Environment

Today’s the day to vote for the winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week, the annual March Madness-style popularity contest for Katmai National Park’s famous brown bears. (Personally, my money’s on Chunk.)

The Verge received a Covering Climate Now award for this story about a quirky and determined community of scientists and locals bringing forests back to life in Costa Rica, despite new perils brought on by climate change. They were so fun to hang out with, hope this story feels like a trip into the forest with them!

Both Trump and Biden have sought to build up a domestic supply chain for uranium to lessen dependency on Russian imports and meet growing data center electricity demand with nuclear energy.

The Environmental Protection Agency wants to stop collecting data on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other polluting sites. The proposed rule change comes as the Trump administration attempts to get rid of the agency’s ability to regulate planet-heating pollution at all.

“They’re doing away with science,” Christine Todd Whitman, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and former Republican governor of New Jersey, tells Bloomberg. That only makes it harder to prepare for the consequences of a warming world, from eroding coastlines to more devastating wildfires across the US.

“If they overturn this, it would leave the public responsible for cleaning up, not the companies that knowingly polluted the land,” University of California, San Francisco professor Tracey Woodruff tells The New York Times, which first reported on the proposal.

There’s plenty of disinformation trying to blame the nascent offshore wind industry for whale deaths without evidence. Not only is that misleading, it also takes the focus away from solutions that might actually address the leading causes of death — vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear.

In local battles over who foots the bill for new energy infrastructure, it’s about “power in the literal sense — the electrons that keep the lights on and fuel modern technology — and power in the political sense,” Ivan Penn and Karen Weise write for the The New York Times.

Plastic production, and the mountains of waste that creates, are still growing exponentially, Grist shows us in helpful, albeit eye-watering, charts. Whether things start to turn around depends on on thousands of delegates meeting in Geneva this week to try to negotiate an international plastics treaty.

The agency was already working on designing a reactor that might one day provide people with electricity on the moon. The Trump administration wants to try to speed things up and build a bigger reactor, Politico reports.

Called AlphaEarth Foundations, the model stitches together data from actual satellite images, radar, climate simulations, and more to map Earth’s land and coastal waters.

“Stay away from the coast!” the National Weather Service warns. A magnitude 8.7 earthquake off the east coast of Russia has triggered tsunami alerts across the Pacific. The tsunami advisory means that dangerous currents and waves are possible.

The Trump administration proposed tossing out the landmark 2009 “endangerment finding” that allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act.

A University of Washington experiment with “a machine to create clouds” was shut down by the city of Alameda — because the scientists didn’t bother to tell the locals what they were up to, Politico writes. They were 20 minutes into the test when city officials ended the experiment.

Plans are in place to revive a shuttered plant in Kentucky. The Trump administration and Big Tech are trying to revitalize the nuclear energy industry to meet growing electricity demand from AI data centers.

It’s part of the company’s new push to support the development of technologies that can store renewable energy for longer periods of time than lithium-ion batteries. It’s the kind of thing that might be able to help Google meet growing data center energy demands and maybe even stop its fossil fuel emissions from continuing to rise.