A pivotal trial over the embattled Dakota Access Pipeline opens today that could have grave consequences for protests in the US and the future of the environmental group Greenpeace.

Members of the Standing Rock Sioux and more than 500 other tribes protested the development of the pipeline alongside demonstrators who joined from across the US nearly a decade ago. Legal battles are still in motion, even after oil started flowing through the pipeline that runs from North Dakota to Illinois in 2017.

The company that operates Dakota Access, Energy Transfers, is suing Greenpeace for $300 million in a lawsuit that goes on trial this week. Energy Transfers claims that Greenpeace supported protesters’ “unlawful acts of trespass” and property destruction to stop construction. It also alleges that the organization spread false information about the company and concerns about the pipeline’s impact on the environment and cultural sites to the public and to banks financing the project.

Paying that amount in damages would be equivalent to about 10 times Greenpeace USA’s annual budget, according to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Occidental, the oil giant that has tried to fashion itself as a climate tech leader, is being real clear now about capturing carbon dioxide emissions, which it sees as the next big thing for fossil fuel production.

That shouldn’t be surprising coming from a petroleum company. But Occidental has built up an entire arm of its business purporting to fight climate change. It acquired the startup Carbon Engineering, a pioneer in the development of technologies that filter CO2 out of the air, back in 2023. Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive is building giant facilities in Texas using Carbon Engineering’s tech. Those projects got support from the Biden administration and from big companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, with their own climate goals to meet. Sucking carbon dioxide out of the air is supposed to get rid of the pollution causing climate change.

But that strategy, called direct air capture (DAC), doesn’t get at the root of the problem: extracting and burning fossil fuels is what produces that planet-heating pollution in the first place. What happens to that carbon once it’s captured is an even hairier question. DAC is sold as a climate solution because the captured carbon can be sequestered underground, keeping the greenhouse gas from building up in the atmosphere and raising global average temperatures.

But fossil fuel companies have historically used CO2 in a process called enhanced oil recovery, shooting carbon into depleting oil fields to force out hard-to-reach reserves. In an earnings call this week, Occidental described its DAC business as imperative to the company’s ability to produce more oil.

“We believe the next round of technology that’s going to add significant barrels — 50 to 70 billion barrels of reserves — will be production that comes from the use of CO2 in enhanced oil recovery,” Occidental president and CEO Vicki Hollub said on the call. This was in response to a question about how the company was thinking about its carbon-removal business with the change in administration this year — from one that prioritized action on climate change under Joe Biden to one that aims to “drill, baby, drill” under Donald Trump.

Hollub essentially characterized the use of captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery as the biggest boon for fossil fuels since fracking enabled the US shale revolution. “Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a technology that needs to work for the United States, and President Trump knows the business case for this,” Hollub said, adding that she’s had “several conversations” with Trump.

Occidental’s seen a slight slump in its enhanced oil production over the past few years, but company leadership thinks it can turn that around with the help of captured CO2. “There’s not enough organic CO2 in the country to be able to flood all the things that we’re going to need to flood to get that 50 to 70 billion barrels,” according to Hollub.

Direct air capture is still a prohibitively expensive endeavor, however, costing hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2 captured. Its future in the US could hinge on whether the Trump administration keeps Biden-era tax credits for the technology, which Hollub mentioned on the call. After all, the company doesn’t want to risk its DAC plants becoming stranded assets. Its first large DAC plant, called Stratos, is slated to come online this year in Texas, and the company has plans for an even bigger project at King Ranch that was awarded federal funding in 2023.

Microsoft struck a deal with 1PointFive last year for 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal. And Amazon agreed to pay for 250,000 metric tons of carbon removal from 1PointFive’s first forthcoming DAC plant. Both of those agreements, at least, include stipulations that the captured carbon be permanently sequestered without being used to produce more oil and gas.

But there’s another worrisome outcome with these kinds of deals. The DAC plants Occidental is building have to succeed for that CO2 to be sequestered. Other companies that purchase carbon-removal services budget that into their carbon accounting to meet their own climate goals. Time and money that could have been spent reducing greenhouse gas emissions by other means — say, by switching to cleaner energy sources — could be squandered on carbon-removal technologies that might never become commercially viable.

Occidental will still have its fossil fuel business to fall back on, even if DAC fails, however. And for now, it can profit off its oil and gas business, profit from cleaning up some of the CO2 pollution it creates, and then use the pollution it captures to produce even more fossil fuels.

Mark Flores sits at the kitchen table drawing birthday cakes. At 44, he loves to draw circles, a skill he’s mastered over the past decade of his life. His thick black hair is neatly combed like the Superman cartoon on his T-shirt. Grasping thick Crayola markers, he lines up small circles in rows within larger oblong shapes. Mark has accomplished much more than his mother, Yvette, was told he ever could when he was born — when doctors said he wouldn’t be able to interact with people because of his intellectual disabilities.

Instead, Mark greets most people with a big, toothy smile, stoops over to give them a hug if they’re willing, and is quick to answer most questions with an enthusiastic “yeah.”

