On the heels of the hottest summer on record and a United Nations report warning that global temperatures are likely to push climate risks to “increasingly dangerous heights,” the Trump administration overturned most of a Biden-era rule limiting climate pollution from power plants, the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a final plan Monday that guts the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, which the agency said exceeds its authority under the Clean Air Act by requiring control technologies “that are not adequately demonstrated.” The agency also proposed revoking “all remaining GHG emissions requirements for power plants,” arguing their emissions “have no material impact on climate change.”

The plan to revoke the Carbon Pollution Standards was initially revealed last spring.

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On the heels of the hottest summer on record and a United Nations report warning that global temperatures are likely to push climate risks to “increasingly dangerous heights,” the Trump administration overturned most of a Biden-era rule limiting climate pollution from power plants, the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a final plan Monday that guts the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, which the agency said exceeds its authority under the Clean Air Act by requiring control technologies “that are not adequately demonstrated.” The agency also proposed revoking “all remaining GHG emissions requirements for power plants,” arguing their emissions “have no material impact on climate change.”

The plan to revoke the Carbon Pollution Standards was initially revealed last spring.

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In July, the Trump administration relegated endangered leatherback turtles, sea lions, and whales to mere collateral damage in its race to profit from the oceans. Now, fisheries science is in the government’s crosshairs.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced new agency priorities last week that they say are a commitment to “cutting bureaucracy, modernizing our science, and putting our fishing communities first.” But experts say the agency’s actions will erode fish stocks, threaten endangered species, and surrender marine habitats to destructive trawlers.

The agency-level reforms serve as a self-proclaimed “operational roadmap” to fulfilling President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.

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© Reinhard Dirscherl

In July, the Trump administration relegated endangered leatherback turtles, sea lions, and whales to mere collateral damage in its race to profit from the oceans. Now, fisheries science is in the government’s crosshairs.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced new agency priorities last week that they say are a commitment to “cutting bureaucracy, modernizing our science, and putting our fishing communities first.” But experts say the agency’s actions will erode fish stocks, threaten endangered species, and surrender marine habitats to destructive trawlers.

The agency-level reforms serve as a self-proclaimed “operational roadmap” to fulfilling President Donald Trump’s “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” executive order, signed in April 2025.

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© Reinhard Dirscherl

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 US Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend eating at least 8 ounces of fish a week and urges people to choose salmon or other species that are similarly high in “heart-healthy” Omega-3 fatty acids. But new research led by USDA scientists finds that levels of these fatty acids in farmed salmon have dropped considerably, potentially making the agency’s own advice, and similar recommendations, including from the American Heart Association, outdated and insufficient.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here . NEW YORK—When nearly 10,000 people in Southeast Queens lost power during a July heatwave, Mayor Zohran Mamdani called on…

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter. When Gerard Mullin decided to train in offshore wind, he didn’t know what to expect. But on his first long-term project in…

With summer heat comes pool parties, beach days, backyard cookouts, and, of course, swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes.

But while insect bites have always been a side effect of time spent outdoors, the species doing the biting are changing in historically temperate regions like New England. As climate change makes these areas warmer and wetter, their ranges are expanding—and any diseases they carry come with them.

In Connecticut, for example, a statewide mosquito monitoring program has detected 54 different species, including invasives like the Asian tiger mosquito, which can transmit potentially serious diseases including dengue and Zika. The mosquito’s historical territory is in hot and humid climates farther south, but it has been moving north.

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In 2023, after years of pollution, equipment failures, and health concerns, the Cumberland Fossil Plant in Tennessee was slated to close within the decade.

The coal-fired plant had been part of a multibillion-dollar settlement in 2011 after its operator, the Tennessee Valley Authority, failed to install pollution control technology a decade earlier. Regulators cited the plant for more air-pollution violations in 2017 and 2023. TVA said it would shutter Cumberland’s units in 2026 and 2028.

Then the Trump administration replaced four of TVA’s board members, and the agency reneged on its retirement plan in February. Now, TVA has a federal pledge for $46 million to extend Cumberland’s lifespan—part of a nationwide push by President Donald Trump to keep older coal plants running.

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© Stephen A. Smith/Southern Alliance for Clean Energy

MAJURO, Marshall Islands—Perched on the bow of an aluminum landing craft, Anne Cohen gazed a few yards ahead of the vessel toward a yellow robot gliding across the emerald Majuro lagoon.

The unmanned surface vehicle, called Yellowfin, was quickly becoming one of the coral researcher’s most dependable guides in these Central Pacific waters.

“She’s the best dive buddy,” said Cohen, a tenured scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod. Programmed to navigate to a precise set of coordinates, the robot cut through small swells like a tiny sailboat without a mast, directing Cohen toward a destination she had traveled thousands of miles to revisit.

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MAJURO, Marshall Islands—Perched on the bow of an aluminum landing craft, Anne Cohen gazed a few yards ahead of the vessel toward a yellow robot gliding across the emerald Majuro lagoon.

The unmanned surface vehicle, called Yellowfin, was quickly becoming one of the coral researcher’s most dependable guides in these Central Pacific waters.

“She’s the best dive buddy,” said Cohen, a tenured scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod. Programmed to navigate to a precise set of coordinates, the robot cut through small swells like a tiny sailboat without a mast, directing Cohen toward a destination she had traveled thousands of miles to revisit.

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© Lukasz Larsson Warzecha/Getty Images

The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.

On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed the appeal after the Justice Department filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10.

The case against Trump’s executive order was filed in May 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, DC, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

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The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.

On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed the appeal after the Justice Department filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10.

The case against Trump’s executive order was filed in May 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, DC, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

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© glegorly

Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on Thursday.

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest.

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The upcoming loss of a deep-ocean monitoring system is triggering deep anxiety in Alaska, the nation’s top fish-producing state, where temperatures are warming twice as quickly as the global average.

The National Science Foundation announced plans in May to decommission the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a nearly $368 million network of scientific instruments that tracks ocean chemistry, wave action, water temperature, salinity, and a host of other metrics.

The real-time information from these ocean observatories helps scientists, fishery managers, coastal hazard planners, and even the military plan and prepare for the future. Whether that’s calculating how much fish can be harvested or when a marine heatwave or giant wave action may be occurring, the data is used by a plethora of sources.

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For migrant workers trapped onboard Chinese distant water fishing fleets, cutting the fins off sharks as they writhe violently on rusted decks in the Indian Ocean isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional and lucrative act that marks the start of a bloody half-a-billion-dollar offshore supply chain, tacitly supported by Beijing yet covertly concealed from port inspectors globally.

The Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on the protection of endangered species, filed a formal petition this month requesting the U.S. government potentially sanction China for failing to meet American shark conservation standards. Shark populations have declined by more than 70 percent since 1970, with more than one-third of all shark and ray species now threatened with extinction. Yet each year, Chinese-flagged vessels catch, brutally fin, and discard thousands.

Should the National Marine Fisheries Service identify China as having violated the US Moratorium Protection Act, then President Trump could be expected to ban the import of all $1.5 billion of Chinese seafood.

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