Our little guy Jake getting more accustomed to his new home with us. Little braver each day, but what happened in his 7 years to date will always be a mystery. His toupee makes us smile each day, as does his dancing and prancing as his food bowl is prepared.

Excerpt from this story from the Sierra Club:

Over the past century, the biodiversity of apple trees has declined sharply in the United States. Monoculture orchards have erased the mature forested orchards that once served as habitat for dozens of bird species such as bluebirds, northern flickers, and scarlet tanagers. There once were some 16,000 named apple varieties in the US alone. We’ve now lost more than half of those varieties, with only 3,000 remaining. As a naturalist, I have been researching apple biodiversity for several years, and I find it especially gratifying when this pathway leads me to our rich, and sometimes forgotten, history of apple growing.

To rediscover some of that history, I looked to one of the earliest known places where apples were grown in North America—the Manzano Mountains. But for two weeks, I had been hearing “There are no apple trees left” and “I don’t know of any.” I’d spoken to half a dozen rangers at Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument and Manzano Mountains State Park. Despite their shrugs, my family and I drove a couple of hours south to Mountainair, New Mexico, to see for ourselves. In my heart, I couldn’t believe there were no historic apple trees in the monument's ruins, located in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains. After all, the mountains and the village at their base are named after the Spanish word for apple tree.

My husband and I had pored over a bevy of old maps and determined that a 1794 map by French cartographer Jean-Baptiste D’Anville seemed to have been the first to refer to the Sierra Moreno as the Mansos Mountains. At the time, the mountains may have been named for the Manso indigenous peoples. A later map by the American cartographer Samuel Mitchell refers to the mountains as Manzanas, and a map prepared the same year, in 1867, by the US Topographical Bureau officially christens the range as the Manzana Mountains. A paper published in New Mexico Geology in 2000 notes that the apple trees in the Salinas area are probably the oldest living apple trees in the country, with their history stretching back to early Spanish explorers and the native Tompiro and Tiwa peoples who planted the trees for 17th-century Franciscan friars.

When a beloved historic apple tree in the Pacific Northwest died in 2020, there was a considerable outcry. Rightly so. In contrast, even the Salinas rangers I spoke to didn’t know about a comparable treasure right under their noses. Perhaps with a turnover in positions, institutional memory has faded. Three gorgeous ruins remain of the Salinas settlements, and the New Mexico Bureau of Geology paper confirmed that the surviving stand of apple trees is located in the Quarai ruins. The paper characterized Quarai as nestled in a juniper forest, and ideal for apple growing since the land has natural springs. Tree-ring growth data estimated that the apple trees are from roughly 1800. Local legend has it that they were planted even earlier by the friars and early Spanish ranchers. If the Quarai trees are 224 years old, as per tree-ring estimates, they have outlived the Pacific Northwest’s oldest apple tree, believed to have germinated in 1826 or 1827, and died in 2020, at the age of 194.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

President Trump’s repudiation of renewable-energy technologies stands to make the United States an outlier in the world.

Many of its large-economy peers are choosing a different path. Even as coal, oil and gas still power the global economy, and more fossil fuels are burned year after year, the movement globally is toward heavy investment in solar, wind and batteries, the prices of which have fallen sharply in recent years.

The European Union has aggressively moved away from coal. Its use of natural gas is declining, and last year solar alone made up 11 percent of power generation across the 27-country bloc, inching above coal, according to a new analysis by Ember, a research group.

Britain closed its last coal-burning power plant last year, and its government has said it would issue no new drilling licenses in the North Sea. Norway, a petrostate that has enriched itself with oil exports, offers such attractive incentives for clean transport that 90 percent of new cars sold in 2024 were electric.

Even Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has set a goal to generate half of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030.

China is in a league of its own. It burns more coal than any country by far, making it the world’s biggest emitter of planet-heating greenhouse gases. But at the same time, it is home to nearly two-thirds of all the world’s utility-scale solar and wind projects under construction. China’s dominance of the manufacturing of inexpensive solar panels has driven down the price of solar energy globally. And its companies are setting up electric vehicle factories as far afield as Thailand and Brazil.

