentally important woodlands. The practice of pelletizing Canada’s mature trees appears ongoing, according to a recent report by the environmental group Stand.earth. Citing logging data from 2024 and 2025, the group claims Drax has been accepting truckloads of trees from British Columbia that were hundreds of years old. Drax downplayed the report, emphasizing that the logs were legally harvested and of insufficient quality to go to sawmills.

Drax sees itself as one of the most environmentally conscious companies on the planet. “Sustainability is the cornerstone of long-term success and the transformation of our business,” said Miguel Veiga-Pestana, Drax’s chief sustainability officer, in a statement.

While most pellets Drax makes in the U.S. are derived from logged trees, the company also uses sawdust and other leftovers from lumber mills. The company supports forest thinning, a practice it says can ease crowding in densely planted timberlands, improve the health of the remaining trees, and diversify habitat for wildlife.

“By ensuring that we source sustainable biomass, and that we embed sustainable practices into every facet of our operations, we can build lasting value,” Veiga-Pestana said.

Water vapor escapes a cooling tower at the Drax power station in Drax, England. The station is the largest wood pellet-burning facility in the U.K. and was originally developed to burn coal. Gary Calton / The Guardian

The value of the entire utility-scale wood pellet industry depends on what many scientists call an “accounting loophole” entrenched in some of the earliest international policies aimed at combating climate change.

During the 1990s, the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol established land use and energy use as two separate categories for counting a country’s greenhouse gases. To avoid double counting wood burning across both land-use and energy-use categories, the U.N. assigned wood pellet emissions only to the land-use sector, believing that normal forest regrowth would keep pace with the modest harvests for pellet production. The wood pellet industry at the time was tiny, selling the bulk of its products to homeowners with small pellet-burning stoves. Any carbon released by burning would be balanced by new trees that work as natural CO2 absorbers, the thinking went.

The effect, though, was that regulators would count CO2 from burning oil and coal, but CO2 from burning timber could stay off the books.

“Drax and other bioenergy companies took that and said, ‘Look, we have no impact — we’re instantly carbon neutral,’” said Mary Booth, director of the environmental organization Partnership for Policy Integrity.

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This exemption was incorporated into the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty that set legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. Experts were soon warning of troubling consequences. In a study published in the journal Science in 2009, scientists said the exemption was an “accounting error” that could spur deforestation and hinder attempts by governments to curb emissions.

“The error is serious, but fixable,” said Tim Searchinger, a Princeton University energy policy expert, in a statement at the time. “The solution is to count all the pollution that comes out of tailpipes and smokestacks whether from coal and oil or bioenergy, and to credit bioenergy only to the extent it really does reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Other scientists challenged the industry’s claim that planting trees would neutralize power station emissions. According to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it can take 44 to 104 years for forest regrowth to pay back the carbon debt from pellet burning. While the planet waits decades for the trees to regrow, glaciers melt, seas rise, and weather from droughts to hurricanes grows more extreme.

Trucks haul lumber in and out of the Amite BioEnergy wood pellet production facility operated by the Drax group in Gloster, Mississippi, on September 24, 2025. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian

Despite these warnings, the European Union latched on to wood burning as a relatively quick and cheap way to meet tighter climate mandates. Rather than blanket the landscape with wind turbines and solar panels, countries could dust off old coal plants and put them on a diet of “carbon-neutral” pellets.

The shift toward bioenergy accelerated in 2009, when the European Union set a target of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020. Pellet demand in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and other European countries immediately began to increase, but in the U.K., the growth was explosive. Between 2012 and 2018, the U.K.’s pellet consumption surged by 471 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The U.K. left the European Union in 2020, and it remains the world’s biggest buyer of wood pellets. In 2024, the country imported nearly 10.3 million tons, a record high spurred partly by a dip in pellet prices.

