2026-02-23 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina.
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s quarterly meeting in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, opened with a triumphant video homage to its work during Winter Storm Fern. Yet again, energy had come through to defeat extreme cold. The montage credited this to the utility’s “coal workhorses,” then noted that nuclear provided “uninterrupted power” and “hydro responded instantly.” The list ended there, despite years of promises that the agency would bolster renewables and battery storage. The message was clear: Solar had been unceremoniously dropped from the mix, and coal, which the agency had been phasing out, was back.
What the video hinted at, the board made official. Its seven members unanimously dropped renewable energy as a priority, ended diversity programs, and granted two of the agency’s four remaining coal plants a reprieve. The decision followed the seating of four members selected by President Donald Trump, breaking months of paralysis that followed the termination of three Biden appointees.
The changes, made during the February 11 board meeting, signal more than a routine policy reset for the nation’s largest public power provider. They will slow the TVA’s shift away from fossil fuels just as electricity demand is spiking, raising questions about future costs, pollution, and the role of federally-owned utilities in the country’s energy transition.
For years, TVA planners had mapped out a future without coal. That is now on hold.
For years, TVA planners had mapped out a future without coal. That is now on hold. The Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, was scheduled for retirement in 2027, with all nine of its units slated for demolition and replacement with an “energy complex” of gas generation and battery storage. All of them will remain online alongside the gas plant, but renewables are no longer part of the picture. The board also shelved plans to scuttle the Cumberland Fossil Plant in Stewart County, Tennessee, in 2028.
These moves come despite the agency’s 2025 Integrated Resource Plan, which called for retiring the two facilities because of Kingston’s “high cost and challenged condition” and Cumberland’s “lack of flexibility.” The Kingston coal plant was also the site of a devastating 2010 coal ash disaster, the largest industrial spill in U.S. history.
The board defended its decision by citing energy affordability for the Tennessee Valley.
“As power demand grows, TVA is looking at every option to bolster our generating fleet to continue providing affordable, reliable electricity to our 10 million customers, create jobs, and help communities thrive,” agency spokesperson Scott Brooks said in a statement.
Left unsaid was the fact that a coal-fired power generation unit at the Cumberland Fossil Plant failed during last month’s storm.
Much of TVA’s load growth comes from the rise of artificial intelligence, said CEO Don Moul, and data centers account for 18 percent of its industrial load. During the same meeting, the board allowed the company xAI, owned by Elon Musk, to double the amount of power it draws from the grid.
For former board member Michelle Moore, one of the Biden-era appointees President Trump fired in March, the shift aligns squarely with the administration’s priorities. It also signals, she said, that the utility is no longer fulfilling its mission to provide affordable power, economic development, and environmental stewardship across the seven-state Tennessee Valley. “The politics in Washington may change,” she said. “But the TVA’s mission does not.”
That independence has at times put the Tennessee Valley Authority at odds with presidents of both parties. The utility resisted Trump administration pressure to keep coal plants open, continuing to retire facilities based on economic reasons. But it also fell short of President Biden’s decarbonization goals.
Moore worries ordinary ratepayers are no longer an active part of TVA’s decision-making. Typically, a shift as monumental as turning away from renewable energy would have been subject to a lengthy review with input from communities throughout the region, something that simply will not occur now. “This is one more indicator that the public power model is being eroded and is at risk,” Moore said.
Last month, the TVA said it would streamline how it reviews the ecological impacts of its projects, allowing some to move ahead with far less, if any, scrutiny. The move follows a broader rollback of the National Environmental Policy Act under President Trump that grants greater discretion over such considerations to entities like the TVA. For nearly 60 years, the law required an assessment of the environmental impacts of federal projects. “Over the past several years, the TVA board has faced pressure to make decisions based on stringent environmental regulations,” said board member Wade White.
The TVA’s willingness to join the Trump administration’s push to revive the coal industry has rankled locals and environmentalists. In the first year of his second term, President Trump lifted Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on the industry, used emergency executive orders to keep aging coal plants open, expanded mining, and ordered the Pentagon to buy electricity from power plants that use coal. The president has since received an award from industry executives, dubbing him the “Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal.”
