Denver is on track to see one of the city’s driest winters on record after only traces of snow fell in February, according to the National Weather Service.
Roughly 13.4 inches of snow fell in the Denver area between September and February, according to the weather service. On average, Denver records 34.8 inches of snow during that timeframe.
With only traces of snow falling in Denver in February, the city officially tied its record for the least-snowy February since 1882, when the agency started keeping snowfall records, according to the weather service. The previous record for lack of February snowfall was set in 2009.
Denver saw 0.02 inches of total precipitation, making it the second-driest February on record, and an average monthly temperature of 42.1 degrees, the third-warmest on record, weather service meteorologists said.
The warmest February in Denver’s history was in 1954, with an average temperature of 43.7 degrees, according to the agency. Temperature and precipitation records started in 1872.
One of the warmest and driest Februaries on record for much of northeast Colorado.
Denver's stats:
Least snowiest (trace) 2nd driest (0.02") 3rd warmest (42.1°F)
How exactly horses produce that distinctive sound — also called a neigh — has long eluded scientists.
The whinny is an unusual combination of both high and low pitched sounds, like a cross between a grunt and a squeal — that come out at the same time.
The low-pitched part wasn’t much of a mystery. It comes from air passing over bands of tissue in the voice box that make noise when they vibrate. It’s a technique similar to how humans speak and sing.
But the high-pitched piece is more puzzling. With some exceptions, larger animals have larger vocal systems and typically make lower sounds. So how do horses do it?
According to a new study, they whistle.
Researchers slid a small camera through horses’ noses to film what happened inside while they whinnied and made another common horse sound, the softer, subtler nicker. They also conducted detailed scans and blew air through the isolated voice boxes of dead horses.
The whinny’s mysterious high-pitched tones, they discovered, are a kind of whistling that starts in the horse’s voice box. Air vibrates the tissues in the voice box while an area just above contracts, leaving a small opening for the whistle to escape.
That’s different from human whistling, which we do with our mouths.
“I’d never imagined that there was a whistling component. It’s really interesting, and I can hear that now,” said Jenifer Nadeau, who studies horses at the University of Connecticut. Nadeau was not involved with the study, which was published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
A few small rodents like rats and mice whistle like this, but horses are the first known large mammal to have a knack for it. They’re also the only animals known to be able to whistle through their voice boxes while they sing.
“Knowing that a ‘whinny’ is not just a ‘whinny’ but that it is actually composed of two different fundamental frequencies that are created by two different mechanisms is exciting,” said Alisa Herbst with Rutgers University’s Equine Science Center, of the study in an email.
A big lingering question is how horses’ two-toned calls came to be. Wild Przewalski’s horses can do something similar, as can elks. But more distant horse relatives like donkeys and zebras can’t make the high-pitched sounds.
The two-toned whinnies could help horses convey multiple messages at the same time. The differently pitched neighs may help them express a more complex range of feelings when socializing, said study author Elodie Mandel-Briefer with the University of Copenhagen.
“They can express emotions in these two dimensions,” Mandel-Briefer said.
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Associated Press video journalist James Brooks contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE – A horse whinnies in a barn at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds in Oklahoma City, during a cutting horse competition, Monday, June 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
Surveillance footage captured a coyote following a 3-year-old boy toward his home in Pasadena earlier this week.
At around 1 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 23, on Tamarac Drive, 3-year-old Salvo Bessemer exited his gated courtyard and headed for the driveway, hoping to give his father, Leonard Bessemer, a hug goodbye before he left for work, his father said.
Salvo did not find his dad, who had left about five minutes earlier. Instead, he spotted a coyote in front of the house, Leonard Bessemer said. The boy then turned around and ran back toward the house, screaming for his mother.
Video footage shows Salvo reaching the door, with the coyote following behind him. Audio captured Salvo’s mother, Aida Svelto, screaming when she spotted the coyote near the entrance.
The coyote then turned around and trotted away. According to Bessemer, the animal did not immediately leave the area, but lingered nearby for a short time, watching the house through ivy on the property.
Coyotes are frequently spotted in the neighborhood, Bessemer said. He sees one at least once a week while on early-morning runs and typically makes noise to deter them, especially when accompanied by the family’s chihuahua, Sam.