Wood burning has helped the U.K. come within striking distance of its goal to eliminate oil and gas from its electrical generation by 2030. Nearly 74 percent of the national grid is powered by what the government calls “low carbon” energy sources. Wood pellets and other forms of bioenergy supply about 14 percent of the low-carbon mix, with wind, solar, and hydropower accounting for the rest.

Every workday, Ian Cunniff climbs into his orange overalls, pounds his helmet tightly on his head, and steps into a cage that drops 459 feet into a maze of dark tunnels littered with old machinery.

The stout Yorkshireman is one of the last miners still working in the coal pits, but now his job is to lead tours along the rich seams he once risked his life to dig out. Cunniff is a guide for the National Coal Mining Museum at Caphouse Colliery, a former West Yorkshire mine dating back to the 1790s. His last “real” mining job was at Kellingley Colliery, the U.K.’s last deep coal pit and a major feeder of Drax’s power station before it switched to wood.

In the depths of the Caphouse mine, Cunniff grew wistful over the coal still embedded in the walls. The seams once provided nearly everything a man and his family needed, he said. “It was your future; it was your retirement. So much of it has never been touched.”

Miners, union members, and the local community take part in a protest march in 2015 in Knottingley, England, marking the end of deep-pit coal mining in Britain.
Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

Wood pellets didn’t kill the U.K.’s coal industry. It began to wither as the country shifted from cheaper, imported coal in the 1980s to natural gas in the 1990s. Coal’s decline left gaping holes in Yorkshire’s economy and social fabric. The wood pellet industry has contributed some jobs and tax dollars, but it can’t replace what the region once had, said Shaw-Wright, the county council member.

“With coal, you didn’t really need to get an education much because you were going to get a job at the pit,” he said. “And if you had a job at the pit, you would have it for life.”

At its height between the two world wars, the industry employed 1.2 million people in the U.K. In some northern England counties, 1 in 3 residents was employed in coal mining. The Selby Complex, a group of deep-pit mines near the Drax power station, employed about 3,500 workers before it shut down in 2004. The industry also supported cooperative groups that funded social halls, communit

Ilana Newman
The Daily Yonder

Brandon Small’s pickup squeezes down a narrow dirt road lined with trees and bushes as we drive down the hillside towards the buffalo. We’re on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana, a landscape full of yellow grasses and hillsides lined with small pine trees. Small runs the buffalo restoration program here on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation.

Here on the reservation, where food and energy sovereignty are inextricably linked, a new solar installation is helping the tribe become more self-sufficient.

Brandon Small drives across the Northern Cheyenne buffalo pasture near Lame Deer, Montana to fix some water troughs for the animals. He points out where buffalo look like tiny specks on the horizon. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.

The buffalo pasture we’re traversing is huge—15,244 acres, to be exact—and Small said they’re working on expanding even further. Small drove us out here from nearby Lame Deer, Montana, to check on the water infrastructure and give us a tour of the buffalo habitat and the brand new solar installation that will allow them to grow their buffalo operation.

The buffalo enclosure has no transmission lines crossing it, meaning there’s no way to get electricity out to the land unless the electricity is completely off the grid.

Last year, in partnership with Indigenized Energy, a native led nonprofit focused on energy sovereignty, the Northern Cheyenne buffalo program received a solar array that will allow Small to expand the herd and processing capacity of the facility. The 36kW solar array and 57.6kW battery was funded by the Honnold Foundation and Empowered By Light and constructed by Freedom Forever and Jinko Solar in collaboration with Indigenized Energy.

This 36 kW solar and 57.6 kW battery system was installed in 2025 by Freedom Forever in collaboration with Indigenized Energy with donations from Jinko Solar. It was funded by the Honnold Foundation. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.

Cody Two Bears, the founder of Indigenized Energy, sees energy sovereignty as inextricable from food sovereignty. “ We need energy sovereignty to flourish because that’s what’s gonna support all the other initiatives that are so important to tribal people moving forward,” Two Bears said in a Daily Yonder interview.