Worldwide, investors poured nearly twice as much money into renewable energy in 2024 as they did into fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. “The world is undergoing an energy transition that is unstoppable,” Simon Stiell, the head of the United Nations’ climate agency, said Tuesday at the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland.

Mr. Trump’s energy-related executive orders, many issued on his first day in office, seek to make it easier for companies to produce oil and gas, and empower the government to stop clean-energy projects that have already been approved. (Coal use has sharply declined in the United States, mainly because of the availability of cheap fracked gas.)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Each January, business and political leaders descend upon the Swiss ski town of Davos to warn against urgent threats to the global order. Each year, they identify climate change as a one of the top risks that the world faces.

And then, for a few days, they make pledges, speeches and impassioned calls to take rapid action and save the planet.

But does it do any good?

I’ve been coming to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum for a decade now.

I’ve heard presidents pledge to “keep 1.5 alive,” a reference to the dangerous global warming threshold. I’ve heard institutional investors say they will pursue net zero goals. And I’ve heard Marc Benioff, the billionaire and chief executive officer of Salesforce, promise to plant a trillion trees.

All the while, emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, which are the main cause of global warming, have continued their inexorable rise. Last year was the hottest in recorded history, the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial times. And now, many of the corporations that made big climate pledges are walking back their commitments.

This year, the dissonance in Davos is particularly acute.

The conference opened on Monday, the same day that President Trump was sworn into office and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement. In a speech broadcast live to the W.E.F. conference Thursday, Trump called the Paris Agreement “one-sided,” attacked Biden’s “ridiculous and wasteful” climate programs and unapologetically promoted fossil fuels.

“The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth and we’re going to use it,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, the shops and restaurants on the Davos main drag have been taken over by corporations promoting their artificial intelligence offerings.

Amazon, Microsoft and other companies that have made ambitious climate goals are this year touting A.I., a technology that is forcing them to walk back their emissions reduction targets and consuming vast quantities of electricity, much of it generated with fossil fuels.

And the fossil fuel industry itself was well represented, too. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil and gas company, hosted a private party. Oil and gas executives are striking deals on the sidelines. JPMorgan, the biggest funder of fossil fuel projects in the world, rented out a museum for a cocktail party.

So, given all of this, what are we to make of the perennial pledges at Davos about global action to slow climate change?

“It makes you wonder, ‘Is this all a charade?’” said Fatou Jeng, climate adviser to the United Nations Secretary General. “The hypocrisy has gone on for a long time, and enough is enough.”

Excerpt from this story from Nation of Change:

Farmed animals in the United States have minimal legal protections, and much of the abuse they endure is legal. Unfortunately, the federal Animal Welfare Act—which establishes protections for pets and nonhuman animals used for exhibition (like in zoos) and research—does not apply to farmed animals. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a poorly conceived regulatory framework regarding animal rights and the enforcement of the few protections that exist for animals raised and slaughtered for human consumption.

“The failure of regulatory oversight in the U.S. slaughter industry is actually multifold, negatively affecting workers, animals, and the environment (including the communities that live near slaughterhouses),” wrote Delcianna J. Winders, an associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute Vermont Law and Graduate School, and Elan Abrell, the vice president of community planning and partnerships at the Phoenix Zones Initiative, in 2021 for the Health and Human Rights Journal.

Most state anti-cruelty laws also exempt farmed animals or allow standard practices that are patently cruel. No federal law in the United States explicitly regulates the treatment of animals on farms, except for the small percentage raised organically.

“Cattle are subject to many unique forms of legal bodily exploitation,” wrote Katalina Hadfield, former editor-in-chief of Ecology Law Quarterly, in 2022. “Perhaps the most well-known form of exploitation is, of course, the slaughter of cattle to produce beef. Another common endeavor is to forcibly impregnate cows and collect their milk for processing and distribution. Cattle are also routinely branded, sometimes on the face, for humans to lay legal claims to their bodies. Cattle are subject to agitation, mutilation, and general discomfort in rodeos across the United States. Nearly all these practices are completely legal—and sometimes encouraged—in U.S. law.”