Monday’s scare prompted Bessemer and his fiancée to take stricter precautions with both Sam and Salvo.
“We made a rule that he’s not to go to the gate without one of us,” Bessemer said. “It might have gone differently if Salvo had been by himself.”
Bessemer said he also plans to make sure Sam is always leashed when taken outside and that the front door remains closed as a precaution.
Kevin McManus of Pasadena Humane said that while the video may appear frightening, the coyote did not demonstrate signs of aggressive or hunting behavior based on the footage.
“The good news is everybody’s safe,” McManus said.
Bessemer said he has noticed more coyotes in the area recently, including during daytime hours. McManus said this is likely due to mating season, when coyotes are more active and more likely to be seen outside of dawn and dusk.
“People should make noise and try to make coyotes uncomfortable to scare them off,” McManus said. “Remember, we’re bigger than them.”
McManus also advised residents to be extra cautious with pets during this season and to avoid leaving food or unsecured trash around their homes.
Surveillance footage shows a coyote following 3-year-old Salvo Bessemer toward his home in Pasadena on Monday, Feb. 23. (Courtesy of Leonard Bessemer)
Despite a barren start to Colorado’s ski season, Winter Park Resort opened on Halloween and served up holiday powder.
The ski area’s secret is a contraption a few miles upwind of the chairlifts that looks like a meat smoker strapped to the top of a ladder. When weather conditions are just right, a Winter Park contractor fires up the machine, burning a fine dust of silver iodide into the sky — a process known as cloud seeding. Ideally, the particles disappear into a cloud that is cold enough and wet enough to produce snow, but may need a nudge. The silver iodide becomes the nuclei for water droplets, like iron filings to a magnet. Those droplets freeze and fall from the sky as snowflakes, freshening up the slopes of the resort as it tries to lure the Gore-Tex-clad masses between Denver and larger, showier ski destinations further west.
Doug Laraby, who has helped run Winter Park for nearly four decades, says the resort leaned heavily on its cloud seeding equipment over the Christmas holiday, sprinkling the skies as fresh powder fell days before the critical New Years weekend. At the moment, Winter Park has more snow than Breckenridge, Keystone and a host of bigger resorts nearby.
“For us,” Laraby explains, “that was a million-dollar storm.”
Resorts are increasingly seeking solutions to freshen up the brown slopes spanning the American West this winter, even as the East Coast grapples with back-to-back storms. Last month, Vail Resorts Inc. — which owns nearly 50 resorts across the U.S. and Canada — said it would miss revenue projections due to subpar snowfall this season. The dramatic lack of precipitation in the Rockies “limited our ability to open terrain” and, in turn, crimped spending by both locals and destination guests, Chief Executive Officer Rob Katz said in a statement.
In a battle to improve — or at least maintain — snowpack in the face of rising temperatures and drought, Winter Park, operated by Vail rival Alterra Mountain Co., is one of a growing number of groups in the American West doubling down on cloud seeding, from state governments and ski hills to utilities and watershed management agencies.
Desperate for water — ideally snow — they’re banking on the strategy to buoy the $6 billion U.S. ski industry, while keeping rivers and reservoirs at healthy levels come spring. Despite the promise, though, companies are still trying to amass data showing the technology can actually deliver appreciable amounts of powder. And scientists studying cloud seeding have cast doubt on just how effective it is.
Katja Friedrich, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Colorado, concedes that cloud seeding works in a lab. “But out there,” she says, gesturing to cirrus clouds sweeping over the Front Range outside of her office, “it’s a totally different business.”
Storms are volatile, complex and unforgiving places to gather data. “The application is so far ahead of what the science actually shows,” Friedrich explains. “Usually, it’s the other way around.”
The idea of cloud seeding dates back to the 19th century, and it got an unexpected boost thanks to research at General Electric in the wake of World War II. DRI, a nonprofit research institute in Nevada, started cloud seeding in the 1960s. Putting particles in clouds to create precipitation gained traction in recent years as waves of drought hit the U.S., tallying $14 billion in damages in 2023 alone.