Tribal nations are supposed to be sovereign nations, self governing and independent from the United States government. But many factors, like broken treaties and stolen traditional homelands, have forced tribal communities into continued reliance on federal subsidies, impeding full sovereignty. But sovereignty is still the goal for every tribal nation. And asserting independence around how they manage their food, health, and energy are some main ways indigenous communities are reclaiming sovereignty.

The Importance of Buffalo

Buffalo are the keystone species of the northern plains, an animal who shape the prairie ecosystem, but they’ve been nearly extinct for a century. Now, tribes and researchers are proving that buffalo are the key to healthier ecosystems and food sovereignty for northern plains tribes like the Northern Cheyenne.

“Having bison on the landscape, especially at really large scales, is likely to increase sort of diversity of vegetation, conditions, and habitat and likely to increase biodiversity,” said Andy Boyce-Pero, a Great Plains researcher for the Smithsonian Institute.

Brandon Small wades through a buffalo water trough that he just performed maintenance on while he takes us on a tour of the Northern Cheyenne buffalo habitat. Photos by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.

Before Small started running the buffalo restoration program, he worked at the Rosebud Mine, a coal mine in Colstrip, Montana. The buffalo program has existed since the tribe was given a herd of buffalo in the 1970s, but those buffalo were left relatively unmanaged until Small got involved and created a new management plan.

When Covid-19 hit, Small started to think about how he could help. He saw the currently unmanaged buffalo—who were in the habit of breaking through their fences onto the highway—as a resource the tribe was neglecting, and an important piece of their journey towards self-sufficiency.

He started spending time out with the buffalo, fixing fences and supplying food, while he petitioned tribal council with a management plan for a buffalo program. “I spent a lot of time out there on my own, out of my own pocket,” said Small as we drove on a ridge overlooking the buffalo enclosure.

Brandon Small wades through a buffalo water trough that he just performed maintenance on while he takes us on a tour of the Northern Cheyenne buffalo habitat. Photos by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.

It’s obvious how much Small cares about the animals that we eventually find, munching on grass on either side—and in the middle of—the dirt road we are slowly driving along.

Small’s five year goal was to form a “tribal buffalo program that was self-sufficient, where I didn’t need any money from the tribe or federal government,” he said.

He said they’re currently on track with that goal, but it’s not cheap to take care of a herd of more than 300 buffalo. “This year we’re spending 32,000 [dollars] on hay alone,” said Small.

The solar array also brings the buffalo program closer to self-sufficiency. It currently powers a small bunkhouse with a mini split that, during our September visit, provided welcome relief from the hot sun, Starlink internet, and a freezer that holds processed bison meat. It also powers electric fences and gates to keep out intruders. Small said that they have had issues with poaching in the past.

The solar array allows for electricity and internet access on the remote landscape of the buffalo habitat which helps with processing the animals and allows for operations to grow over time. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.

In December 2025, the Northern Cheyenne buffalo solar array was named one of Solar Builder Magazine’s projects of the year, highlighting the remote location of the project and how it builds capacity and sustainability for the tribe’s buffalo program.

Eventually, Small wants to have a small processing facility onsite. The solar array was built to be expandable to grow with the program.

The buffalo are both a source of food and economic development for the tribe. In November 2025, Small and the buffalo program handed out 5,414 pounds of buffalo meat. But they also sell the animals to other buffalo ranchers. The first year, Small said they sold 103 animals for around $126,000 to a rancher in South Dakota.

The processed buffalo meat sits in a freezer that would be impossible without the solar array. Small and the buffalo restoration program donate the processed meat to the tribe in regular giveaways. Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.

There is a fine line between running a successful business and providing for the community, said Small. “We wanted to do it in such a way that we could still get meat processed and donated out to the communities, but still have enough money to keep our operation going and keep growing and expanding.”

