Inside Climate News

Eat more fatty fish. That dietary advice has changed the way the world consumes salmon, pushing consumer demand ever upward and production to higher and higher levels. Most of that demand is being met with farmed salmon: Today, nearly 70 percent of the salmon consumed on the planet are raised in pens and cages. The […]

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from challenging California’s longstanding authority to set vehicle pollution standards stricter than federal requirements. The legal dispute stems from a decision announced in June by EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who said the agency had determined that four of California’s Clean Air Act preemption waivers were […]

Texas officials told lawmakers at a state Senate hearing on Tuesday that they want to know how much water data centers across the state are using, but there is no master mailing list. The regulators are thus uncertain whether they’re reaching facility operators at the right address, or if they’re being ignored.  The lack of […]

As data centers and other large users drove demand higher, U.S. power plants increased their output by 2.1 percent in the first half of the year compared to the first half of 2025.  This week, I looked at which states rose and fell the most and which power sources drove those changes, based on figures […]

When the Trump administration last fall unveiled its cornerstone policy for carrying out the Clean Water Act—new language spelling out the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority—it said one of its goals was to return power to states and tribes. “This proposal recognizes that states and tribes know their local land and water resources […]

HOMESTEAD, Fla.—It was too hot to sleep.  When the lights turned off and the air conditioning unit went quiet that night in July, it didn’t come as a surprise for Mirella Estrada, 51. She and her husband, both farmworkers, had long been struggling to pay off their climbing electricity bill debt. Earlier that week, a […]

China’s carbon pollution fell modestly in recent months after the country’s consumers and industries sharply cut their use of oil, according to a new analysis. With oil and gas markets still in turmoil due to war in the Middle East, the trend could translate into a full-year decline for China’s carbon dioxide emissions. After the […]

This story is a collaboration between Inside Climate News and Honolulu Civil Beat. Three years after the deadly Lahaina wildfire destroyed her childhood home, Raquel Utrillo cannot bear the thought of returning to the block where she grew up.  Others in the neighborhood have finished rebuilding, but her family’s lot remains almost empty. It is […]

A proposed offshore oil project near the Falkland Islands threatens sensitive marine ecosystems—and Argentina’s sovereignty—and must be halted, an Argentine environmental group and a veterans’ organization alleged in a new lawsuit.  The complaint, filed in a federal Argentine court on Tuesday, asks the court to block planned offshore oil operations by U.K.-based Rockhopper Exploration and […]

Many of our impact case studies cover ongoing stories that Inside Climate News continues to actively cover. The impact reflected here is current as of publication and may be updated as the situation develops. As a climate reporter for nearly two decades, I’ve seen enough clean energy projects and emission-reduction pledges fall by the wayside […]

Fossil fuel emissions are pushing Earth’s climate toward a dangerous new phase of climate “overshoot,” scientists warned Wednesday in a new report from the United Nations Environmental Programme. The report, Limiting Overshoot, projects that global temperatures will exceed the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold identified in the Paris Agreement within a few years, […]

A federal judge has struck down New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, ruling that it “conflicts with” federal authority.   The legislation would have required fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of adapting to climate change, but it operates in an area of the law “in which the federal interest is so dominant that […]

An intense downpour at Grand Canyon National Park transformed hiking trails and shallow creeks into deadly rapids over the weekend, killing at least two people. Following scattered showers Saturday morning, around an inch of rain pummeled parts of the storied Arizona park in just a half hour later that day. Flash floods carried water, mud […]

About a month ago, two wildfires ignited a day apart in southwest Montana. The Bobcat Lakes Fire started July 31 near Wise River, followed by the Sand Creek Fire on Aug. 1 near Wisdom.  Now, crews working to contain them are intentionally setting fire to vegetation in areas where steep, densely timbered terrain makes direct […]

PUYO, Ecuador—People fighting oil wells, mines and other threats to their homelands did not come to this Amazonian city to lobby politicians at an environmental conference hosted by governments. They built the conference themselves.  The 12th Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, known as FOSPA, brought together Indigenous leaders, Afro-descendent communities, women, youth and other environmental defenders and […]

By its own account, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is doing a fantastic job. In a March report on its performance in the last fiscal year, the agency boasted that it had concluded 2,127 civil enforcement cases, “the highest in nine years.” That number wasn’t wrong, but it was very misleading, an Inside Climate News […]

Maryland’s ratepayer protection agency is fighting on two fronts simultaneously to shield households from paying hundreds of millions more in costs related to projected power demand—much of it linked to data centers that may never get built.  In recent weeks, the Office of People’s Counsel has asked federal regulators to reject regional grid operator PJM […]

Most people decide if it’s safe to eat an old tub of yogurt in the fridge or canned tuna in the back of the cupboard by checking its sell-by date. But no label indicates that pesticides, phthalates, PFAS or other hazardous chemicals could be seeping from those containers into your food. Of more than 15,000 […]

Over the weekend, Iceland voted against resuming talks to join the European Union. At the heart of the referendum question: fish. More than a decade since talks previously collapsed, Euroskeptics won 52.8 percent of the vote, according to the National Electoral Commission.  Just over 12,700 votes separated the two camps. While the referendum—which was moved […]

PHILADELPHIA—A simmering debate over the future of Philadelphia’s Bellwether District has been reenergized by a Planning Commission presentation last month that identified the industrial zone as one of only two sites in the city capable of hosting a large data center. Neither the commission nor the site’s owner, HRP Group, report any such proposals to […]