DRI now runs cloud-seeding operations all over the West, including the program at Winter Park. In 2023, the Winter Park generators burned for the equivalent of five straight days, planting an estimated 24 inches of powder on the slopes that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, according to DRI. That equates to 13% of what would have fallen naturally.
“The main driver [for our clients] is water resources,” says Frank McDonough, a DRI research scientist. But, he notes, “we can help the entire mountain economy.”
Private companies are also playing a growing role, most notably Rainmaker Technology Corp., a startup that is now the lead cloud seeding contractor for Utah, which has built one of the most aggressive programs in the American West. From a warehouse in Salt Lake City, founder Augustus Doricko, a 25-year-old with a resplendent mullet that belies his Connecticut childhood, manages a crew of 120, mostly young people working to make it snow on mountains they might otherwise be climbing or skiing.
When the weather looks right, Rainmaker crews pile into 12 pickups, each loaded with two drones, and convoy up the canyons of the Wasatch Mountains. They send half of the drones whirring into the soup of clouds and spray silver iodide for about an hour. When the machines come down to recharge, the team launches the second wave. The cycle is repeated until the clouds move on or get too warm.
Doricko says his company is creating a fresh supply of water with no ecological impact; silver iodide is inorganic and even if ingested, won’t dissolve in the human body.
This year, the state of Utah will pay Rainmaker $7.5 million, part of a cloud seeding blitz that began three years ago. With the Great Salt Lake at historic low levels, Utah lawmakers approved a tenfold increase in funding, committing at least $5 million a year to operations and another $12 million to upgrade and expand a fleet of almost 200 cloud seeding machines on the ground.
Rainmaker is charged with generating enough snow to help partially refill the lake. The company also has a contract with Snowbird Resort, located to the east of Salt Lake City, and much of its seeding will happen near Powder Mountain and Snowbasin resorts, located further north, although neither ski area is a client.
“Anything we can do to increase water levels is going to be well worth the funding,” says Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with the Utah Department of Natural Resources.
The list of stakeholders clamoring for more water in the American West is long, ranging from ski resorts to wildfire fighters, reservoir managers to farmers.
“Every state in the West is either cloud seeding or thinking of cloud seeding,” says Friedrich, the University of Colorado researcher.
It’s also popular, in part, because it’s cheap. Jennings estimates that it costs about $30 to produce 325,000 gallons of water, or what experts call an acre-foot of water. Recycling or desalinating a similar amount would cost somewhere around $1,000. Snowmaking, meanwhile, is more expensive and uses more water than it produces.
When Doricko visits potential customers, be they utilities, ski resorts or state agencies, his sales script is simple: “It’s the only way you can bring new water supply to the Rocky Mountain West.”
More often than not these days, the pitch lands. Idaho has also hired Rainmaker this winter, eager to fill its reservoirs and keep farmers happy. All told, the company has about 100 drones flying across Western skies.
In Colorado, where arid conditions have exacerbated wildfires, officials are curious about the capabilities of Rainmaker’s drones while waiting to see this winter’s snow tallies from Utah. In the meantime, they’re working to replace decades-old, ground-based seeding machines with ones that can be switched on remotely. Without the need of a human to light the burner, the new units can be tucked into more remote places and at higher elevations that are colder for longer, improving the odds for snow.
“We feel comfortable saying we can get an additional eight to 12% of precipitation per storm,” says Andrew Rickert, a weather modification program manager with the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “And if we have a great winter in Colorado, there are 30 to 35 storms we can seed.”
Friedrich isn’t so sure about that estimate, despite being regarded as a bit of a rockstar in the cloud seeding field. In 2017, her research team zig-zagged a plane rigged with seed flares through a cloud in Wyoming that wasn’t producing snow. Sure enough, snow fell in the same pattern as the flight, results that fueled much of the recent seeding boom.
However, Friedrich points out, there wasn’t that much snow. And she notes that much remains unknown, like how wind affects the amount of silver iodide that gets into a cloud, and whether the particles trigger much precipitation beyond what would occur naturally.
“I understand why people are buying it, because they’re so desperate,” she says. “But if you ask me, there’s no scientific proof” that it produces a meaningful amount of water. Friedrich is working on a new study to try to figure out how effective ground-based cloud seeding can be and the best operating conditions.