From a public health standpoint, it’s a nightmare. “Coal is one of the worst things you can imagine for the environment,” said Avner Vengosh, a professor of environmental quality at Duke University who leads a coal and coal ash research group. Mining destroys ecosystems and poisons groundwater, polluting rivers and streams with sulfuric acid. Burning the fossil fuel releases fine particulate matter, impacting the health of nearby residents. A 2023 study in the journal Science found that coal plants caused nearly half a million excess deaths between 1999 and 2020, and a Sierra Club report notes that TVA coal-fired plants were the nation’s deadliest.
“People are upset, they feel like we’re going backwards,” said Amy Kelly, a Sierra Club campaign manager. “The fact that these plants are from the 50s and 60s, and we’re just going to prop them up with Band-Aid solutions to appease the current administration is going to cost people.”
Even some coal plant operators agree. A Colorado utility is suing to close a facility, calling a federal emergency order to keep it online “unconstitutional.” For those who live near the two plants the TVA just saved, the decision is, in Joe Schiller’s words, “a betrayal.” Schiller, a retired college professor, has lived near the Cumberland plant for 30 years. “It contradicts everything they’ve told us about the plants in the past,” he said. Even so, he added, it’s a beautiful area. Moments before, his wife had called him outside to admire the sandhill cranes flying by.
“It’s not like you look around every day and say, ‘Yep, that Cumberland plant is slowly killing me,’” Schiller said with a laugh. “Although it probably is.”
2026-02-23 01:19:38
On Sunday, more than a dozen Arab and Islamic governments condemned statements made by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee after he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Israel had the biblical right to take over land belonging to other states in the Middle East.
“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee told Carlson in the interview released on Friday when questioned on whether Israel had been promised almost all the land in the Middle East in the Bible. The statement was part of a heated exchange where Carlson pressed Huckabee on his beliefs in Christian Zionism. (Huckabee later added that Israel was not interested in acquiring other countries’ land.)
In a joint statement released by the United Arab Emirates’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, several governments—including US allies like Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—called Huckabee’s remarks “a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations” that threaten security in the region. The countries stated that the ambassador’s statements “directly contradict” Donald Trump’s 20-point plan from last October to end the war in Gaza.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime supporter of the country’s expansion in the Middle East, had another response. He posted on X on Saturday: “I [heart emoji] Huckabee.”
Huckabee clarified later on in his Friday interview on The Tucker Carlson Show that his statement that Israel could take it “all” was “hyperbolic.”
In July 2024, the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice, said that Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violate international law by infringing on the Palestinian people’s rights for self-determination.
Despite that, Israel and US policy has facilitated the expansion of settlements. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote in February 2025, Trump has not just supported permanently displacing Palestinians from Gaza—he has also stated that he wants the US to take control of the region and have a “long-term ownership position,” manifesting in his administration’s “New Gaza” real estate project, complete with skyscrapers and industrial centers.
2026-02-23 01:01:15
An armed man was fatally shot on Sunday after driving into the secure perimeter of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as another vehicle was exiting, according to a spokesperson for the US Secret Service.
“The individual was observed by the north gate of the Mar-a-Lago property carrying what appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can,” the Secret Service’s press release reads. “US Secret Service and a [Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office] deputy confronted the individual and shots were fired by law enforcement during the encounter.”
The president and First Lady Melania Trump were at the White House at the time of the shooting.
At a press conference on Sunday morning, Palm Beach County Sheriff Rick Bradshaw said that the man was ordered to drop the two pieces of equipment that he was carrying. In response, “he put down the gas can [and] raised the shotgun to a shooting position.”
According to Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service’s Chief of Communications, the suspect was in his early 20s and from North Carolina. He was reported missing a few days ago by his family.
Guglielmi said that investigators believe the man picked up a shotgun on the way to Florida. Law enforcement recovered a box for the gun in the suspect’s vehicle.
