As President Trump issues rapid-fire executive orders intended to drastically reduce the federal work force and dismantle several agencies, many federal employees are left wondering what the future holds. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency with wide-ranging responsibilities that include disentangling whales from fishing nets off Alaska, gathering satellite data on…
A new federal order that freezes a Biden-era program to build a national network of electric vehicle charging stations has confounded states, which had been allocated billions of dollars by Congress for the program. In interviews on Friday, some state officials said that as a result of the memo from the Trump administration, they had…
President Trump said on Friday that he would stop a plan by the Biden administration to phase out plastic straws in favor of paper ones across the federal government, saying they don’t work and it’s “BACK TO PLASTIC.” “I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws,…
President Trump has so far restrained himself from trying to meddle with the Federal Reserve on matters related to monetary policy during his second term. But some of the more than 50 executive orders he has signed since returning to the White House are leaving an imprint on the central bank. The latest evidence is…
Twenty-two states, led by West Virginia, are suing to block a recently approved New York law that requires fossil fuel companies to pay billions of dollars a year for contributing to climate change. Under the law, called the Climate Change Superfund Act, the country’s biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions between the years 2000 and…
When Andreas Fichtner unspooled a fiber-optic cable into a deep hole in Greenland’s ice, he wasn’t expecting to discover a whole new way that glaciers move. Even when the cable started sending back data, his first reaction was skeptical. “Rubbish,” Dr. Fichtner, a professor of seismology and wave physics at the Swiss university ETH Zurich,…
In the United States at least, coal is a terminal case. While it once dominated the nation’s power grid, hundreds of units have shuttered over the last two decades and have been largely replaced by natural gas and renewables like solar and wind. More than half of the remaining coal units in the United States…
Good Chablis is the most distinctive chardonnay wine in the world. I’ve long been convinced of this, and a wine I drank on a recent visit to Chablis reaffirmed my conviction. It was a 2015 Montée de Tonnerre from William Fèvre, one of Chablis’s best producers. The wine was saline and stony, like drinking liquid…
At a time when the documentary film business is atrophying, one of the world’s leading documentarians, Alex Gibney, has taken on a powerful partner: Wendy Schmidt, a billionaire philanthropist by way of Google. “We’ve been managing to make films on important social issues for a long time, but finding and getting those stories to audiences…
Even as much of the United States shivered under frigid conditions last month, the planet as a whole had its warmest January on record, scientists said on Thursday. The warmth came as something of a surprise to climate researchers. It occurred during La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which tend to lower the globe’s…