When Mark coughs at the table, Yvette asks him if he needs water. “You don’t have to, Mark, you can say no,” she says, her soft brown eyes behind black cat-eye glasses. “We’re learning ‘no,’” she says to me as an aside. Like her son, she’s quick to flash a smile. Her dark hair falls loosely around her shoulders, streaked with silver against her face. 

Yvette was working at a factory in the early days of Silicon Valley when she got pregnant with Mark. An …

Read the full story at The Verge.

China and the US, the world’s two top greenhouse gas polluters, could burn through a lot more electricity over the next couple of years, according to the latest forecast from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The steepest rise in global electricity demand in a while is expected over the next few years, with much of that coming from new data centers and the manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and semiconductors in the two countries.

That growth reflects broader changes across the world when it comes to how people consume information and what powers their lives. More vehicles and home appliances run on electricity these days. And new AI tools have led to a boom in energy-hungry data centers. That makes it all the more urgent to deploy new sources of energy that can make sure homes and businesses have enough electricity without creating a lot more pollution in the process.

“The acceleration of global electricity demand highlights the significant changes taking place in energy systems around the world and the approach of a new Age of Electricity. But it also presents evolving challenges for governments in ensuring secure, affordable and sustainable electricity supply,” Keisuke Sadamori, IEA director of energy markets and security, said in a Friday press release.

Globally, growth in demand is expected to be equivalent to adding more than Japan’s entire annual electricity consumption each year between now and 2027, according to the IEA. Most of that growth comes from countries whose economies are considered to be developing or emerging, including China. But so-called “advanced” economies, including the US, are also beginning to consume more electricity than they have in the past.

It’s important to note that rising electricity demand doesn’t necessarily correlate with economic growth. China’s electricity consumption has grown faster than its economy since 2020, according to the IEA. Its manufacturing of solar panels, EVs, and batteries is a big reason why; those three industries accounted for a third of the rise in electricity demand in recent years. Chinese automaker BYD rivals Tesla when it comes to selling the most electric cars in the world. Solar supply chains are still concentrated in China, despite trade sanctions against products tied to accusations of labor and human rights abuses in Xinjiang province. And on Monday, China announced new policies to boost battery production.

Artificial intelligence is a big part of the story, too. China-based startup DeepSeek recently announced major advances in its AI models. That includes significant gains in energy efficiency, which creates more uncertainty about how much energy AI might use in the future. Even so, the IEA says electricity use by data centers in China could double by 2027. The growth of 5G networks in China is also eating up more electricity, according to the IEA.

Electricity demand has either flatlined or fallen over the years in advanced economies including the US, Canada, the European Union, Japan, and Korea. Even with economic growth, that’s been the case since around 2009 thanks to the development of more energy-efficient technologies. Now, the IEA expects demand to rise as a growing number of data centers, EVs, electric heat pumps, and air conditioners suck up electricity from power grids.

After China, the US currently uses the most electricity and creates the most greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. Its electricity demand dipped by 1.8 percent in 2023 but rebounded last year and is now expected to grow by around 2 percent on average each year through 2027. That might sound like a small percentage, but it adds up to the equivalent of California’s total electricity demand over three years. Data centers are driving that trend, with companies making plans to build out new gas infrastructure and develop new nuclear reactors to satiate growing demand from data centers. Generative AI has also increased demand for semiconductors, and chip manufacturing is forecast to burn through increasing amounts of electricity in the US.

Electrification — getting more buildings and modes of transportation to run on electricity — isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as that electricity comes from cleaner sources of energy. China and the US are both heavy fossil fuel users, with fossil fuels generating around 60 percent of each country’s electricity mix. The Trump administration just abandoned US climate goals, instead favoring oil and gas development and efforts to make the US the “AI capital of the world.”

Nevertheless, pollution doesn’t have to go up with electricity demand. With solar and onshore wind farms already being the cheapest new sources of electricity in most of the world, renewable energy is growing quickly. Renewables are on track to beat coal and generate more than a third of the electricity the world uses this year and could meet as much as 95 percent of new electricity demand through 2027, the IEA says. It anticipates “record-high” electricity generation from both renewables and nuclear reactors over the same period. That leads to a very hopeful prediction from the IEA — that planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions from generating electricity could plateau globally sometime in the next few years.

A grassroots environmental alliance that called for a “free Palestine” has lost the more than $50 million it was supposed to receive under the Biden administration’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) became the target of conservative attacks after advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza, and a group of of federal workers wrote an open letter last year signaling that the CJA had been singled out as a result. The CJA was charged with distributing around $50 million in subgrants for locally led environmental projects as one of 11 “grantmakers” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) named in 2023.

This week, CJA announced that it would sunset its grantmaking program after not receiving the funds. Trump’s appointee to lead the EPA posted on X on Thursday that he cancelled the grant.

The cancelled program “would have channeled resources into projects that not only protect public health and safety but also create sustainable economic opportunities for jobs,” CJA executive director KD Chavez said in an emailed statement. “This program would have clearly benefited taxpayers and working-class families.”

The EPA’s grantmaking program was supposed to make it easier for funding to reach communities living with the most pollution, which are often communities of color in the United States. The CJA includes around 100 grassroots organizations across the US including the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program and the Indigenous Environmental Network.