Cloud seeding has also faced pushback from conspiracy theorists who say it works too well. Despite no evidence, Rainmaker was inaccurately implicated in last summer’s deadly Texas floods, and bills to ban weather modification have been filed in dozens of statehouses across the U.S., including those of Colorado and Utah. Former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also introduced a federal cloud-seeding ban in Congress in the wake of last July’s floods.
Doricko, at Rainmaker, has been working to convince lawmakers that cloud seeding does no harm and, on the other front, win over skeptical scientists like Freidrich. Rainmaker spent much of the spring and summer building its own radar system and deploying a layer of on-the-ground weather stations to measure results. It’s also working with independent researchers to provided peer-reviewed validation. As Friedrich did years ago, Rainmaker tries to spray silver-iodide in zig-zag patterns, so its results are more visible on radar — a so-called “seeding signature.”
Doricko acknowledges the challenge of teasing out the exact influence of manmade cloud seeding — which he jokingly refers to as “magic beans” — from natural precipitation. “Our fundamental research on now at Rainmaker is all about what kitchen sink of sensors can we throw at this problem to actually validate” our work, he says.
Vail abandoned its cloud seeding program in 2020, shifting its resources to invest heavily in machines that use water to spray artificial snow. The newest snow guns monitor weather in real time and can be programmed remotely.
“This technology means that Vail can make the most of every moment that conditions allow for snowmaking,” says spokeswoman Michelle Dallal. Still, the resort is feeling the pinch of an abnormally dry winter.
State officials are trying to get Vail back on board. Cloud seeding, they argue, can be cheaper than snowmaking, both in terms of cost and carbon, and it adds water to the ecosystem, rather than taking a share of it away. The state is also trying to get other ski areas to buy in: This year, Colorado positioned a ground system to seed clouds on the slopes of Aspen, in hopes that the resort will help fund future programs.
Meanwhile, Winter Park has emerged as one of the state’s biggest cloud seeding cheerleaders. Laraby says only 10% of the mountain is covered by snowmaking gear, and there are no plans to install more. And yet, when the storms rolled through the state Dec. 28, Winter Park says its cloud-seeding efforts conjured 12 inches of snow, triple what fell on Vail.
“If you ask me, it enhances the efficiency of these storms,” Laraby says. “I think it’s awesome.”
Justus Henkes of Team United States competes in the Aspen Snowmass Men’s Snowboard Slopestyle Qualifiers during the Toyota U.S. Grand Prix 2026 at Aspen Snowmass Ski Resort on Jan. 8, 2026, in Aspen, Colorado. (Michael Reaves/Getty Images North America/TNS)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency will resume staff cuts that were briefly paused during January’s severe winter storm, according to two FEMA managers, stoking concern across the agency over its ability to address disasters with fewer workers.
FEMA at the start of January abruptly stopped renewing employment contracts for a group of staffers known as Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery, or CORE employees, term-limited hires who can hold senior roles and play an important role in emergency response.
But FEMA then paused the cuts in late January as the nation braced for the gigantic winter storm that was set to impact half the country’s population. FEMA did not say whether that decision was linked to the storm.
The two FEMA team managers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the staffing changes with the media, were told this week that dismissals were going to resume soon but were not given a specific date. It was not clear how many people would be impacted.
FEMA staff told The Associated Press that the policy indiscriminately terminates employees without taking into account the importance of their role or their years of experience. The hundreds of CORE dismissals have wiped out entire teams, or left groups without managers, they said.
“It’s a big impact to our ability to implement and carry out the programs entrusted to us to carry out,” one FEMA manager told The Associated Press.
The officials said it was unclear who at the Department of Homeland Security or FEMA was driving the decision. Managers used to make the case to extend a contract months in advance, they said, but now leaders were often finding out about terminations at the same time as their employee.
DHS and FEMA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There are over 10,000 CORE workers, making up nearly half of FEMA’s workforce. While they are employed on two- and four-year contracts, those terms are “routinely renewed,” one manager said, calling CORE the “primary backbone” for FEMA’s response and recovery work. Many CORE are supervisors and it’s not uncommon for them to have worked at the agency for many years, if not decades.