This solar array, as well as the buffalo program overall, helps the Northern Cheyenne tribe become more sovereign and self-sufficient in every way. “Energy policy is really health policy because of what energy extraction has continuously done to our water, our air, our land, and our animals,” said Two Bears.

New Hampshire Republicans are attempting to do away with a 50-year-old property tax exemption for households and businesses with solar, contending that the policy forces residents without the clean energy systems to unwittingly subsidize those who have them. Supporters of the exemption, however, say this argument is misleading, insulting, and at odds with New Hampshire’s tradition of letting communities shape their own local governments.

The focus of the debate is a bill proposed in the New Hampshire House this month by Republican Representative Len Turcotte and several co-sponsors in his party. The measure would repeal a law, established in 1975, that authorizes cities and towns to exempt owners of solar-equipped buildings from paying taxes on whatever value their solar systems add to their property. As of 2024, 153 of the state’s municipalities — roughly two-thirds — had adopted the exemption, one of the only incentives offered in support of residential solar power in the state.

The exemption means that homeowners without solar must pay more property tax to make up for the money not being collected from the “extreme minority” who have solar panels, Turcotte said while presenting his legislation at a hearing of the House Science, Technology, and Energy Committee last week. This “redistribution” of the tax burden is unfair, he said.

The solar property tax exemption is a fairly common policy: Nationally, 36 states offer some version of it. While legislators in many states have targeted pro-solar policies like net metering, property tax exemptions have so far avoided similar attacks. New Hampshire, therefore, could end up as a proving ground for whether this approach can find traction.

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New Hampshire does not have a sales tax or an income tax and leans heavily on local property taxes for revenue; its rates are among the highest in the country. That makes changes to property tax policy a particularly sensitive subject. The solar exemption bill has Republicans, who are typically tax averse, walking a fine line between championing what they say is fairness for all and pushing a policy that will inevitably raise taxes for some.

The state authorizes 15 other property tax exemptions — including for elderly residents, veterans, and those with disabilities — but Turcotte’s bill targets only the one for solar.

The exemption is a “local option” policy, meaning cities and towns must opt in through a vote in each municipality. Turcotte, however, doubts the average resident realized that they were signing up to pay more on their own taxes.

“They see a feel-good measure,” he said. “Do they truly understand? I don’t believe they do.”

After Turcotte presented his bill, the remaining speakers — about a dozen clean energy advocates, lawmakers, business leaders, and local solar owners — uniformly opposed his proposal.

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Removing the exemption would be an unfair rule change after homeowners invested in solar systems with the understanding they’d be getting a tax break, many argued. Businesses using solar could face a “significant tax increase,” said Natch Greyes, vice president of public policy at New Hampshire’s Business and Industry Association. The change could cost homeowners with solar hundreds of dollars per year while barely reducing the property tax rate for everyone else, others said.

In the town of Hudson, for example, $2.2 million in property value isn’t taxed because of the exemption, out of a tax base of $5.1 billion, its chief assessor, James Michaud, testified. Removing the exemption would have virtually no effect on the tax rate, he said.

“It’s almost incalculable how small it is,” he said.

Whatever tiny tax shift the exemption creates is worth it, others argued, saying that it provides an incentive for the public good: More solar means lower greenhouse gas emissions and less burden on the grid. Turcotte countered that these broader benefits of solar — many of which have been well documented — are “subjective.”

The question of local control also loomed large in the testimony. In New Hampshire, whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” the right of individual towns to decide on their own rules and regulations has long been a point of pride. Repealing the exemption would mean overriding decisions made by voters. Turcotte’s claim that residents didn’t understand what they were getting into is not only condescending but also just plain wrong, several witnesses said.

“You are essentially, with this bill, substituting your judgment about what is proper at the level of local taxation for that of town meetings and city councils throughout the state,” said Representative Ned Raynolds, a Democrat, while questioning Turcotte.