CJA was chosen to distribute subgrants to EPA regions 8–10, which includes most of the Western US. It was also the national grantmaker responsible for outreach to tribal communities. The CJA told The Verge last year that it had already spent $1.6 million from its own operational budget to get ready to start accepting applications for subgrants.

The Biden administration tried to release a majority of the funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) before Donald Trump, who said on the campaign trail that he would rescind unspent funds, stepped into office. The EPA under Joe Biden ultimately sent funding to every other EPA grantmaker in the program except for the CJA.

“The Biden Administration and the EPA did not heed the call of communities and their legacy is now one of broken promises to frontline communities,” CJA said in a statement this week.

Now, the Trump administration is working to dismantle programs that deal with climate change or the disproportionate health burdens many communities of color face from pollution. It placed around 170 employees in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice on administrative leave. It’s also trying to block other pots of Biden-era climate and clean energy funding, including $20 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created by the IRA.

The Trump administration is attempting to take back around $20 billion of funding that the Biden administration previously awarded to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump’s appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, posted a cryptic video last night and followed up with a press release today claiming “roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA.” He later clarified that “at this point, there is zero reason to suspect any wrongdoing by the bank,” but that “the financial agent agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated” and the money returned to the EPA.

Limited details Zeldin shared about the money seem to point to the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) created when Congress passed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The fund is meant to prevent pollution by supporting new clean energy projects, particularly those in low-income neighborhoods, Native and rural communities, and other communities that haven’t had as much access to these technologies in the past.

“They are blocking tens of billions of dollars in public-private partnerships from investing in projects across the country. Whether it is a local credit union offering low interest loans to small businesses to install solar panels and lower their electricity bills, or a municipality securing funding to upgrade century old buildings with modern windows and HVAC systems, these projects are now uncertain,” Kyle Kammien, a policy director at nonprofit Dream.Org, said in an emailed statement.

To make things more confusing, Zeldin refers to the funding as “gold bars,” referencing a video from the right-wing group Project Veritas that filmed an EPA employee talking about distributing funding to nonprofit organizations, states, and tribes. The Biden administration hustled to disburse most Inflation Reduction Act money ahead of Donald Trump stepping into office; Trump campaigned on a pledge to “rescind” unspent IRA funds.

The employee, who appears to have been filmed without their knowledge, says “now we’re just trying to get the money out as fast as possible before they can come in and stop it all … it truly like feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”

“Fortunately, my awesome team at EPA has found the gold bars,” Zeldin says, talking about $20 billion in funding for groups including a coalition of nonprofits called Climate United. The coalition was awarded close to $7 billion through one of the programs of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, although Zeldin doesn’t specifically name the GGRF.

The EPA didn’t immediately respond to a press inquiry from The Verge about which programs Zeldin is targeting. Bloomberg and The Washington Post report that his comments indicate that the EPA administrator intends to stop GGRF funding, and the Post reports that the bank Citi is overseeing the distribution of those funds.

Zeldin describes the Biden-era awards as “a rush job with reduced oversight” in his video address. Democratic lawmakers have challenged Donald Trump’s ability to claw back funding approved by Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act, so any effort to place those “gold bars” back on the Titanic is likely to face a legal battle.

The Trump administration brought webpages back online, meeting a court-ordered deadline at 11:59PM on February 11th. 

Doctors for America (DFA), which represents physicians and medical students, filed suit last week against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for taking health data off government websites.

A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order, setting a deadline for those agencies to make that information available again online. The order includes more than a dozen CDC and FDA webpages that were specifically mentioned in the lawsuit. That includes the social vulnerability index and environmental justice index, for example, which are tools that show whether particular populations might face disproportionate health risks.

DFA alleges that the agencies violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act by removing public access to the webpages without giving adequate notice in advance. The CDC, FDA, and HHS didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Verge. 

The agencies started taking webpages down after President Donald Trump signed an anti-trans executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” on his first day in office. The CDC’s main data portal went down briefly before going live again with a note saying, “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline in order to comply” with the executive order. 

The court order says webpages are supposed to be restored to versions as of January 30th. The Verge wasn’t able to immediately verify whether the restored pages have the same content they had on January 30th.

The plaintiffs claim that removing the data forced DFA members “to scramble in search of alternative resources to guide how they treat patients; slowed their clinical practices or reduced the amount of information they can convey to patients in time-limited visits; and paused or slowed their vital research.” They say a temporary restraining order is necessary to protect their practices and public health while the lawsuit determines whether the defendants’ actions were lawful or not.

Beyond the webpages named in the lawsuit, the defendants are also supposed to work with DFA to identify any other resources that need to be restored, setting a February 14th deadline for those webpages to become available again.

President Donald Trump wants to make America incandescent again. He posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he plans to end Biden-era standards for lightbulbs that accelerated the adoption of LED lighting.

According to that post, he’ll direct his appointee Lee Zeldin to “go back to the common sense standards,” for lightbulbs. Zeldin is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, although Trump calls him “secretary” in his post. And  while Trump singled out Zeldin, it’s the Department of Energy that sets efficiency standards for light bulbs and appliances. 

