I think often of a line I came across years ago, when researching presidential science advisors: "Richard Nixon did not want science advising and took steps to be sure he would not get it." This is that, only blown up, Big Bang-style.
The planet will continue its lonely journey around the sun, and so here I am again, to explain which things will and will not happen in 2026.
The answer, of course, is grift. The answer is always grift.
Shaving every tenth of a degree off whatever final thermometer number we end up at means a few more glaciers hanging on, diminished perhaps, but a glacier still, with room to grow.
NREL employees, many of whom joined the lab specifically to work toward its clean energy mission, are not happy about the oil-soaked leadership's moves.
The original sin of the UN's work was to fail to center coal, oil, and gas as the primary villains in the entire enterprise.
It's a schoolyard friend saying "I promise not to tell anyone your secret" and then shouting it from on top of the jungle gym, claiming he didn't tell "anyone," he told "the sky."
Independent reporting and commentary on science, politics, and policy
A recording of the new director's first town hall reveals how he is trying to walk a difficult line between optimism and clear-eyed realism.
Some new analysis from activists sheds some light on just how deep into the international climate negotiations process Big Oil has managed to burrow.
"I would rather be an actual pawn. At least pawn sacrifices are calculated and achieve something."
Looking back, and ahead, on the anniversary of a White House warning.
A growing body of research has demonstrated that hits from tropical cyclones leave more than just damaged rooftops in their wake, in fact raising mortality rates through a likely wide variety of mechanisms for years.
The fact is, more people care about this than the authors suggest. More people will care even more as the years pass because the problem is not only not going away but actively getting worse.
We already have plenty of evidence of what happens when things better left to governments — which in this case might decide to never flip the switch at all — are ceded to private industry.
A reasonable accounting of the major policies enacted in one way or another in the nine months of the Trump administration resembles, essentially, a series of weeping voids in the sides of various figurative edifices, now given corporeal form within view of the Treasury building.
"I can't just sit back and watch things fall apart."
The lemonade stand owner releasing a report on the increasing demand for lemonade is, at best, wishful thinking, and at worst, active market manipulation.
Some of the scariest climate thresholds are approaching fast. But so are some potential ways out.
Multiple people at multiple agencies said their bosses have told them to email up the chain if they hear about RIFs, because, per one source, "they probably won't be told if people are fired."