The bill now awaits a vote in committee before it can face a floor vote from the full House. It would then advance to the Senate. Republicans control both chambers of the state Legislature and the governor’s office.

But the bill’s opponents hope that lawmakers will heed their arguments and give weight to the mass of voters who have approved the exemption across the state.

“This is the reason two-thirds of the towns have adopted it: They can see it’s a good thing,” testified David Trumble, a solar owner from the town of Weare. “Solar is a good thing.”

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal to revise the Clean Water Act, specifically a section of the law that regulates water quality and limits states’ and tribes’ authority over federal projects, as well as how tribes can gain the authority to conduct those reviews. Experts say the move would dissolve one of the few tools tribes have to enforce treaty rights and hamper their ability to protect tribal citizens.

“What the Trump administration is proposing to modify here is a really important tool for states and tribes, because it gets at their ability to put conditions on or, in extreme cases, block projects that are either proposed by the federal government or under the jurisdiction of the federal government,” said Miles Johnson, legal director at Columbia Riverkeeper, an organization that works on issues affecting the Columbia River.

Developers seeking to build dams, mines, data centers, or pipelines must navigate a permitting process to do so. One requirement in the process is obtaining certification from a tribe or state confirming that the project meets federal water quality standards. Currently, tribes and states conduct holistic reviews of projects, known as “activity as a whole”, evaluating all potential impacts on water quality, including spill risks, threats to cultural resources, and impacts on wildlife. This approach was established under the Biden administration in 2023.

However, the newly proposed rule would limit reviews to “discharge only,” where both states and tribes are able to review projects solely based on how much pollution they would release, narrowing the scope of oversight.

The proposed rule also changes how tribes can gain regulatory authority to assess water quality under the Treatment in a Similar Manner as a State program, or TAS. Under that program, tribes are able to act as regulators, one of the few tools available to them, and directly set conditions to limit factors that would pollute waters near tribal lands. To date, only 84 tribal nations have received TAS status, allowing them to review federal projects. Currently, Section 401 of the Clean Water Act allows tribes that can demonstrate the capacity and resources the ability to review water quality standards, expanding regulatory powers beyond tribes with larger resources. The proposed change would shrink those powers, allowing only TAS tribes to perform evaluations through a separate, more rigorous authorization program.

“Treaty rights are one of the strongest mechanisms to enforce against the federal government, against the state, against third-party actors, and in litigation,” said Heather Tanana, a law professor at the University of Colorado. “It takes years, it takes money, it’s complicated to do, and so you want these other mechanisms.”

A reversion to pre-2023 rules, Tanana said, would put higher demands on tribes to show larger-scale capacity, often in the form of dedicated water departments.

“There’s such a wide variance in tribes of what resources are available to them. Do they have other sources of revenue, right? How many staff do they have? Do they have their own environmental departments? Is it one person, or is it 10?” said Tanana.

During the Biden administration, tribes advocated for a baseline rule allowing all tribes some input in federal projects while seeking TAS status, but industry pushback during the comment period and a Trump win during the general election in 2024 led to its withdrawal from the EPA in December.

Patrick Hunter, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, noted that of 7,500 projects submitted during the Biden administration, fewer than 1 percent were denied. Most were approved with conditions such as mitigation measures and sediment traps to prevent water pollution during construction. Tanana said tribal review outcomes were similar.

The EPA’s 2025 report on tribal consultations highlighted widespread opposition to changes. “The clear feedback from the tribes was, ‘Don’t change it,'” said Tanana. “‘You’re going to make it harder for us to exercise our sovereignty to protect our waters and protect our community.’”

A 30-day public comment period on the proposed rule is currently underway. The rule is expected to face litigation after finalization.

“Tribes have an obligation to care for the rivers and waterways that have sustained their communities since before the existence of the United States and are weighing every option to protect their way of life,” said Gussie Lord, head of tribal partnerships at Earthjustice.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA wants to eliminate one of the few ways that tribes can protect their water on Jan 27, 2026.