Trump said he’s going to sign “orders” to reinstate standards that were in place during his first term. Along with lightbulbs, the president indicated he would weaken standards for sinks, showers, toilets, washing machines, and dishwashers.

Trump has been crusading against more efficient lightbulbs since his first term as president, saying at the time “you look better with incandescent lights” and that “of course being a vain person, that’s very important to me.”

On a more serious note, his administration has taken aim at energy efficiency initiatives as part of a broader effort to derail action on climate change and promote fossil fuels. He signed a sweeping executive order called “Unleashing American Energy” on his first day in office that includes “safeguard[ing] the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs.”

Oil and gas companies pumped more than $75 million into Trump’s campaign and Republican efforts during the last election cycle, and now they’re reaping the rewards. Trump picked fossil fuel executive Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy (DOE), which set higher efficiency standards for lightbulbs before he stepped into office.

The US has been trying to phase out inefficient lightbulbs since 2007, when George Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law. Trump rolled back those standards in 2019. Then the Biden administration introduced stricter rules on energy efficiency that most incandescent bulbs couldn’t meet. 

Old-school incandescent bulbs are far less efficient than their newer counterparts because they lose about 90 percent of their energy as heat. Household LEDs typically use at least 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and can last up to 25 times longer. And while upfront costs for an LED bulb tends to be higher, an LED is supposed to save consumers money in the long run because of its longevity and through lower electricity bills. It’s no wonder, then, that the LED is already the leading lighting technology in homes globally, according to the International Energy Agency.  

The term “climate change” has started to vanish from Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website. Its former “climate resilience” website has been rebranded under the title “future conditions.” There are still subtle references to climate change there, but it’s more of a whisper than an urgent warning as it was before.

The edits come as the Trump administration takes a wrecking ball to federal agencies, attempting to slash the government workforce and eliminate initiatives Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk deem unnecessary. Their anti-diversity crusade has already targeted websites and scientific research mentioning words including “women,” “minority,” and more.

Despite mountains of evidence showing that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are exacerbating extreme weather disasters, President Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change “a hoax” and campaigned on plans to “drill, baby, drill.” So, naturally, information about climate change is in the crosshairs as the Trump administration enacts a broader purge of health and environmental information it doesn’t want conflicting with his pro-fossil fuel message.

The webpage formerly titled “climate resilience” used to say at the top:

“Climate change is the defining crisis of our time. From extreme heat, drought and wildfires to more severe coastal storms, sea-level rise and inland flooding, the consequences of climate change are all around us.”

Reading the current webpage in comparison is like playing one of those games where you have to guess what changed in a picture. (Hint: there’s a double-space typo where the words “climate change” used to be.) The paragraph now says:

“Disaster incidents are rising due to increased human vulnerability, exposure and a changing climate. From extreme heat, drought and wildfires to more severe coastal storms, sea-level rise and inland flooding, the consequences  are all around us.”  

There are several mentions of climate that have been removed from the page, according to an analysis by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). The group of researchers came together after Trump was first elected in 2016 to document what might happen to public environmental data. The group found a nearly 40 percent drop in the use of the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies during the first Trump administration.

As the agency that coordinates federal responses to all kinds of disasters from hurricanes to wildfires, FEMA risks developing a major blindspot in its work if it ignores the effects of climate change. Climate change made the deadly Los Angeles wildfires more likely in January, in just one terrifying instance.

FEMA faces more existential threats, of course, under the Trump administration. The president signed an executive order on January 24th establishing a “review council” to assess whether the agency can “capably and impartially address disasters,” alleging “serious concerns of political bias in FEMA.”

FEMA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge. The changes were made on January 21st, a day after Trump’s inauguration. “We do not know the intention of the team who renamed this website,” EDGI wrote in a blog post today. “Perhaps it was to fly under the radar of the new administration; perhaps it was to align with the priorities of the new administration.”

Other webpages for FEMA and other government agencies are a mixed bag when it comes to mentioning climate change. The Department of Transportation took down a webpage for “climate and sustainability” from its “priorities” website. But other longstanding web resources on climate are still online.

EDGI and other groups have been scrambling to archive federal webpages and datasets. But there are still bigger questions about what happens if those agencies stop paying attention to climate change altogether. As the adage goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has reportedly infiltrated the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that collects and shares vital weather and climate information. Sources have told The Verge, as well as other news outlets, that they’re worried about drastic changes that could impact the public’s access to weather forecasts, jeopardize cybersecurity, and gut employee morale.

NOAA houses the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, which produce forecasts and warn people about approaching storms. News that DOGE has barged into national headquarters has raised fears that the ad hoc group Musk is leading to remake the federal government is about to take a sledgehammer to NOAA — potentially hobbling the agency’s ability to keep the public safe during disasters. One current employee tells The Verge they’re staying on despite “demoralizing” changes at the agency because of how vital their work is — people rely on NOAA for accurate forecasts every day.   

“It seems like a hostile corporate takeover of a government agency that provides a suite of services to the public to protect lives and to protect property,” Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), tells The Verge.

DOGE representatives arrived at NOAA offices in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Tuesday, Axios reports, citing anonymous sources. 