CORE employees are paid out of FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund and are not subject to as long a hiring process as permanent full-time federal employees. That allows the agency to be more nimble in its hiring and onboard employees more quickly as needs arise. With DHS funded only temporarily because of a battle in Congress over immigration tactics, CORE employees can work and be paid during a government shutdown, so long as the disaster fund still has money.
It also comes as DHS faces increasing criticism over how it manages FEMA, including delays in getting disaster funding to states and workforce reductions.
FEMA lost nearly 10% of its workforce between January and June 2025, according to the Government Accountability Office. Concern has grown in recent months among FEMA staff and disaster experts that larger cuts are coming.
A draft report from the Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council included a recommendation to cut the agency’s workforce in half, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the report with media. The council’s final report, due last November, has not been published.
“Based on past disasters, we know that slashing FEMA’s workforce will put Americans at risk, plain and simple,” Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said after introducing a resolution Wednesday condemning FEMA staff cuts.
Last week, a coalition of unions and nonprofits led by the American Federation of Government Employees filed a legal complaint against the Trump Administration over the FEMA reductions.
A CORE employee at FEMA headquarters who asked not to be named for fear of losing their job said that even though FEMA was able to support states during Winter Storm Fern, a year of staff losses could already be felt. There were fewer people available for backup, they said, and staff were burned out from ongoing uncertainty.
FILE – People work at the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington, on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
Energy Star, the program that helps guide consumers to more energy-efficient appliances and electronics, has survived the Trump administration’s plans to cut it.
The program received sufficient support in Congress that it was included in budget legislation signed this week by President Donald Trump.
Environmentalists and advocates called it good news for consumers and the planet, but raised concerns over how the program will be administered under a shrunken Environmental Protection Agency.
But Energy Star is not the only energy efficiency program targeted by Trump.
Here’s what to know about the outlook for that program and others.
What’s Trump got against energy efficiency?
Trump has regularly said efficiency standards for household items and appliances — many strengthened under predecessor Joe Biden’s administration — rob consumers of choice and add unnecessary costs.
His first executive order upon returning to office last year outlined a vision to “unleash American energy.” In it, he emphasized safeguarding “the American people’s freedom to choose” everything from light bulbs to gas stoves to water heaters and shower heads.
At the same time Trump has targeted efficiency, he’s also sought to block renewable energy development such as wind and solar and boosted fossil fuels that contribute to warming, including gas, oil and coal.
What happened with Energy Star?
Energy Star is a voluntary, decades-old EPA-run program that informs consumers about how efficient home appliances and electronics are, including dishwashers, washing machines and more. The idea is to simultaneously reduce emissions and save consumers money on their energy bills.
The Department of Energy develops product testing procedures for Energy Star, while the EPA sets performance levels and ensures the certification label is reliable for consumers. It also applies to new homes, commercial buildings and plants.
EPA says the program has saved 4 billion metric tonnes (4.41 billion tons) of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions since launching in 1992, and can save households an average of $450 annually.
Last May, EPA drafted plans to eliminate Energy Star as part of a broader agency reorganization that targeted air pollution regulation efforts and other critical environmental functions. The agency said the reorganization would deliver “organizational improvements to the personnel structure” to benefit the American people.
The legislation Trump signed this week allocated $33 million for the program, slightly more than 2024’s $32.1 million, according to the Congressional Research Service, but it continues the general trend of declining funding for the program over the past decade. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, among many industry groups to advocate for keeping the program in letters sent to Congress, said it was “very pleased” to see the funding continue.
Some concerns remain
Experts say uncertainty around the program likely didn’t impact consumers much over the past year. They note that manufacturers can’t change their product lines overnight.
Amanda Smith, a senior scientist at climate research organization Project Drawdown, said the uncertainty may have had a bigger effect on EPA’s ability to administer the program. She was among experts wondering how staffing cuts may affect EPA’s work.
EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch didn’t address a question about that, saying in a statement only that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin “will follow the law as enacted by Congress.”
What other energy efficiency rules are still in limbo?