Even more concerning are the claims—some made by former USDA employees—that animal welfare officials purposely ignore breaches in animal welfare regulations in favor of business interests. In 2021, National Geographic reported that former USDA employees said, “inspectors were discouraged from documenting poor welfare,” revealing “a pattern of federal officials’ failure to act on potential welfare violations.”

While federal protection for farmed animals is largely nonexistent, the few instances of protection that do exist are on the state level. Since the turn of the 21st century, several states have enacted measures to improve the welfare of farmed animals. These laws are often the result of public concern, and in many cases, they are reflected in citizen-initiated ballot measures.

Excerpt from this National Geographic story:

There are few animals so beloved in literature as the character of Ratty, one of the most endearing and widely quoted characters in Kenneth Graham’s children’s classic The Wind in The Willows.

Fans of the book will know of course that Ratty is not actually a rat but a water vole—a much cuter creature, with rich dark-brown fur, a bulbous nose, bright inquisitive eyes, and little furry ears tucked close to its head.

Back in 1908, when Wind in The Willows first appeared in print, water voles were a familiar sight along Britain’s riverbanks and canals, their distinctive “plop” as they as dived into the water as much a part of a river idyll as swans or birdsong.

But today things aren’t going quite so swimmingly. Water voles are Britain’s fastest disappearing mammal and face possible extinction. A recent wildlife survey showed an alarming 94 percent drop in water vole numbers from their healthy population of about 8 million of a century ago. Now listed as an endangered species in England and Wales, and threatened in Scotland, they have already vanished entirely from many parts of Britain. 

Yet there’s reason to hope for these beloved animals: The voles’ decline, which has been gathering pace since the early 2000s, has prompted a flurry of reintroduction programs around the country to try to save Ratty—and in March the British government set aside £25 million (about U.S. $30 million) for restoring habitat for iconic wildlife such as water voles and otters.

“We’ve been so focused on otters over the years that I think we lost sight of what was happening with the voles,” says Paul Wilkinson, an ecologist with the Canal & River Trust, which has been rolling out miles of coir matting along the towpaths and riverbanks to encourage vole-friendly plant diversity. “Now otters are making a comeback, and it’s the voles we’re worried about.” 

Like the character in the Wind in the Willows, water voles are model citizens, what ecologists call a keystone species, playing a role similar to that of beavers in helping to maintain a healthy wetland ecosystem.

Their burrowing and feeding activity aerates the soil, shifts seeds and nutrients, and helps to promote biodiversity, encouraging habitat for wildflowers, insects, reptiles, and amphibians.

On a less cuddly, but equally important note, they’re also natural prey for otters, foxes, pike and barn owls who have their own livings to make in Britain’s woodlands and waterways.

Excerpt from this story from Yale Environment 360:

For decades on the U.S. Mid-Atlantic coast, recreational anglers have braved the cold temperatures of late October and November to chase one of the region’s most iconic fish species, the striped bass. This season, just offshore of New Jersey and New York, the fall run was especially strong. “The amount of fish and [their size] was really, really high,” said Lou Van Bergen, a captain of Miss Barnegat Light, a 90-foot party boat out of Barnegat Light, New Jersey. “Every week, all the way through Thanksgiving, you could go out and catch nicer-sized fish.”

From the looks of the boat’s deck this fall, it would have been easy to assume that striped bass, once overfished to dangerously low numbers on the East Coast, had completed a remarkable comeback. Except that in the nearby Chesapeake Bay and in the Hudson River, where the fish return each spring to spawn, the hatching and maturation of juveniles “has been abysmal,” said John Waldman, an aquatic conservation biologist at the City University of New York. Waldman, an avid fisherman himself, called the low levels of striped bass recruitment, or spawning success, in these historically fertile estuaries “a real mystery.”