“They blew through security … they walked in and they said, basically, take me to your IT,” says Andrew Rosenberg, a marine scientist who previously held leadership roles at the National Marine Fisheries Service at NOAA and UCS, based on news he’s heard from former and current employees. “This is basically like doing a major computer hack attack, but doing it inside the agency, because, you know, somebody gave you a badge,” Rosenberg tells The Verge.

Rosenberg says DOGE is trying to sniff out anything that “vaguely mentions diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) — initiatives that President Donald Trump and Musk are trying to stomp out of existence.

A current NOAA employee, who was granted anonymity because of the risk of retaliation, tells The Verge that ahead of an “external audit,” staff have been instructed to fully delete or take down any materials related to diversity and equity, whether that’s publicly available online, on internal sites, or in physical office spaces. Government webpages for other federal agencies have already removed content that discusses race, gender, and equity issues. 

The employee tells The Verge that posters with information about how to report sexual assault and harassment had also been taken down from their office. Chatrooms and websites for employee resource groups, including one for women, have also gone down.

“To have those supportive spaces just … gone [is] incredibly hard,” the NOAA employee who identifies as queer and neurodivergent said in a message to The Verge. “It’s demoralizing.”

At least one person at the agency was put on administrative leave, that employee says. Similarly, Wired reports that a staff member who leads diversity and inclusion efforts within NOAA was placed on leave on Tuesday. The person had reportedly worked there for decades and was scheduled to retire in a few weeks. 

NOAA employees were told to give DOGE engineer Nikhil Rajpal editor access to NOAA Google sites, according to Wired, citing anonymous sources who say the directive came from acting Secretary of Commerce Jeremy Pelter. A NOAA spokesperson referred The Verge to the public affairs contact for the Commerce Department, which houses NOAA. The Department of Commerce didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge.

Rosenberg says his contacts tell him that DOGE has gotten into the agency’s email system to monitor employees to make sure nobody leaks information. The report, which The Verge could not independently confirm, would tally with news from other federal agencies. Employees at other agencies tell The Verge they’ve been told to remove gender pronouns from email signatures. Musk aides have reportedly also kicked workers out of their own computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management. These kinds of incursions into communications and IT systems at federal agencies and the Trump administration’s rushed attempts at slashing the workforce have also raised cybersecurity concerns. 

“They’re into the data systems, but nobody really knows what they’re doing there,” Rosenberg says. “Who knows, you know what is carried along with tapping into these systems? We worked on cybersecurity now for how many decades? And they’re just ignoring that.”

Federal employees received an email last week from the Office of Personnel Management telling them they could opt to take a “deferred resignation” by February 6th or face drastic workplace changes should they choose to stay. Soon after receiving that email, NOAA employees got a rush of spam mail in their inboxes, according to the employee The Verge contacted. The person shared screenshots of some of those emails that included advertising for denim jeans and Scientology Today, as well as other messages containing homophobic and misogynistic slurs. The spam emails were reportedly deleted from staff inboxes by someone within NOAA about an hour after they were sent. 

“Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers are ransacking their way through the federal government, unlawfully gaining unfettered access to Americans’ private information and gutting programs people depend on,” Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) said in a statement, The Hill reports.

The turmoil at NOAA comes after DOGE stormed the Treasury Department and is attempting to shut down the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. And on Tuesday, Trump nominated Neil Jacobs to lead NOAA, who was found to have violated the agency’s scientific integrity policy during the notorious “Sharpiegate” scandal of Trump’s first term. Trump reportedly used a Sharpie to erroneously alter a National Hurricane Center map depicting the expected path of Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Jacobs was acting administrator at the time.

Only around 20,000 workers have reportedly chosen to take deferred resignation as of January 5th across the federal government, which is made up of around 3 million workers. Sweeping layoffs could start soon, Trump administration officials told CNN. 

DOGE intends to slash NOAA’s workforce in half and reduce its budget by 30 percent, Rosenberg wrote in the SciLight newsletter. Since its data also informs resources related to climate change like flood maps, NOAA has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay the consequences of climate change. Project 2025, the right-wing manifesto for a second Trump administration, said NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

Privatizing weather forecasts could put more Americans at risk during extreme weather, sources tell The Verge. Private companies — and new AI tools for weather forecasting — still rely on data collected by NOAA. One alternative would be to keep collecting data through NOAA but then turn it over to private companies to share with the public. That would turn a free service, weather forecasts, into something for which people would have to pay. And that could have grave consequences if only those who can afford to access that information have it as disasters unfold, sources say.

“How will they know if they need to evacuate and when?” the UCS’s Declet-Barreto says. “Or how hot it’s going to get during a heat wave and when? That is all public information paid by your tax dollars, and that information protects people and saves lives. Project 2025 wants to put that behind a paywall.”

The NOAA employee told The Verge that they have no plans of leaving unless they’re fired and “they physically remove me from the building … I know the work we do is incredibly important.”

House of Representative members from California want to know what led to accidental evacuation alerts that fomented confusion during devastating Los Angeles fires in January.