The Sunday incident at Mar-a-Lago took place a few miles from Trump’s West Palm Beach club, where a man tried to assassinate him while he played golf during the 2024 campaign.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
2026-02-22 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When Russian air strikes knocked out Ukrainian power plants earlier this winter, much of the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv went dark, and indoor temperatures plummeted. Just 60 kilometers from the front, Tornado rockets, cruise and ballistic missiles, and attack drones have been raining down on the city of 450,000 for the last four years. Now, during the coldest winter in more than a decade, most of Mykolaiv’s citizens are once again enduring bitterly cold homes and, when electric water pumps fail, dry taps.
“Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational.”
But there are new glimmers of hope in Mykolaiv. Last November, 26 newly installed photovoltaic roof panels, paired with 100 kilowatt-hours of lithium battery storage, began to power heat pumps and generators to keep the city’s Urban Rehabilitation Center for Children and Persons with Disabilities up and running. Thanks to the Danish Refugee Council and Denmark’s foreign ministry, the project’s donors, the center continued operating even during a 32-hour stretch of shelling in mid-December. In addition to treating 70 patients a day, the center has opened its doors to at-risk Mykolaivians who lack heat. Several other institutions in Mykolaiv have also jettisoned their exclusive reliance on the national grid, which is mostly powered by large natural gas, coal-fired, and nuclear plants, and now draw energy from small-scale distributed systems that produce electricity at or near the point of use.
Since the war’s onset, Russia has targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure—its old-school fossil-fueled power plants, substations, and transmission lines—in an effort to advance its offensive and beat down the Ukrainian people. Before this winter even set in, half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure lay in ruins. Economists estimate that total damage to the nation’s energy sector now exceeds $56 billion.
This winter is the most devastating yet: Attacks have left giant swaths of the country with irregular electricity and heat as temperatures have plummeted to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The bitter conditions have left many schools and other public services closed since Christmas. In Kyiv, as well as in Kharkiv, Poltava, and Dnipro, more than 1,000 public heating tents, powered by diesel generators and wood-burning stoves, offer residents warmth and a place to charge their phones. But these improvisations aren’t enough. On January 14, President Volodymyr Zelensky declared a state of emergency in the energy sector.
While Ukraine’s energy system, which had a pre-war generation capacity of 60 gigawatts, scrambles to keep the lights on, grid operators are also looking past the next drone swarm, pushing to diversify the country’s energy sources, says Lars Handrich, a German energy expert who works closely with Ukraine. The plan is to replace the bulky thermal plants and centralized grid, which are vulnerable to drone and other attacks, with distributed renewables and modestly sized gas-fired plants that make less attractive targets for incoming fire. According to estimates from the Solar Energy Association of Ukraine, the nation installed at least 1.5 gigawatts of new solar generation in 2025—enough to power roughly 1.1 million homes—and grid operators intend to almost double the country’s renewable energy production over the next four years.
Ukraine is revamping its power sector as rapidly as it can, not for climate protection but for energy security. “Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”
Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”
Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.
Ukraine’s shift away from fossil fuels began before Russia’s full-scale invasion: To join the European Union, the nation must adopt the bloc’s climate criteria, and in 2021, Ukraine pledged to be coal-free by 2035. The war interrupted this phaseout, but it also accelerated Ukraine’s adoption of renewables, despite its strapped budget.
European countries are bankrolling most of Ukraine’s energy makeover, including all of the Mykolaiv solar installations. West of Kyiv, the city of Zhytomyr plans to run entirely on renewables by 2050 with the help of the Rebuild Ukraine initiative, which is largely European-funded. And in the Kyiv region and beyond, solar systems supported by the Solar Supports Ukraine program are keeping schools open during blackouts. A self-financed exception: Before the war began, the Sunny City cooperative in Slavutych, a town near the Belarus border, crowdfunded to create a solar power plant on the roofs of three municipal buildings.
According to the International Energy Agency, Ukraine made “strong strides” in rebuilding and bolstering its system’s resilience this past summer. The renewables rollout was—and still is—dominated by rooftop solar, small photovoltaic arrays, wind, local storage, and biomass combustion.