One way to better understand this apparent shift in striped bass recruitment and distribution in the Mid-Atlantic Bight— the coastal region that stretches from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to Massachusetts — is to look at similar shifts in the behavior of one of its key food sources, the Atlantic menhaden, a forage fish in the herring family. In recent years, menhaden have also been seen in high numbers off the New Jersey and New York coasts — Van Bergen described an early November trip in which the ocean surface was thick with menhaden for some 25 miles. But just like striped bass, menhaden numbers in the Chesapeake and other estuaries, where the fish was once reliably abundant, have been low.

“I don’t know if this is a larger cyclical pattern, if it’s driven by how they’re managed, or if it’s because the water temperature is increasing,” said Janelle Morano, a doctoral student at Cornell University who has been studying how menhaden distribution has changed along the U.S. East Coast over time. “But something is going on, and it is real.”

Taken together, the shifts in behavior of these two interconnected species resemble aspects of a phenomenon that is being observed across the planet, from land to sea: phenological mismatch.

Phenology is the seasonal timing of lifecycle events, like spawning and migration. Think of how honeybees emerge from their hives just as spring flowers bloom, or how in autumn, the monarch butterfly migrates south to Mexico as milkweed begins to die off in the United States. Phenological mismatch, however, occurs when these intricate, interspecies relationships fall out of sync due to changes in the environment. Terrestrial cases of phenological mismatch have been well documented. For example, detailed analysis has shown that, over the past 29 years, monarch migration has been delayed by six days due to warming temperatures, triggering mismatches with food availability during the journey and failures to reach overwintering sites.

But in the oceans, phenological mismatch has been far less studied. Every scientist interviewed for this story noted that while there has been good research on single-species phenology in marine environments, there remains precious little understanding of multispecies phenological mismatch. The subject, they said, urgently requires more focus because of the potential knock-on effects that mismatches could cause up and down the food chain. They also cautioned that all species, marine and terrestrial, are prone to natural swings in abundance, and that declines or increases can’t be pinned to any one stressor. Overfishing and stock management are just two external factors that may be influencing phenological mismatch in the world’s oceans. As the authors of a paper published in Nature Climate Change that focused on this lack of knowledge put it, “Given the complexity involved, accurately forecasting phenological mismatch in response to climate change is a major test of ecological theory and methods.”

Excerpt from this story from Yale Environment 360:

Last March, two young California men were searching for shed deer antlers in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento and were startled by a young mountain lion walking toward them, no more than 10 yards away. Experts say the best thing to do when a mountain lion approaches is to raise your arms to make yourself look larger, yell, and back away slowly. The young men, Taylen Brooks, 21, and Wyatt Brooks, 18, did just that, but the lion was not deterred.

Wyatt fell and the lion pounced on him sinking its fangs into his face. He pushed the cat away and it raked his face, and then the lion turned and attacked Taylen, fastening its jaws on his neck. Wyatt saw his brother’s arms go limp and the lion then dragged Taylen off the road and into the brush.

With difficulty Wyatt managed to dial 911. Fifteen minutes later, two deputy sheriffs drove up, followed by an ambulance. “The deputies spotted the drag trail through the brush and followed it to the cat, still crouched over Taylen’s body,” wrote Malcolm Brooks, the young men’s uncle. The cat vanished after deputies fired warning shots. It was later caught and killed by a county trapper.

Brooks’ story about the incident appeared in the New York Times Magazine in December, and it has rekindled a debate about mountain lions and how they should be managed.

To Brooks there is no doubt about what should be done in parts of California — something known as “tree-and-free.” That means, to reduce habituation and instill a fear of humans, hunters with hounds are allowed to chase lions until they climb a tree to escape. Lions in California are strictly protected, though, and there are many wildlife advocates who want to continue strict protections for the charismatic animal, including no “harassment” with dogs.