The Palisades and Eaton wildfires broke out in early January, killing at least 29 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures. In the midst of the chaos, some 10 million people received an erroneous emergency alert on January 9th telling them an evacuation warning was issued for their area. It was only supposed to go to people living in areas most at risk from another blaze, but was instead sent across Los Angeles County.

After the gaffe, the county said it was working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to investigate why “echoes” of the alert kept going out to residents’ phones, making it more difficult for people to rely on officials’ warnings.

“Appropriately timed, targeted, and clear emergency alert messages can mean the difference between life and death. However, unclear messages sent to the wrong locations, multiple times and after the emergency has passed, can lead to alerting fatigue and erosion of public trust,” the lawmakers say in letters sent to Los Angeles County, FEMA, the FCC, and software company Genasys.

Led by Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), the legislators are considering whether more guidance or regulations are needed to keep the same problem from happening again during other emergencies. The letters include a series of questions about how the Los Angeles warning system operates and what’s changed since the January infernos. The recipients have been asked to provide their responses by April 1st. None of them immediately provided responses to inquiries from The Verge.

As the third week of Donald Trump’s presidency begins, workers across federal agencies are scrambling to find their footing among the chaos.

From the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Agriculture, to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor, federal workers are facing an onslaught of changes that threaten to upend their work and the systems that keep the country running. Sweeping orders from the White House threatened to freeze funding for basic grants and programs, before being blocked by a judge and walked back by Trump. Using a made up meme agency, unelected billionaire Elon Musk is attempting to stage a takeover reminiscent of his remaking of Twitter, now X, except this time hollowing out the US government. 

“A lot of us are scared and feel betrayed,” a person who works for USAID told The Verge. “When [people] get hired, they take an oath to protect the constitution.” And with Musk actively dismantling the humanitarian agency, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday he now runs, workers at other agencies are wondering if the same could happen to their workplaces. “I think everyone is really scared about wh …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Key resources for environmental data and public health have already been taken down from federal websites, and more could soon vanish as the Trump administration works to scrap anything that has to do with climate change, racial equity, or gender identity.

Warnings floated on social media Friday about an impending purge at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spurring calls to save as much data as soon as possible. The CDC shares data on a wide range of topics, from chronic diseases to traffic injuries, tobacco use, vaccinations, and pregnancies in the US — and it’s just one of the agencies in the crosshairs. 

The CDC’s main data portal, which housed much of those datasets, was offline by Friday night. “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline in order to comply with Executive Order 14168 Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” a notice on the webpage says, adding that it will become available again once it’s “in compliance” with the executive order.

Fortunately, researchers have been archiving government websites for months. This is typical with every change in administration, but there was even more imperative with the return of Donald Trump to office. Access to as much as 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was removed during the first round of Trump’s deregulatory spree. And now, it seems, similar moves are happening fast.

The CDC’s social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — tools that could show whether particular populations might face disproportionate health risks — have both been taken offline within the past week. In 2007, during the Bush administration, social scientists, geographers, and statisticians started developing the social vulnerability index (SVI), which incorporated demographic and socioeconomic factors including poverty, race, and ethnicity over the years. 

The Biden administration launched the environmental justice index (EJI)  in 2022. “Too many communities across our nation, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, continue to bear the brunt of pollution. Meeting the needs of these communities requires our focused attention and we will use the Environmental Justice Index to do just that,” then Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release at the time.

Since stepping into office, Trump has tried to undo previous administrations’ work to address health disparities when it comes to race and gender. In an executive order Trump signed to undo Biden-era policies, the president wrote that  “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) has “corrupted” government institutions. 

He also claimed that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” During his first term in office, there was a near 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies. It’s too soon to know what the damage might be this time around, but some webpages have already vanished. The US Department of Transportation’s “priorities” website has removed pages on both “climate and sustainability” and “equity.” It follows an internal memo sent this week instructing USDOT operating administrations to identify and ultimately “terminate” Biden-era activities relating to climate change and DEI.

Donald Trump’s efforts to limit foreign aid seem to have also led to information being taken down on HIV and AIDS. The data webpage for the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) was taken down this week. PEPFAR has been around since 2003 and helped more than 20.6 million people get access to antiretroviral therapy in 2024 alone, according to a snapshot of the website taken by the Wayback Machine on January 26th, before it was taken down.

The End of Term Web Archive project has saved content on federal government websites during every presidential transition since 2008. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that formed after Trump was first elected also documents changes to government websites and works to make archived datasets available elsewhere. It worked with partners including the Open Environmental Data Project to back up data from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index and they’ve shared it on a webpage for The Public Environmental Data Project.

Yet even if these datasets have been archived, they aren’t as helpful when they aren’t updated. “Any dataset has a lifespan of utility,” says Dan Pisut, senior principal engineer at GIS software company Esri.  

Aging datasets might not fully represent what’s actually happening on the ground, so people have to be careful about how they use them, Pisut points out. It could be risky, he says, but “better than nothing.”

Update, February 1st: This post has been updated with information about data.cdc.gov going offline.

Update, February 5th: Data.cdc.gov is now back online with a notice that says, “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

This post has also been updated to include groups that backed up data from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index

DeepSeek startled everyone last month with the claim that its AI model uses roughly one-tenth the amount of computing power as Meta’s Llama 3.1 model, upending an entire worldview of how much energy and resources it’ll take to develop artificial intelligence. 