It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?

The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defense contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.

The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released this year independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron. The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped.

"When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told Common Dreams.

World’s Largest Polluter?

Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.

It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.

This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.

As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”

"You have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”

But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.

In one particularly candid interview, a major general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”

And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check," he says.

Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.

They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.

“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams. “So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that's actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”

'Human Detritus'

The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.

“Once you get into the research, you realize every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it's not just emissions, it's the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.

The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.

Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.

"We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”

“No matter what you think you know, it's worse. It's actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.

One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles. “My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.

In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.

Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind.”

“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they're churned up and spit out. They're the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”

Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.

“This isn't about service members,” she said. “This isn't about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We're fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”

The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.

“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.

A Movie and a Movement

This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realized “it could be 10 documentaries.”

She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”

But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalized me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore's filmography.

Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.

“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire."

“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this. If you care about cold water and good air, you can't walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”

She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can't get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can't. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”

Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.

Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing "profound climate anxiety" following the birth of the pairs' first child. She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.

Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it's not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”

The sense of urgency has only increased with President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorize US cities.

Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarization of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.

“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it's to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organizations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”

So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.

But education is not her only goal.

“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.

For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defense, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way. It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.

While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilization against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.

“There's so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that's our vision.”

“It's like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fiber of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”

Solar panels are usually sold with 25 to 30 years of performance promises. But what happens after that, when the warranty language is long gone and you are

The U.S. Department of the Interior has said it will revoke the grazing permits that have allowed American Prairie to run bison on roughly 63,000 acres of federal public land in Montana. This decision would affect seven parcels managed by the Bureau of Land Management in Phillips County, and it would hinder the organization’s larger goals of conserving large swaths of intact grasslands while restoring the native grazers to those landscapes.

The Interior’s rationale for yanking the permits, according to its Jan. 16 proposed decision, is that under the Taylor Grazing Act, the BLM can only issue grazing permits for livestock managed for “production-oriented” purposes. It claims that American Prairie’s emphasis on conservation runs counter to those purposes.

American Prairie CEO Alison Fox criticized this reasoning as both unfair and inconsistent with long-standing public-lands grazing practices in Montana. She said in a response to the decision that it creates uncertainty, not just for American Prairie — which has been grazing bison using federal leases since 2005 — but for all other livestock owners in the West. She added that American Prairie plans to protest the decision and will take further legal action, if necessary.

“This is a slippery slope,” Fox said in a statement shared with Outdoor Life. “When federal agencies begin changing how the rules are applied after the process is complete, it undermines confidence in the system for everyone who relies on public lands. Montana livestock owners deserve clarity, fairness, and decisions they can count on.”

The grazing permits now in limbo were approved by the BLM in 2022 after years of analysis and public comment. The agency noted in its record of decision that the feeding habits of bison could lead to habitat improvements there, and that it had granted similar bison grazing permits on BLM lands in Colorado, North Dakota, Wyoming, and other Western states.

This approval, however, drew intense pushback from industry livestock groups and politicians in Montana, who considered it a radical proposal and an attack on the state’s ranchers. Those same groups challenged the BLM’s approval in court, and they are now celebrating the Interior’s more recent decision — one that was signaled in December, when Interior secretary Doug Burgum used his authority to assume jurisdiction over the long-running legal battle.

The Trump administration settled just 15 of the illegal pollution cases referred by the US Environmental Protection Agency in the first year of President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, according to data compiled by a government watchdog—the latest evidence that Trump officials are placing corporate profits above the EPA's mission to "protect human health and the environment."

In the report, The Collapse of Environmental Enforcement Under Trump's EPA, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) noted Thursday that in the first year of former President Joe Biden's administration, 71 cases referred by the EPA were prosecuted by the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

“Under [EPA Administrator] Lee Zeldin, anti-pollution enforcement is dying a quick death,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of PEER and a former enforcement attorney at EPA.