But some experts say there are simply too many lions in some places, many of which have lost their fear of humans, and treeing and freeing doesn’t go far enough. “They need hunting,” said John Chandler, the professional El Dorado County trapper who caught the lion that attacked Brooks’ nephews. “It solves everything.”

There are an estimated 30,000 mountain lions in the United States, the lion’s share of them in the West. Numbers are not well known because cougars are not federally protected and not well studied. But they are showing up in more places, from the Midwest to the East Coast, and are stoking controversy.

Mountain lions are also known as pumas, cougars, or panthers. They live solitary lives and feed primarily on deer. They are the second largest of North America’s wild cats (jaguars are the largest). In the U.S., male mountain lions average more than 135 pounds and females nearly 95 pounds. They are found from Canada to South America, the most widely distributed wild land mammal in the world.

Unlike wolves or grizzly bears, mountain lions across the country are managed by states, and so regulations are literally all over the map, varying greatly. In California, any hunting of lions is banned because of a 1990 voter initiative; in Texas, mountain lions are considered vermin and can be shot year round with a general hunting license and no special permit.

Florida is the only place where they are managed by the federal government, as an endangered species.

Attacks like the one on the Brooks brothers are driving a lot of the debate. Since 1890 there have been at least 32 fatal mountain lion attacks on humans, and more than 170 nonfatal attacks. As more people encroach on wild land — building homes and hobby farms, hiking and biking — the numbers of encounters are increasing and are being spread far and wide by social media and news outlets.

One of the wild cards in the management of lions, and other wildlife, is “ballot biology.” Management of mountain lions in several states has been decided by voter initiative. Washington and Oregon both banned hunting with hounds in the 1990s. Colorado, which has roughly as many mountain lions as California, recently voted against an initiative that would have banned the hunting of mountain lions, lynx, and bobcats.

Some experts and hunting advocates are critical of such “ballot biology,” saying that they are often based on emotions rather than science.

Others believe they are an important way to affect change and bypass special interests. Dan Ashe, former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, believes that hunting mountain lions is unethical. “I’ve never been much for so-called ‘trophy hunting,’ especially when the animals are chased to exhaustion by commercial outfitters using dogs and GPS tracking,” he wrote in a Colorado newspaper, “and then shot by a ‘hunter’ while perched helplessly in a tree.”

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

As long-distance transmission line capacity emerges as a bottleneck for Illinois’ clean energy transition, state lawmakers and advocates are drafting legislation to establish state incentives for power line projects.

One proposal under consideration would allow independent transmission developers to access subsidies through the state’s Renewable Energy Credit (RECs) program, the same mechanism that has fueled the state’s solar boom.

“Merchant transmission developers are essentially building a road — generators pay to put their electricity on that road and send it to customers,” said James Gignac, Midwest senior policy manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a member of the coalition working with legislators on an energy bill building on 2017’s Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, or CEJA.

The Illinois legislation being prepared for this spring’s session would create another source of revenue for such projects, lowering the cost burden on wind and solar developers looking for a more direct route to power customers. Unlike projects funded by utility ratepayers, merchant lines do not need to go through the lengthy planning and financing process overseen by regional grid operators such as MISO and PJM.

“These [high voltage, direct current] lines can serve a different purpose,” Gignac said. ​“It’s an overlay or additional feature of the transmission system. They can provide important benefits that supplement the [regional transmission organization] plan.”

CEJA mandates that almost all of the state’s fossil fuel generation cease by 2045. Especially with the boom in data centers, some are worried Illinois won’t be able to meet its energy needs with renewables and nuclear power if coal and gas plants close.

“Transmission is a huge part of the equation, it will be important in helping us take inefficient coal and gas plants off-line, and it will help bring on extraordinary amounts of clean energy,” said Christine Nannicelli, Sierra Club Beyond Coal senior campaign representative.

In December, MISO, which manages the grid for most of Illinois and a large part of the central U.S. spanning from the Dakotas to the Gulf Coast, approved a batch of 24 long-distance transmission projects on top of 18 interregional transmission lines approved in 2022. But these lines will likely take a decade or more to build, given lengthy bureaucratic processes.

