EPAs

The sky above New York City glows with a menacing orange color akin to the desert wasteland seen in films like Mad Max: Fury Road. With Canadian wildfires bringing a haze down onto the northeast U.S., users have helped the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s air quality app climb to be one of the world’s most-popular iPhone applications.Is This the End of Apple’s Lightning Cable?As of Wednesday afternoon ET, the EPA’s AIRNow app sat at number 13 most downloaded free apps on the App Store for iPhone. This made it more…

WASHINGTON —  The Supreme Court on Thursday limited federal protection for millions of acres of U.S. wetlands, ruling for property rights over clean water.In a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Water Act does not forbid developing marshy areas or dry creek beds because water does not flow regularly and directly from them into a river, lake or bay. Since the 1970s, the law has broadly protected wetlands from development because they help improve water quality and because dredge material can pollute rivers and bays.…

A cutaway of the Earth shows how impermeable rocks cap CO₂ reservoirs. Credit: Global CCS Institute The U.S. government is planning to crack down on power plants' greenhouse gas emissions, and, as a result, a lot of money is about to pour into technology that can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and lock it away. That raises…

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a historic climate policy proposal on Thursday. Through a new rule, the Biden Administration intends to set limits on coal- and gas-fueled power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions.California’s Snowpack Gets a Much Needed Boost | Extreme EarthGenerally, the EPA regulates polluting emissions like carbon monoxide and ozone. But the agency has exercised limited authority over planet-warming carbon dioxide in the past. Currently, the sole Clean Air Act provision on the books…

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just announced the availability of $400 million for clean school buses – the first round of funding available as grants. This is how the money is going to be distributed. Why the electric school bus grant program matters The Clean School Bus program, a part of President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was launched in May 2022. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 authorized the EPA to offer rebates in 2022 to replace diesel school…

One big question keeps surfacing after the Biden administration announced plans to raise auto standards so sharply they would likely boost electric vehicle production to 67% of all new passenger vehicle sales in under a decade: Can automakers pull that off? The proposal would require a huge change in production and consumer…

CLIMATEWIRE | The tailpipe emissions rules EPA proposed Wednesday are the sticks to Congress' carrots, providing the clearest view yet of how the agency plans to leverage the hundreds of billions of dollars lawmakers have pumped into clean energy and infrastructure. EPA built its two market-transforming rules on top of generous incentives in last year's Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. That resulted in the agency proposing the most aggressive restrictions in U.S. history on the…

This story was originally published by Grist, in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle and the Beaumont Enterprise. The project was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.The trouble began in the middle of the night. Around 2 a.m. on January 10, 2017, an air quality monitor in Port Arthur, Texas, began recording sulfur dioxide readings well above the federal standard of 75 parts per billion, or ppb. The monitor had recently been installed by regulators to keep an eye on Oxbow Calcining, a company owned by…

Photo: Sean Gallup (Getty Images)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.Thousands of employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are lobbying this week for Congress to address staffing issues that they say are limiting their ability to meaningfully carry out the Biden administration’s ambitious climate goals.Leaders of AFGE Council 238, a union representing roughly half of the EPA’s 14,000-member workforce, said in a memo that non competitive salaries and a lack…

On Friday, November 11, the Environmental Protection Agency posted a PDF with a title seemingly designed to be weapons-grade boring: Supplementary Material for the Regulatory Impact Analysis for the Supplemental Proposed Rulemaking, “Standards of Performance for New, Reconstructed, and Modified Sources and Emissions Guidelines for Existing Sources: Oil and Natural Gas Sector Climate Review” But the 131-page document is not as dry as it sounds. It’s where the EPA, and the whole Biden administration, lays out an estimate…