The Department of Energy has proposed rolling back, weakening or revoking 17 other minimum efficiency standards for energy and water conservation as part of 47 broader deregulatory actions. Those are standards that must be met for the products to be sold legally.
That includes air cleaners, ovens, dehumidifiers, portable air conditioners, washers, dishwashers, faucets and many more items that have been in place and updated over the years.
“These are standards that are quietly saving people money on their utility bills year after year in a way that most consumers never notice,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “The striking thing is that consumers have a huge array of choices in appliances in the market today. Repealing these standards would simply increase cost. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Changing efficiency measures also drives up energy demand at a time when utilities are already challenged to meet the growing needs of data centers, electrification and more.
While Congress has supported Energy Star and these separate appliance standards, it also has advanced legislation that would give the president new powers to roll back rules.
Manufacturers are likely to continue making efficient consumer appliances, but weakened rules could negatively impact the U.S. marketplace.
“The problem for U.S. manufacturers is that overseas competitors making inefficient products elsewhere could now flood the U.S. market,” deLaski said, noting that would undercut American manufacturers.
Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Lawyers for conservation groups, Native American tribes, and the states of Oregon and Washington returned to court Friday to seek changes to dam operations on the Snake and Columbia Rivers, following the collapse of a landmark agreement with the federal government to help recover critically imperiled salmon runs.
Last year President Donald Trump torpedoed the 2023 deal, in which the Biden administration had promised to spend $1 billion over a decade to help restore salmon while also boosting tribal clean energy projects. The White House called it “radical environmentalism” that could have resulted in the breaching of four controversial dams on the Snake River.
FILE – Water moves through a spillway of the Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River near Almota, Wash., April 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Nicholas K. Geranios, File)
The plaintiffs argue that the way the government operates the dams violates the Endangered Species Act, and over decades of litigation judges have repeatedly ordered changes to help the fish. They’re asking the court to order changes at eight large hydropower dams, including lowering reservoir water levels, which can help fish travel through them faster, and increasing spill, which can help juvenile fish pass over dams instead of through turbines.
In court filings, the federal government called the request a “sweeping scheme to wrest control” of the dams that would compromise the ability to operate them safely and efficiently. Any such court order could also raise rates for utility customers, the government said.
“We’re returning to court because the situation for the salmon and the steelhead in the Columbia River Basin is dire,” said Kristen Boyles, managing attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit law firm representing conservation, clean energy and fishing groups in the litigation. “There are populations that are on the brink of extinction, and this is a species which is the center of Northwest tribal life and identity.”
FILE – Water spills over the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, which runs along the Washington and Oregon state line, June 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski, File)
The lengthy legal battle was revived after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement last June. The pact with Washington, Oregon and four Native American tribes had allowed for a pause in the litigation.
The plaintiffs, which include the state of Oregon and a coalition of conservation and fishing groups such as the National Wildlife Federation, filed the motion for a preliminary injunction, with Washington state, the Nez Perce Tribe and Yakama Nation supporting it as “friends of the court.” The U.S. District Court in Portland will hear the oral arguments.
The Columbia River Basin, spanning an area roughly the size of Texas, was once the world’s greatest salmon-producing river system, with at least 16 stocks of salmon and steelhead. Today, four are extinct and seven are endangered or threatened. Another iconic but endangered Northwest species, a population of killer whales, also depend on the salmon.
The construction of the first dams on the Columbia River, including the Grand Coulee and Bonneville in the 1930s, provided jobs during the Great Depression as well as hydropower and navigation. They made the town of Lewiston, Idaho, the most inland seaport on the West Coast, and many farmers continue to rely on barges to ship their crops.
Opponents of the proposed dam changes include the Inland Ports and Navigation Group, which said in a statement last year that increasing spill “can disproportionately hurt navigation, resulting in disruptions in the flow of commerce that has a highly destructive impact on our communities and economy.”
Speaking before the hearing, Jeremy Takala of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council said “extinction is not an option.”
“This is very personal to me. It’s very intimate,” he said, describing how his grandfather took him to go fishing. “Every season of lower survival means closed subsistence fisheries, loss of ceremonies and fewer elders able to pass on fishing traditions to the next generation.”
