Clean | Environment.org

In early March, a small group of Democratic senators from the Rust Belt sent President Joe Biden an urgent letter. They began by extolling the benefits of two of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, calling them “historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure” that will ring in a brighter future for American manufacturing. But there was something, they cautioned, that threatened to hamper this progress: the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned regulations for integrated iron and steel mills, proposed last July and nearing a court-ordered deadline.

“We are concerned that the EPA’s proposed integrated steel rules will do what foreign competitors have thus far been unable to do: deter and diminish continued American investment in improving our steel industry,” wrote the five senators, among them Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John …

Want clean electricity? These are the overlooked elected officials who get to decide.

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| Pollution

This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising electricity bills to developing renewable energy.

On a Tuesday morning in January, college student Aurora Gray stepped up to the podium in a windowless room in Atlanta, around the corner from the state capitol building. In front of her sat a five-member panel of elected officials that oversees how and where nearly every Georgia resident gets their power.

“The generation of energy… using fossil fuels has become an existential threat to our safety due to the undisputed impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on our planet,” Gray told the commission. “We must act now, as later is way too late.”

More than a dozen other students sat behind her, …

New EPA rules tell polluters in Great Lakes communities to clean up legacy coal waste

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| Pollution

When Dulce Ortiz wants to enjoy the beauty of Lake Michigan, walk in a green space, or see and touch the water, she has to leave her neighborhood, even though the second-largest of the Great Lakes is in her backyard.

Ortiz lives in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb about an hour north of Chicago that has a lurid history of toxic waste. With a population of only 88,000, the city has five Superfund sites, many of them found along the Lake Michigan shoreline.

And that’s not even counting the large pools of toxic materials leftover from decades of burning coal in Waukegan. Deep pits of hazardous sludge sit along the shores of Lake Michigan, the watershed for roughly 12 million people.

Ortiz, co-chair of the local environmental justice organization Clean Power Lake County, calls these coal waste sites a …

Beyond solar: Here’s what the clean energy future might look like

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| Pollution

Images of a clean-energy future tend to feature wind turbines and solar panels, iconic symbols of the struggle to halt global warming. But the United States is pursuing a much wider range of solutions to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Soon, a direct air capture facility, or a carbon capture and storage project, or a clean hydrogen hub could be proposed in a town near you. Maybe one already has. Two recent laws — last year’s bipartisan infrastructure legislation and this year’s Inflation Reduction Act — offer developers billions of dollars to build these kinds of projects.

Experts say these technologies are needed to tackle climate change. They can help cut carbon from hard-to-decarbonize parts of the economy that cannot simply switch over to renewable electricity. But there are very few large-scale examples operating today. To help people visualize what …