Some self-sustaining energy zones combine renewables with conventional energy. The central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, for example, boasts five microgridst that combine local generation, including solar, gas, and hydroelectric power, with energy storage systems. Five major wind farms will join the energy mix in the next two years. In Khmelnytskyi, the national university’s 4,400-kilowatt microgrid includes a natural gas-fired cogeneration unit (it produces both electricity and heat), a 264-kilowatt solar array, a diesel-powered plant, and a gas-fired boiler house, which generates heat.
Before Russia seized territory that hosted more than half of Ukraine’s wind power capacity in 2014 and 2022, including major wind farms on the Sea of Azov coast, Ukraine had 34 wind parks, comprised of nearly 700 turbines. Since wind generation is so central to its decentralized energy strategy, Ukraine has sought to increase wind generation even in the midst of Russian attacks.
Just 65 miles from the front, DTEK is installing the 500-megawatt Tyligulska Wind Power Plant, the first wind park ever built in a war zone. It is a crucial source of electricity in southern Ukraine and will supply 900,000 households when it’s finished. The country currently has 7 gigawatts of wind power in the pipeline that could be installed this year, according to Andriy Konechenkov, of the Ukrainian Wind Energy Association, should conditions on the ground allow it. The new turbines would more than triple the country’s current wind-power capacity.
While the war has sidelined the rollout of utility-scale wind farms, solar installations atop households, businesses, and public institutions have continued at an unprecedented rate. Ukraine’s YASNO utility, which supplies electricity and gas to millions of Ukrainians, says its customers are snapping up the solar and storage packages that it offers. On sunny days, Ukraine even boasts energy surpluses.
The German-Ukrainian Energy Partnership, a platform for intergovernmental dialogue on energy matters, estimates that Ukraine’s long-term technical solar potential exceeds 80 gigawatts, on par with the output of 80 medium-sized nuclear reactors. “The sector is emerging as one of the fastest-developing renewable markets in Eastern Europe,” according to its website. A University of Technology Sydney study suggests Ukraine could meet 91 percent of its energy needs from a combination of solar and onshore wind using 1 percent of its land.
“Individual consumers want to get off the grid any way that they can,” explains Andriy Martynyuk of Ecoclub, a Ukraine-based NGO that helps communities develop renewables. “It’s largely a grassroots phenomenon and a bit chaotic now,” he says. But Martynyuk expects the demand for renewables will further surge when state subsidies for fossil energy, which have priced Ukrainian energy significantly below market rates, are eventually phased out.
This boom, of course, begs for storage options, and there, too, Ukraine has moved quickly. In 2024 and 2025, the country’s national grid operator invested in half a gigawatt of storage capacity—an impressive amount according to experts, who note that it is just under a quarter of Germany’s total storage supply. The battery projects that in Europe take two years to roll out, the Financial Times reports, take just six months in Ukraine.
In terms of a new, cutting-edge distributed energy system, Ukraine may be racing forward with the zeal of a new convert, but even the planned rollout of renewables in 2026 won’t keep most of the Ukrainian population safe from Russia’s depredations next winter. Wartime Ukraine has the will but not the financial resources to revamp its energy production on its own. The nation’s largest donor, the E.U., is already contributing nearly $200 billion to Ukraine’s budget for military expenditures and humanitarian aid, including energy. The speed with which Ukraine blankets its territory with distributed energy systems could make the difference between surviving another punishing winter—or succumbing to its cruelty.
2026-02-22 05:58:14
There have been nearly 1,000 confirmed measles cases in the US in 2026 so far, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than four times the amount of cases as this time last year.
It’s unclear how much larger the spread could be, as the CDC’s number refers to reported and confirmed cases.
Many of the current cases stem from an outbreak in South Carolina, with the state nearly reporting around 800 cases since January. Twenty-six states have reported cases this year, spanning the entire country—from California to Maine and from Texas to Wisconsin.
During 2025, there were 2,281 confirmed cases of measles. The country is now at risk of, if not on track to, losing its measles elimination status that it’s held since 2000. Two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine, usually administered in children, provides 97 percent protection, though distrust of vaccinations, fueled by mis- and disinformation, has risen in the past few years.
The surging 2026 numbers come after more than a year of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. serving as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He, along with key allies, has led the agency toward an unprecedented reshaping of the nation’s vaccination system for children—a mission he began prior to becoming secretary.