The dams for which changes are being sought are the Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite on the Snake River, and the Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day and McNary on the Columbia.
FILE – This photo shows the Ice Harbor dam on the Snake River in Pasco, Wash, Oct. 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Jackie Johnston, File)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California sued the federal government Friday for approving a Texas-based company’s plans to restart two oil pipelines along the state’s coast, escalating a fight over the Trump administration’s removal of regulatory barriers to offshore oil drilling for the first time in decades.
The state oversees the pipelines that run through Santa Barbara and Kern counties, said Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta.
“The federal administration has no right to usurp California’s regulatory authority,” he said at a news conference. “We’re taking them to court to draw a line in the sand and to protect our coast, beaches and communities from potentially hazardous pipelines.”
But the U.S. Transportation Department agency that approved Sable’s plan pushed back on the lawsuit.
“Restarting the Las Flores Pipeline will bring much needed American energy to a state with the highest gas prices in the country,” said a spokesperson with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Sable did not respond for comment on the lawsuit.
Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term to reverse former President Joe Biden’s ban on future offshore oil drilling on the East and West coasts. A federal court later struck down Biden’s order to withdraw 625 million acres of federal waters from oil development.
The federal administration in November announced plans for new offshore oil drilling off the California and Florida coasts, which the oil industry has backed for years.
But critics say the plans could harm coastal communities and ecosystems.
Bonta said one of the pipelines Sable wants to restart burst in 2015, spilling oil along the Southern California coast. The event was the state’s worst oil spill in decades. More than 140,000 gallons (3,300 barrels) of oil gushed out, blackening beaches for 150 miles from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. It polluted a biologically rich habitat for endangered whales and sea turtles, killing scores of pelicans, seals and dolphins, and decimating the fishing industry.
FILE – A worker removes oil from sand at Refugio State Beach, north of Goleta, Calif., May 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
The drilling platforms were subsequently shuttered.
Sable has faced a slew of legal challenges but has said it is determined to restart production, even if that means confining it to federal waters, where state regulators have virtually no say. California controls the 3 miles nearest to shore. The platforms are 5 to 9 miles offshore.
“It’s crazy that we are even talking about restarting this pipeline,” said Alex Katz, executive director of the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara group formed in response to a catastrophic 1969 California oil spill.
The federal government’s approval to restart the pipelines ignores painful lessons the community learned from the 2015 oil spill, said California Assemblymember Gregg Hart, a Democrat representing Santa Barbara.
“California will not allow Trump and his Big Oil friends to bypass our essential environmental laws and threaten our coastline,” he said in a statement.
California has been reducing the state’s production of fossil fuels in favor of clean energy for years. The movement has been spearheaded partly by Santa Barbara County, where elected officials voted in May to begin taking steps to phase out onshore oil and gas operations.
FILE – Workers prepare an oil containment boom at Refugio State Beach, north of Goleta, Calif., on May 21, 2015, two days after an oil pipeline ruptured, polluting beaches and killing hundreds of birds and marine mammals. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
Lansing — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive directive Thursday that she said would help explore geologic hydrogen as a new source of energy in Michigan, requiring state agencies to plan for needed infrastructure and policy changes.
Whitmer announced the initiative during a speech at the Detroit Auto Show, saying if Michigan’s hydrogen reserves are proven to be safe and viable, they could lead to a “massive economic boom, creating jobs, lowering costs and reducing our reliance on foreign fuel.”
The directive, her first of 2026, will require the Department of Natural Resources to develop a report on any legal impediments to leasing “state-owned subsurface rights” for hydrogen exploration and the Michigan Public Service Commission to develop a report on needed infrastructure upgrades.
“The directive could make us a national leader in this space,” Whitmer said Thursday, according to her prepared remarks for the event. “We’re already seeing a lot of interest in Michigan because we have more potential reserves under our feet than every other state.”
The reports from state agencies are due by April 1, according to the directive. The Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy must file one on “statutory and regulatory authority to permit” geologic hydrogen exploration and any impediments in current law.
A statement from the governor’s office described geologic hydrogen as “a natural energy resource with the potential to serve as a fuel source at a scale and price that is competitive with fossil fuels.” Hydrogen releases water when it is burned, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, while petroleum and other fossil fuels release planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide.
