As the remnants of Hurricane Ida barreled north in September 2021, Chris Erdner heard a startling warning on TV: Residents in her area needed to seek shelter immediately. Erdner’s quiet suburban neighborhood in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, was directly in the path of a tornado. Erdner and her husband rushed to the basement. “I don’t know...

For more than a decade, students have been begging their universities to stop investing in oil and gas companies. In 2019, protesters stormed the field of a Harvard-Yale football game at halftime, yelling, “Hey hey, ho ho! Fossil fuels have got to go!” Hundreds of schools have now taken steps to divest (including Harvard and, at least in part, Yale),...

On a Tuesday morning in mid-August, Mary Hynes was blasting her air conditioning. Hynes has walking problems, and she said she’s passed out “a couple of times” in the past. The issue went away after having her pacemaker adjusted, but it was enough to make her nervous about leaving her apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. And then New...

Choi Hee-woo was a 20-week-old embryo when he joined a landmark climate lawsuit in South Korea. At the time, his mother was planning to make Choi’s older sibling a plaintiff in a lawsuit that argued the South Korean government had not taken sufficient action against climate change. But when she learned that an unborn child could be party to a lawsuit,...

The U.S. presidential campaigns both have their eyes on the critical swing state of Pennsylvania — and Pennsylvania, as ever, has its eyes on energy. The state is the nation’s second-largest producer and exporter of fuels for energy — mostly natural gas and coal. The future of those industries is sufficiently important to the state’s voters that one...

When President Joe Biden nominated Deanne Criswell to serve as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2021, she received a unanimous confirmation, a rare gesture of bipartisan support from the bitterly divided U.S. Senate. A longtime firefighter who served overseas in the Colorado Air National Guard, Criswell also had decades of...