Merchant lines can be constructed much more quickly, as they do not need to be studied and deemed necessary through the regional transmission organization process. They just need to be interconnected to the regional grid system, as well as receive certain approvals in the states they pass through. Illinois advocates have also proposed that legislation designate merchant lines as public utilities, giving them an easier path to eminent domain powers.

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

The Trump administration has ordered federal agencies to ​“immediately pause the disbursement of funds” under the landmark federal climate and energy laws passed during the Biden administration, a move that will throw tens of billions of dollars of lawfully designated federal funding into limbo — and one that is likely to be challenged in court.

The pause on disbursing funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is laid out in a section of a broader executive order on ​“Unleashing American Energy,” entitled ​“Terminating the Green New Deal.”

The order calls on federal agencies to halt all disbursements under the two laws while they ​“review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law.” It gives federal agencies 90 days to report to the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the head of the National Economic Council on how the frozen spending aligns with the administration’s overall energy goals.

Incoming administrations often call for temporary freezes and reviews of federal agency actions ordered by their predecessors. But it is far less common for executive orders to make federal agencies halt spending on programs mandated in laws passed by Congress.

The order is likely to cause significant confusion for the many government entities and private-sector companies that have been awarded funds, Alex Kania, director of equity research at Marathon Capital, an investment banking firm focused on clean infrastructure, wrote in a Tuesday research note.

“This would obviously stop any unappropriated funding, but the halt on any disbursement suggests a broader move, such as stopping payment of funds that had already been approved and previously contracted,” Kania wrote. ​“Bottom line, these executive orders inject a lot of uncertainty into federal clean energy policy, and a turn to the courts seems likely.”

Kania noted that the executive order is unlikely to impact tax credits created by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Tax credits — not loans, grants, and contracts — make up the majority of the hundreds of billions in federal spending expected to flow from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has called for rescinding entirely. But Republicans in Congress and many industry groups have warned that ending the tax credits would undermine the economic development and job growth the incentives have spurred largely in Republican districts.

Industry observers have been expecting the Trump administration to halt spending that federal agencies have yet to allocate, but the text of the executive order leaves unclear whether the freeze will also target spending that has already been ​“obligated,” or legally committed under contract. A Biden administration official told reporters on Friday that $96.7 billion in clean energy grants, or about 84 percent of grant funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, has been obligated.

That includes tens of billions in loans and loan guarantees issued by the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which under the Biden administration supported electric-vehicle and battery factories, battery-mineral mining, processing, and recycling facilities, distributed solar and battery deployments, EV-charging projects, alternative aviation fuel operations, clean hydrogen production plants, and nuclear reactors. Of the approximately $107.57 billion Biden’s LPO awarded across across 53 deals, just under $60.62 billion consists of loans and guarantees that have been finalized and obligated, according to a Friday update from the DOE.

Obligated funding also includes the $27 billion for so-called ​“green bank” programs created by the Inflation Reduction Act, which help fund climate projects that struggle to secure private-sector loans; about $3 billion of a $5 billion grant program for electric and zero-emissions school buses; and around $5 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants for states, local governments, tribes, and territories to finance plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

Other grant-funded projects at risk include the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $7 billion clean hydrogen hub program, for which only a fraction has been obligated, and the more than $22 billion in grants to fund power grid projects across the country, of which more than $10 billion has been awarded to utilities, companies, and state, local, and tribal governments but just a smaller slice has been obligated. Only portions of the IRA’s $8.8 billion in home-efficiency and electrification rebates and incentives and a $9.5 billion rural electrification program have been obligated.

The executive order also singles out for immediate pause the $7.5 billion in EV-charging infrastructure grants created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Of the $5 billion segment of those grants earmarked for large charging hubs along major highways and transit corridors, ​“my guess is about two-thirds of those are under contract with states,” said Loren McDonald, chief analyst of EV-charging data firm Paren. ​“And I would assume that those that are under contract could not be clawed back. How could you basically promise money for an applicant, they start construction, and then you pull it back?”

