Infrastructure

"Residents of West Oakland, which suffers from toxic waste and high pollution rates, rally against a coal export facility"

"There’s an increasingly narrow strip of New Orleans marshland that hardly anyone lives on, but without it, hundreds of thousands of people will face far greater risks from storms and floods."

"The Trump administration urged a federal court on Monday to dismiss an environmental lawsuit against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, saying the company’s Grok government model and the data centers that power it are crucial to national security. The NAACP alleges that xAI has rushed to build and continue expanding its Colossus Gas Plant in vulnerable and heavily Black communities near the Tennessee-Mississippi border without legally required permits or pollution controls."

"The state of California is walking back protections meant to keep destructive golden mussels out of Lake Oroville, one of the largest and most important reservoirs in the state."

"An executive order in Massachusetts and a regulatory commission action in Minnesota are among the big moves this year that highlight the growing role of virtual power plants in grid management."

"Some day in the next 12 months – maybe in late-August, maybe not until next spring – Lake Mead will drop below the critical threshold of 1,035 feet above sea level. That is the water-level elevation at which hydropower generating capacity at Hoover Dam, the largest in the Colorado River basin, will be cut by 70 percent."

"The Orlando plant had been scheduled for retirement in 2025. The order cited an energy emergency related to a shortage of facilities and proliferation of data centers."

"More than 200 data centers are going up in dozens of competitive House districts — and neither party knows how to handle their political fallout heading into the midterms."

"In the days after Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians in late September 2024, Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Tracy Swartout went up in a helicopter to survey the damage. What she saw was deeply troubling. 'When Helene happened, we ended up with 58 landslides spread across 200 linear miles of the parkway,' Swartout says."

"The U.S. just hit a big milestone: It got more power from solar panels than from coal plants in May."