Justine Calma is a senior science reporter at The Verge, where she covers energy and the environment. She’s also the host of Hell or High Water: When a Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Since reporting on the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, Justine has covered climate change on the ground in four continents. She won a Covering Climate Now award for her reporting on forest restoration in Costa Rica in 2025. “Power Shift,” her story about one neighborhood’s fight for renewable energy in New Orleans, was published in the 2022 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She received an honorable mention in the Society of Environmental Journalists awards in 2023 for her reporting on the environmental effects of crypto mining. Find her on Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, and X, or reach her on Signal at bqe210.91.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has worked to send tailpipe pollution policies to Congress to repeal. US District Judge Beryl Howell accused the EPA of “Orwellian doublethink.”
It says in a new report that global temperatures are probably going to climb 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages soon. We’ll have to cope with catastrophes the UN had previously hoped to avoid, like the “submersion of Small Island Developing States and low-lying coastal cities,” while continuing to cut down and capture CO2 emissions to prevent even worse damage.
Data center developers typically have to apply for permits to install generators that create local air pollution. The DataOne facility in New Jersey is the latest project accused of violating federal law by running on gas-fired generators without approval.
The standard currently requires reactors to keep radiation exposure to workers and the public “as low as is reasonably achievable.” The change is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to speed the buildout of new nuclear reactors expected to power AI data centers.
Proposals for new gas-fired power capacity tied to data centers nearly doubled in the first half of 2026, according to a Global Energy Monitor report. Nearly a third of that new capacity would come online in Texas, more than in any other state or country.
States struggling with dwindling water resources as a result of climate change are turning to a new generation of companies claiming they can induce rain or snowfall. Rainmaker, a cloud seeding company based in El Segundo, California, says it has helped generate at least 143 million gallons of water for Oregon and Utah.