Taken at face value, that claim could have tremendous implications for the environmental impact of AI. Tech giants are rushing to build out massive AI data centers, with plans for some to use as much electricity as small cities. Generating that much electricity creates pollution, raising fears about how the physical infrastructure undergirding new generative AI tools could exacerbate climate change and worsen air quality.

Reducing how much energy it takes to train and run generative AI models could alleviate much of that stress. But it’s still too early to gauge whether DeepSeek will be a game-changer when it comes to AI’s environmental footprint. Much will depend on how other major players respond to the Chinese startup’s breakthroughs, especially considering plans to build new data centers. 

“It just shows that AI doesn’t have to be an energy hog,” says Madalsa Singh, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Climate change helped to set the stage for the devastating Los Angeles fires this month, a new study by 32 researchers shows. 

The Palisades and Eaton wildfires broke out in early January and soon killed at least 28 people, destroying 16,000 structures. Hot, dry conditions and extraordinarily powerful winds fanned the flames.

Those conditions were made about 35 percent more likely because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels warming the planet, according to the study. Fire risk will only grow unless the pollution causing climate change stops. 

“Realistically, this was a perfect storm when it comes to conditions for fire disasters,” John Abatzoglou, professor of climatology at the University of California, Merced, said in a press call today. 

In today’s climate, the extreme weather that drove January infernos can be expected about every 17 years, according to the study.

The study was conducted by the World Weather Attribution initiative, an international collaboration of scientists that researches the role that climate change plays in disasters around the world. They look at historical weather data and climate models to compare real-world scenarios to what likely would have happened if the planet wasn’t 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer today, on average, than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

If the planet warms by another 1.3 degrees Celsius, which could happen in 75 years under current policies, the kind of weather that exacerbated the fires this month becomes another 35 percent more probable. 

The length of the dry season in the region has already grown by about 23 days, according to the researchers. That increases the chances of arid weather coinciding with the powerful Santa Ana winds that typically pick up in cooler months.

While those winds return each year, they were catastrophically strong this month — reaching hurricane strength at upwards of 100 miles per hour. For now, scientists don’t have enough research to know how climate change affected the Santa Ana winds, specifically. Their research only shows that fire season is encroaching more into windy season because of climate change, and that made these fires more likely.

The Trump administration sent a memo instructing federal agencies to pause grant, loan, and other financial assistance programs. It’s a catch-all for a wide range of programs President Donald Trump has crusaded against and it’s unclear what specifically is in the crosshairs with this move, but it seems to target Biden-era programs to deploy clean energy.

But just before the funding freeze was set to take effect on Tuesday, a federal judge paused it until February 3rd at 5 PM, and could extend the pause after a hearing on Monday. The administrative stay will let the government continue to disburse only funds that have already been authorized. The freeze was supposed to stop funds for policies Trump rolled back through executive orders, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

There is no single policy in place across the federal government named “the green new deal.” But Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law in 2022, which created $369 billion in federal funding for climate action and clean energy. Trump, meanwhile, campaigned on a promise to rescind any unspent IRA funds. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law also includes $50 billion to address the impacts of climate change and cyberattacks on national infrastructure, and $73 billion for upgrading the power grid. 

Agencies are supposed to temporarily pause disbursement of funds by 5:00PM ET today. By February 10th they’re supposed to tell the Office of Management and Budget which programs and activities are affected by the freeze. The memo calls “green new deal social engineering policies” and money used to advance social equity, including funds to assist transgender people, “a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” 

Some Democratic Congressmembers are challenging the freeze as unlawful, according to NBC News, which obtained the memo. 

“Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement. “They say this is only temporary, but no one should believe that. Donald Trump must direct his Administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people.” 

The Department of Energy did not immediately responded to inquiries from The Verge about what programs might be affected. In an email to The Verge, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said that it’s “temporarily pausing all activities related to the obligation or disbursement of EPA Federal financial assistance at this time.“

Anticipating Trump’s efforts to dismantle its programs, the Biden administration scrambled to release much of the funding from the Inflation Reduction Act before leaving office. 

“On the unspent funds, we are at a place where we’re north of $9 out of every $10 of grant funding and other similar dollars that have already hit the economic bloodstream across the country,” Biden’s national climate adviser Ali Zaidi told The Verge earlier this month.

Update, January 28th: A federal judge has temporarily paused Trump’s order.

TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup founded by Bill Gates, struck a deal this week with one of the largest data center developers in the US to deploy advanced nuclear reactors. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) are working together on a plan to run existing and future facilities on nuclear energy from small reactors.

Tech companies are scrambling to determine where to get all the electricity they’ll need for energy-hungry AI data centers that are putting growing pressure on power grids. They’re increasingly turning to nuclear energy, including next-generation reactors that startups like TerraPower are developing.

“The energy sector is transforming at an unprecedented pace after decades of business as usual, and meaningful progress will require strategic collaboration across industries,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said in a press release.

A memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies establishes a “strategic collaboration” that’ll initially look into the potential for new nuclear power plants in Texas and the Rocky Mountain region that would power SDC’s data centers.

There’s still a long road ahead before that can become a reality. The technology TerraPower and similar nuclear energy startups are developing still have to make it through regulatory hurdles and prove that they can be commercially viable.

Compared to older, larger nuclear power plants, the next generation of reactors are supposed to be smaller and easier to site. Nuclear energy is seen as an alternative to fossil fuels that are causing climate change. But it still faces opposition from some advocates concerned about the impact of uranium mining and storing radioactive waste near communities.

“I’m a big believer that nuclear energy can help us solve the climate problem, which is very, very important. There are designs that, in terms of their safety or fuel use or how they handle waste, I think, minimize those problems,” Gates told The Verge last year.

TerraPower’s reactor design for this collaboration, Natrium, is the only advanced technology of its kind with a construction permit application for a commercial reactor pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to the company. The company just broke ground on a demonstration project in Wyoming last year, and expects it to come online in 2030.

Electricity demand from data centers has tripled over the past decade, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). That demand is only expected to grow with the rise of AI, a trend that could prolong the lives of aging fossil fuel power plants and revive retired nuclear plants.

Microsoft made a deal in September to help restart a retired reactor at Three Mile Island. Both Google and Amazon, meanwhile, announced plans last year to support the development of advanced reactors to power their data centers.

A federal website for information on reproductive rights and healthcare access is suddenly down, following Donald Trump’s inauguration yesterday. Reproductiverights.gov seemed to be offline as of last night, CBS reports.

The Biden administration launched the website in 2022 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. On top of information about abortion rights, the website also included resources on accessing preventative care, including breast and cervical cancer screenings, prenatal care, and HIV screening. (The Internet Archive has a snapshot of what the website looked like as recently as January 15th.)

Scientists, researchers, and health and environmental advocates have been bracing for potential changes to federal websites under the Trump administration. They’ve been worried about federal agencies curtailing publicly available information about hot-button topics on their websites, particularly when it comes to climate change.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which previously ran the reproductiverights.gov website didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge.

So far, federal websites on climate change seem to be up and running. During Trump’s first term in office, access to as much as 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency website was removed, and there was a near 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies.

In his executive actions on day one of his presidency, Donald Trump rescinded an executive order Joe Biden signed in 2023 to establish safety guidelines for generative AI.

The Biden-era order required developers of large AI models like OpenAI’s GPT lineup to share the results of safety tests with the US government. It also directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards for safety testing, and it tasked other federal agencies with assessing any potential chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, cybersecurity, or critical infrastructure risks AI might pose.

Biden’s action also included measures meant to protect workers and consumers. It commissioned a report on how AI might affect the labor market and asked agencies to develop practices for addressing AI-enabled fraud and discriminatory algorithms.

Donald Trump axed all that yesterday as he signed a flurry of new executive orders. One of his first actions was to rescind 78 Biden-era executive actions, including Executive Order 14110 on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.”

Trump has made the development of new AI tools a priority for his administration. His inauguration was stacked with tech heavyweights, some of whom donated to the president’s inauguration budget. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Shou Zi Chew, Sundar Pichai, and Sam Altman were all reported in attendance yesterday.

The stage is now set for a showdown over the European Union’s AI Act that passed last year, which created transparency requirements and bars certain uses of AI.

Other measures the Biden administration put in place to boost AI development in the US may have a better shot at surviving. Before leaving office this month, Biden announced a new regulatory framework restricting some international sharing of AI chips and models. Biden also issued an executive order in January meant to speed the development of AI data centers on federal land.

Donald Trump has once again taken the US out of the landmark Paris climate agreement, abandoning the global effort to limit climate change. Trump signed an executive order today to exit.

The Paris accord was adopted in 2015, committing nearly 200 countries including the US to working together to stop global average temperatures from rising much higher than they have already. 2024 was the hottest year on record, beating the previous record set in 2023.

Scrapping efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US can have repercussions for Americans and people around the world. The US was already the biggest historical emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions and the world’s leading oil and gas producer, giving it big sway in global climate negotiations. Within America’s borders, billion-dollar weather and climate disasters have already grown more prevalent (adjusted for inflation) in recent years.

Exiting the Paris agreement “is in clear defiance of scientific realities and shows an administration cruelly indifferent to the harsh climate change impacts that people in the United States and around the world are experiencing,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in an emailed statement.

Our planet’s climate has stayed relatively stable for the last 11,000 years or so, supporting the rise of agriculture and civilization as we know it, until the Industrial Revolution. The Paris agreement aims to keep global temperatures within roughly the same temperature range, preventing warming of more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius.

It might not seem like a big difference in temperature, but climate change has already become severe enough to supercharge weather-related disasters across the US including wildfires still burning around Los Angeles that leveled entire communities this month.

Trump took the US out of the Paris accord the last time he was in office. Former President Joe Biden recommitted upon stepping into office in 2021. Now, the US will join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only countries not on board with the international agreement. It’ll take one year from the date the Trump administration sends notification to the United Nations before US withdrawal from the Paris agreement will be official.