As a rare winter storm bore down on South Carolina, bringing conditions that historically paralyze the state for days, local officials in a rural county quietly pushed through a massive $2.4 billion data center without most residents knowing it was even on the table. “There was a public meeting, which most were unaware of,” Jessie Chandler, a resident of rural Marion County, told Capital B…
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On Saturday morning, John Beard woke up to news that he’d been dreading, but preparing for: A global oil crisis could hit closer to home in Texas. The southeastern part of the state is home to more than a dozen oil refineries, and he’d spent decades working at one of them. But after attending more funerals than he could count for loved ones that died from cancer, he began to feel differently…
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“The demand for power and for AI is like nothing I’ve ever seen.” These words were uttered during an October earnings call, not by a wide-eyed tech executive, but by Jeff Miller, the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s biggest oilfield services corporations. Like droves of other companies tied to the fracked gas industry, Halliburton is pivoting toward servicing the data center boom…
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Since 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has required large industrial facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The data, which the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program has been collecting since 2011, is essential in efforts to reduce emissions and provides vital information to the public about climate pollution from the largest U.S. polluters. However, the Trump EPA has…
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In 2020, Noam Chomsky raised eyebrows by declaring Donald Trump “the worst criminal in human history” on account of the fact that, as president of the most powerful nation in the world, he was pursuing environmental policies that would lead to the destruction of “organized life on earth.” That statement was made during Trump’s first presidency. The second Trump presidency is now much worse.
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When word spread through Bessemer, Alabama, earlier this year that a tech giant was eyeing hundreds of pine-covered acres at the city’s edge, Benard Simelton’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The longtime NAACP leader had fielded calls about toxic air and shuttered steel mills before, but this, he said, was new to him. At first, the renderings looked like progress for the majority-Black town…
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