There are no current death reports from 2026, though at least three people died from measles in 2025. As more Americans are at risk of becoming sick from the illness, Kennedy has continued to spread false information about alternative remedies like cod liver oil.
Despite the record numbers and quick spread in 2025, HHS told Mother Jones back in December that they weren’t especially worried about the brewing South Carolina outbreak. The CDC was “not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard wrote.
To date, that outbreak has led to at least 20 hospitalizations. Though, according to reporting from ProPublica, that number is likely much higher as hospitals in South Carolina aren’t required to report when they admit patients with measles-related illnesses.
Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician in South Carolina who is board certified in pediatric infectious disease, told ProPublica that she didn’t even know that anyone had been hospitalized due to the illness in her state until she saw it on social media.
“It’s a very big disservice to the public not reporting complications we are seeing in hospitals or even ERs,” Bragg said. “Measles isn’t just a cold.”
Even if reports of measles were required, the chaos the Trump administration has rained down on the federal workforce could make it hard to understand and address the scope of the issue.
In October, more than 1,000 CDC employees were laid off, only for some 700 to be rehired the next day. As Americans face another widespread public health crisis, the pinned post on Kennedy’s X account isn’t about how to protect yourself or your children from measles. Instead, it’s a video of himself working out in a sauna, shirtless, with Kid Rock.
2026-02-22 03:12:21
President Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice right now is the appointee who refused to restrict the president’s tariff agenda.
After the high court ruled against him in his tariff case on Friday, Trump has repeatedly singled out Justice Brett Kavanaugh in praise—the only one of Trump’s three appointments to dissent against the majority opinion that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, does not give Trump authority to impose tariffs.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump appointed in 2017 and 2020 respectively, sided with Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices in the majority opinion.
“I would like to thank Justice Kavanaugh for his, frankly, his genius and his great ability. Very proud of that appointment,” Trump said during the press conference following the Friday ruling. During that address, Trump claimed, without providing details, that the loss in the Supreme Court “made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear rather than less.”
Trump initially announced that he would impose a global tariff of 10 percent, invoking a law never before utilized by a president which allows the executive to “impose an across-the-board tariff for 150 days unless Congress agrees to extend it,” according to the New York Times. On Saturday, per a Truth Social post, Trump raised the amount to 15 percent—the cap for this kind of tariff imposition.
It’s unclear how this global tariff will impact trade negotiations with world leaders. It’s also unclear, and not covered in the ruling, if the executive office will be refunding any retailers impacted by the previous tariffs. Estimates place the total amount that Trump has collected under IEEPA between $133 billion and $175 billion.
Amid Trump’s strong rebukes of the justices who opted to deny the overarching presidential authority, he continued to lavish praise on Kavanaugh, who, according to a recent Marquette Law School poll, has the lowest net favorability among all of his peers.
“I’m so proud of him,” Trump said of Kavanaugh on Friday, repeatedly citing his dissent.
“My new hero is United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning, before mentioning the other two men who sided with him: “and, of course, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.” Despite dissenting from his liberal colleagues in the recent tariff case, Kavanaugh is the conservative justice most likely to side with liberals in outcomes, according to an analysis by SCOTUSblog.
Trump has long championed Kavanaugh, providing strong support for the appointee during his controversial approval process in 2018. When Christine Blasey Ford had accused then-nominee Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school, Trump called for his followers to pray for him and his family. After Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the alleged assault, which she reportedly detailed to her husband and therapist several years prior, Trump wrote that Kavanaugh “is a fine man and great intellect.”
Around a year later, in 2019, the Times published another sexual misconduct allegation against him, spurring calls for his impeachment. Kavanaugh denied both of the women’s accounts.
Trump again came to the rescue: “Can’t let Brett Kavanaugh give Radical Left Democrat (Liberal Plus) Opinions based on threats of Impeaching him over made up stories (sound familiar?), false allegations, and lies. This is the game they play. Fake and Corrupt News is working overtime!,” Trump wrote at the time, adding the hashtag “#ProtectKavanaugh.”