The DOJ lodged just one environmental consent decree in a case regarding a statutory violation of the Clean Air Act from the day Trump was inaugurated just over a year ago until now—signaling that the agency "virtually stopped enforcing" the landmark law that regulates air pollution.

"Enforcing the Clean Air Act means going after violators within the oil, gas, petrochemical, coal, and motor vehicle industries that account for most air pollution," reads the report. "But these White House favorites will be shielded from any serious enforcement, at least, while Lee Zeldin remains EPA’s administrator."

“For the sake of our health and the environment, Congress and the American people need to push back against Lee Zeldin’s dismantling of EPA’s environmental enforcement program.”

In the first year of his first term, Trump's DOJ settled 26 Clean Air Act cases, even more than the 22 the department prosecuted in Biden's first year.

The report warns that plummeting enforcement actions are likely to contribute to health harms in vulnerable communities located near waterways that are filled with "algae blooms, bacteria, or toxic chemicals" and near energy and chemical industry infrastructure, where people are more likely to suffer asthma attacks and heart disease caused by smog and soot.

“Enforcing environmental laws ensures that polluters are held accountable and prevented from dumping their pollution on others for profit,” said Joanna Citron Day, general counsel for PEER and a former senior counsel at DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Section. “For the sake of our health and the environment, Congress and the American people need to push back against Lee Zeldin’s dismantling of EPA’s environmental enforcement program.”

EPA's own enforcement and compliance database identifies 2,374 major air pollution sources that have not had a full compliance evaluation in at least five years, and shows that no enforcement action has been taken at more than 400 sources that are marked as a "high priority."

Nearly 900 pollution sources reported to the EPA that they exceeded their wastewater discharge limits at least 50 times in the past two years.

The agency has also repealed its rules limiting carbon pollution from gas-powered cars, arguing that the EPA lacks the authority to regulate carbon.

As public health risks mount, PEER noted, Zeldin is moving forward with plans to stop calculating the health benefits of rules aimed at reducing air pollution, and issued a memo last month detailing a "compliance first" policy emphasizing a "cooperative, industry-friendly approach" to environmental regulation.

“Administrator Zeldin is removing all incentives for big polluters to follow the law," said Whitehouse, "and turning a blind eye to those who suffer from the impacts of pollution.”

A tray of eyed chinook salmon eggs are seen in an incubator at the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton) on Jan. 16, a week after they were transferred from the Colville Confederated Tribes’ Chief Joseph Hatchery. As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through its shell – a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period. Photo by Aaron Hemens

First Nations fish hatcheries on both sides of the “Canada-U.S.” border are celebrating 10 years of a collaboration to help salmon blocked from migrating by dams and other threats.

Earlier this month, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in “Washington” transferred more than 6,200 chinook salmon eggs from their Chief Joseph Hatchery to the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s (ONA) kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton), nearly 200 kilometres north.

This year marks one decade since the two tribal hatcheries started working together to restore the fish’s population throughout the Columbia River Basin.

The partnership has seen Colville Tribes send more than 115,000 eyed chinook eggs to the ONA over the past 10 years. One year alone, 2019, saw 40 per cent of those eggs transferred north.

“They don’t have to do that; they don’t have to give us anything,” said Tyson Marsel, a biologist at kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ hatchery and member of Lower Similkameen Indian Band.

“But for them to recognize that this is for the betterment of the environment and conservation, it’s not only helping us, but it’s also helping them.”

An educational tool features glass containers showing the stages of salmon fry development. Photo by Aaron Hemens

As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through its shell – a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period.

Salmon have been a vital source of sustenance for Pacific Northwest Indigenous nations for thousands of years.

But several salmon species, particularly sockeye and chinook, have seen their runs and populations severely depleted across the Columbia River Basin in the last century.

