USA News

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization. Sign up for WBEZ newsletters to get local news you can trust.  Christian Diaz hates a boxy, six-story brick building with blue and gray paneling in Logan Square, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago. … Continue reading In Chicago, one neighborhood is fighting gentrification and climate change at the same time

The idea of a national “green bank,” which would lend public money to help cash-strapped businesses and individuals invest in things like solar panels and energy-efficiency upgrades, has been kicked around since at least the first Obama administration. But it wasn’t until President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in 2022 that… Continue reading These ‘green banks’ are getting billions to decarbonize disadvantaged communities

In response to growing pressure to address the plastic pollution crisis, Amazon has been cutting down on plastic packaging. Last July, the company said it used 11.6 percent less plastic for all of its shipments globally in 2022, compared to 2021. Much of Amazon’s reductions took place in countries that have enacted — or threatened… Continue reading As Amazon eliminates plastic packaging abroad, it’s using even more in the US

Across the nation, strip malls, schools, factories, and other big, nonresidential buildings bask in the sun — a powerful, and too often wasted, source of electricity that could serve the neighborhoods that surround them. Installing solar panels on these vast rooftops could provide one-fifth of the power that disadvantaged communities need, bringing renewable energy to… Continue reading How big-box stores and schools can help marginalized communities go solar

When you live far from the sprawling fields befitting utility-scale solar and wind farms, it’s easy to feel like clean energy isn’t coming online fast enough. But renewables have grown at a staggering rate since 2014 and now account for 22 percent of the nation’s electricity. Solar alone has grown an impressive eightfold in 10… Continue reading US experienced staggering growth in solar and wind power over the last decade

When you live far from the sprawling fields befitting utility-scale solar and wind farms, it’s easy to feel like clean energy isn’t coming online fast enough. But renewables have grown at a staggering rate since 2014 and now account for 22 percent of the nation’s electricity. Solar alone has grown an impressive eightfold in 10… Continue reading The US experienced staggering growth in solar and wind power over the last decade

As wildfires and hurricanes wreak havoc on American communities year after year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has quietly become a central part of the federal government’s response to climate change. The agency has spent billions of dollars over the past decade on long-term recovery projects that supplement emergency aid… Continue reading North Carolina tried to rebuild affordable housing after a hurricane. It took half a decade.

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… Continue reading The EPA wanted to clean up steel mills. Then a group of Rust Belt senators got involved.

Now 30, Big Wind spent most of their 20s fighting extraction projects. They were at Standing Rock, then, immediately after, traveled east to fight the construction of the Tennessee Gas pipeline. A Northern Arapaho tribal member from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Big Wind learned important financial lessons during those actions: Working collectively in… Continue reading Indigenous peoples’ climate labor benefits everyone. Should it be paid?

In the 20 months since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered billions in subsidies for clean energy projects and electric vehicles, President Joe Biden has sought to supplement those climate carrots with a few key sticks. The Environmental Protection Agency has in recent months raced to roll them out, in the form of… Continue reading The EPA’s push to clean up trucking goes way beyond 18-wheelers