And in general, analysts say it would be difficult for Trump to undo obligated awards made by the Biden administration.

Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:

America’s newly inaugurated president sought to deliver on his campaign pledge to ​“end” offshore wind development on his first day in office. ​“We aren’t going to do the wind thing,” Trump said Monday, moments before signing an executive order that presses the pause button on new activity within the sector.

Wind opponents had been calling for an all-out freeze on turbine construction — a so-called ​“stop work” order. But the order signed by Trump stopped short of that ambition. It paused the approval of leases, permits, and loans for both offshore and onshore wind energy pending a federal review. It also temporarily withdrew new offshore wind lease sales and called for a review of the ​“ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending existing wind energy leases.”

“While it’s clear that this will essentially ban permitting activity, we expected that,” said Christian Roselund, a renewables analyst and volunteer for Climate Action Rhode Island, a pro-wind advocacy group. He described the federal permitting process under Trump’s first administration as ​“essentially frozen.”

There are seven offshore wind projects whose permitting was underway and several more in earlier stages that will now be temporarily halted by the order, according to data collected by Canary Media from the federal permitting dashboard.

But seemingly safe from Trump’s pause are plans for nine commercial-scale offshore wind projects that already have federal permits in hand. Five are actively under construction across a swath of ocean that reaches from Maryland to Massachusetts. In total, the capacity of the fully permitted offshore wind plans left untouched by Trump’s order is 13,973 megawatts — enough to power nearly 5 million homes.

At least one company, Dominion Energy, has already confirmed its project is moving forward as planned. The utility told the publication Virginia Business that its 2.6 gigawatt offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia would be completed by 2026 as scheduled. 

Chemical industry execs rotate back to the EPA (Heatmap Am)

Three former Environmental Protection Agency staffers who played key roles undoing chemical, climate, and water regulations during Trump’s first term are heading back to the agency. Nancy Beck, a toxicologist and former director of regulatory policy for the chemical industry’s main trade group, the American Chemistry Council, has been named a senior adviser to the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety, according to The New York Times. She famously re-wrote a rule that made it harder to track the health effects of “forever chemicals.” Lynn Ann Dekleva, who had a 30-year run at DuPont (which invented forever chemicals) before joining the first Trump administration, has been appointed a deputy assistant administrator overseeing new chemicals. Lastly, David Fotouhi, a lawyer who most recently fought the EPA’s ban on asbestos and previously helped Trump roll back federal protections for wetlands, has been nominated to return to the agency as one of its top brass — deputy administrator.

Europe sees the sun. (Heatmap AM)

The European Union got more of its electricity in 2024 from solar panels than from coal-fired power plants — the first time solar has overtaken coal for an entire year in the bloc, according to a new analysis by the think tank Ember. The group found that natural gas power also declined, cutting total 2024 EU power sector emissions to below half of their 2007 peak. Renewable energy now makes up nearly half of EU energy generation, up from about a third in 2019, when the European Green Deal became law. Another 24% of its power comes from nuclear, meaning that nearly three-quarters of the EU’s power is now carbon-free. “Fossil fuels are losing their grip on EU energy,” Chris Rosslowe, a senior analyst at Ember and lead author of the report said in a press release.

Thousands flee massive Hughes Fire (Heatmap AM)

The Hughes Fire, which broke out Wednesday morning near a state recreation area in northwest Los Angeles County, grew rapidly to more than 10,000 acres — nearly the size of the Eaton Fire in Alatadena — within just a few hours. CalFire, the state fire agency, ordered more than 30,000 people to evacuate, and 20,000 more were warned to prepare for mandatory evacuation. Harrowing footage posted online by United Farm Workers shows strawberry pickers in nearby Ventura County harvesting through a thick orange haze. But by Wednesday night, the fire was 14% contained and had only burned through brush — no structures have been reported as damaged. L.A. County is still under a red flag warning until Friday morning. A light rain is expected over the weekend.