As settlers built numerous dams along the waterway, they effectively blocked the fish from migrating up-river and into its tributaries.

Salmon populations have also been impacted by habitat loss, overfishing, and warming water temperatures linked to climate change.

Whether it’s sk’lwist (summer-run chinook) or ntitiyx (spring-run chinook), the fish have for decades become stuck at the Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River in “Washington,” which lacks a fish passage route.

Opened downstream to the dam in 2013, the Chief Joseph Hatchery catches adult fish blocked by the dam to collect their eggs. It’s part of a broodstock, or fish-breeding, program that spawns nearly three million young chinook each year.

“They’ll be collecting millions of chinook eggs in a year,” Marsel said. “Versus us, our best year is 10,000 that we’ve collected from the Okanagan River here.”

A closeup of eyed chinook salmon eggs transferred from the Chief Joseph Hatchery on Jan. 8, now stored in an incubator at the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton). As salmon grow in their eggs, the dark spots of their eyes become visible through its shell – a stage early in their development known as the “eyed eggs” period. Photo by Aaron Hemens

The salmon eggs sent from the Colville Tribes’ hatchery roughly doubled the ONA hatchery’s chinook population compared to last year, when it had just 6,500.

kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery stores the transferred roe in an incubator, where water temperatures are gradually increased from 3 C to 10 C over the course of a few weeks, to help support their development.

The fish are expected to hatch around the end of this month, and will remain housed at the hatchery until June. Once they weigh between three to five grams, the ONA plans to release them into suwiw̓s (Osoyoos Lake).

The adult fish are expected to return between 2029-31.

Although much of the Okanagan River has been channelized — engineered to straighten the waterway — there’s a more naturally flowing portion north of Osoyoos Lake, in the town of “Oliver.”

It’s there that Marsel said the fish like to spawn.

Even if the fish can’t make it upriver past Osoyoos Lake, they’ll still reach the Chief Joseph Dam and Colville hatchery downriver.

“Some of our fish that we’ve released from our facility have gone into Chief Joseph Hatchery’s program,” Marsel said.

Baby chinook salmon swim in a raceway at the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s kł cp̓əlk̓ stim̓ Hatchery in snpink’tn (Penticton) on Jan. 16. Photo by Aaron Hemens

He added that “every fish counts,” especially when it comes to chinook. The species is a key cultural figure for the syilx Okanagan Nation, being ntytyix (Chief Salmon) of the Four Food Chiefs.

“People don’t realize how rare they are, and a lot of people don’t even know that there’s chinook in the system,” he explained.

While much attention has been paid to sockeye salmon restoration efforts, Marsel said chinook hold a particularly important place in the culture.

“For the syilx Nation and all the people here, it means so much more,” he explained. “Not that sockeye aren’t important, but ntytyix holds a lot more meaning.”

The partnership to help chinook recover by sharing eggs hasn’t just transcended the border, however. It might also be helping transcend some political divisions between First Nations.

In recent years, the Sinixt Confederacy of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation has at times been at odds with ONA, over legal and territorial claims related to the historically displaced Sinixt Nation, and which tribal council represents its descendants.

In recent years during the hatchery partnership’s decade, the tensions have resulted in chinook egg transfers being withheld, Marsel said — but he firmly believes the two tribal governments realize working together for salmon outweighs their inter-governmental disagreements.

“We have this same common goal,” he said. “Working together is what’s going to make it better.

“To have the collaboration is extremely important, not only for the people but definitely the environment, the salmon [and] everything that thrives off the salmon.”

But long before the two modern-day tribal organizations were formed, Marsel said Indigenous communities in the region always supported and traded with one another.

“We have family down in Colville Confederated Tribes,” he said. “There was trading constantly across that imaginary line that’s now put up.

“It’s not like this is a new thing where we’re working with Colville Confederated Tribes — but it’s exciting that now we’re working together for a common goal, and that’s conservation.”