As a child, Michelle Serrano would take trips to Boca Chica with her grandmother. From her home in Brownsville, the drive ran east through Texas wetlands and countryside before landing on miles of beach, stretching far down the Gulf Coast just above the U.S.-Mexico border. They’d spend the day there, swimming, laying out — which didn’t cost anything, unlike at South Padre Island to the north.
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now only counting costs to businesses when considering regulation on key pollutants, internal documents show, rather than considering human lives saved by such caps. For the first time in decades of the practice, The New York Times reports, the EPA will effectively set the cost of a human life at $0 when doing cost-benefit analysis for fine…
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Ethylene oxide was once considered an unremarkable pollutant. The colorless gas seeped from relatively few industrial facilities and commanded little public attention. All that changed in 2016, when the Environmental Protection Agency completed a study that found the chemical is 30 times more carcinogenic than previously thought. The agency then spent years updating regulations that…
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Billionaire tech moguls talk as if the artificial intelligence revolution is inevitable, and it’s up to the rest of us to adapt. Earlier this year in a blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman boasted that society is now “past the event horizon; the takeoff has started” toward building computer “superintelligence.” However, the industry is not just facing blowback from skeptics of the technology itself.
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States that have slashed funding for environmental regulation over the last 15 years have put themselves in a tough position to handle the fallout of the Trump administration’s pro-polluter agenda, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). Since 2010, 27 states have slashed budgets and 31 have cut staff at their own public health and environmental agencies…
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Organizers, human rights advocates, and legal experts from around the world convened in Barcelona in November 2025 for the International People’s Tribunal on Palestine. Over the course of a weekend on November 22 and 23, jurors and attendees heard from more than a dozen witnesses who testified to Israel’s calculated destruction of not only Gaza’s population but also its natural environment.
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