The Mediterranean coast faces rising microplastic contamination as researchers trace pollution to waste processing, runoff, and record rainfall.
We need the North Carolina General Assembly to step up and protect their constituents as the EPA rolls out its stated plans to eliminate nationwide drinking water standards for PFAS, a known human health risk.
New EU packaging regulations will come into force this week which set EU-wide limits on PFAS, or "forever chemicals", in food-contact packaging and set targets to cut the bloc's waste, especially of oil-derived plastics.
Pesticide manufacturers have voluntarily canceled registrations for products containing paraquat in California — kicking off a statewide phase-out of the controversial herbicide.
Companies that manufacture, use, or transport nurdles must report spills and will be required to develop plans to limit them in storm runoff.
As Trump’s agencies shrink, narrow their role, and reduce enforcement, politically connected Energy Transfer is steering a slow cleanup of fuel it spilled into drinking water near the Delaware River.
The planned Pecos County facility may generate the most greenhouse gas emissions of any single site in the U.S.
One resident said he ‘wasn’t expecting black smoke,’ which can signal higher levels of toxic pollutants in the air. Another said she’s concerned about potential health impacts because she wants to have a family.
It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.
Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.
“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”
“If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble,” Masters added.
While the heat was more concentrated in the Midwest during the Dust Bowl, all 48 lower states experienced excessive heat this summer — at least one degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.
And instead of focusing on ways to fight the effects of climate change, much of the country is moving in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and is actively seeking to reopen coal-burning plants. AI data centers powered by gas generators are compounding a major uptick in greenhouse gas emissions.
The result is a country literally on fire, while suffering the second-worst July drought conditions on record for the contiguous US, according to Yale Climate Connections. Per the US Drought Monitor, a whopping 71 percent of the contiguous US experienced abnormal dryness or drought during the first week of August, coming on top of billions of dollars in direct damages during the first half of 2026.
Meanwhile, major wildfires continue to burn across both the US and Canada, exposing millions to dangerous levels of air pollution and causing an estimated 4,000 premature deaths across the continent within a single week last month, according to The Economist.
The prognosis is just as grim as one might think.
“This may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives,” Masters told the AP.
To give humanity a fighting chance we need to “stop burning so many fossil fuels,” he added. “We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”
More on climate change: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build
The post It’s Official: This Is the Hottest America Has Ever Been appeared first on Futurism.
Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.
That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
“We’re being transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results,” Callahan continued. “Growth and sustainability don’t have to be in opposition — in fact, our results show they reinforce each other.”
Even without the new Pecos County plant, Amazon’s emissions are staggering. The company recently disclosed a record increase in its total emissions last year, with company-wide electricity usage rising by 34 percent across 2025.
That the company is blatantly papering over its previous climate commitments isn’t a shocker at this point, in other words, as the company reaches new emission highs with each passing year.
More on Amazon: Jeff Bezos Harshly Criticized for $200 Million Pledge to Protect the World’s Most Endangered Species
The post Amazon’s New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States appeared first on Futurism.
At a Massachusetts lab, pebble-sized pellets are transformed into forks and films that won’t leave microplastics in the environment.
One year after negotiations for a global plastics treaty collapsed in Geneva, a new document has been released to revive the process.
Amazon’s artificial intelligence ambitions will soon be partly fueled by a natural gas-burning power plant in Texas that “could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States,” The New York Times reported.
These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm public health—contributing to conditions like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes. Some communities are demanding more stringent environmental reviews, but the Trump administration favors fast-tracking that can include skipping the permitting process entirely.
Since Elon Musk’s xAI controversially began relying on gas turbines last spring to power its biggest AI data center, Colossus, there has been public backlash to off-the-grid data centers like the one Amazon is building.
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