The USGS released a report last year indicating Michigan could be rich with geologic hydrogen that could be tapped for fuel. The state has three elements needed for hydrogen accumulation, the report authors said: a source of hydrogen generation, porous reservoirs that store hydrogen and seals to prevent hydrogen from leaking.
The four-page directive that Whitmer signed said Michigan could see “billions of dollars in new economic activity by tapping into a fraction of the U.S. hydrogen economy.”
In the statement from the governor’s office, Judd Herzer, director of mobility research and innovation at Michigan State University, said Whitmer’s directive sent a signal that Michigan was serious about leading in geological hydrogen.
“With the right coordination across state agencies, research institutions and the private sector geological hydrogen can move rapidly from scientific promise to practical application, supporting hydrogen-powered mobility, clean energy independence and the advanced manufacturing opportunities that will define Michigan’s next era of innovation,” Herzer said.
At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Energy is funding ongoing research into safe hydrogen handling and storage practices, according to the department’s website.
Geologists predict Michigan rich with hydrogen
Exploration of underground hydrogen stores is in the early stage, USGS geologists said in their report published last year. Finding underground hydrogen stores has historically been considered a problem or gone unreported, since companies were typically on the hunt for petroleum and lacked the tools to measure hydrogen.
Geologists used multiple data sets that covered the 48 contiguous states to determine where hydrogen reserves were likely, said Geoffrey Ellis, a USGS geochemist at the Central Energy Resources Science Center and coauthor of the report. He said geologists need to do more focused work to better understand reserves in Michigan.
“The fact that a state like Michigan has so much interest is great,” Ellis said. “Hopefully, we can work with the state (geological) survey and do that type of effort.”
Sara Ryker, USGS associate director for energy and minerals, described the report as “tantalizing” when it was released in January 2025.
“For decades, the conventional wisdom was that naturally occurring hydrogen did not accumulate in sufficient quantities to be used for energy purposes,” Ryker said in 2025. “This map is tantalizing because it shows that several parts of the U.S. could have a subsurface hydrogen resource after all.”
The USGS report sparked interest in recovering hydrogen from below ground rather than making hydrogen by splitting molecules such as water, said Todd Allen, University of Michigan College of Engineering associate dean for research.
While the report shows what federal geologists believe to be the best places for finding geologic reserves of hydrogen, there hasn’t been much test drilling to determine whether the geologists’ predictions are right, Allen said.
“To a great extent, it’s unknown,” he said. “I think the interest in the state of Michigan is that the USGS map said we ought to have a lot.”
It could be a big deal for Michigan if the geologists turn out to be right and the state has large quantities of hydrogen available to recover, he said.
Hydrogen fuel cells could power heavy vehicles, such as ships and trucks. Some clean energy advocates see it as a way to decarbonize heavy-duty transportation and shipping as well as some heavy industries like steelmaking that traditionally rely on coal to power furnaces.
A Hydrogen fuel truck parked during a news conference rehearsal at the new Hydrogen fueling station True Zero operated by FirstElement Fuel in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. The Hydrogen fueling station is the first of its kind opened in the United States, near the Port of Oakland. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Hydrogen fuel typically is created by separating molecules that contain hydrogen – taking the H₂ out of H₂O, for example.
“If we could bring hydrogen out of the ground, it would be much cheaper,” Allen said. “If people can recover geologic hydrogen at the same rate we do natural gas, it would be much, much cheaper (than other sources of hydrogen) and it would be much, much easier to bring it into commerce.”
Separating out that hydrogen requires a lot of electricity and sometimes is done using natural gas, which releases fossil fuels is costly and negates some of the climate benefits of hydrogen. Extracting hydrogen from the ground also could be a win for the climate, Allen said, because it wouldn’t require electricity.
During a speech in Detroit on Tuesday, Republican President Donald Trump referenced hydrogen, appearing to joke — as he has many times during previous campaign stops in Michigan — that he would “pass on” using hydrogen to power cars.
“I’m hearing it’s not testing so well,” Trump said. “It’s fine, except when there’s an explosion, you’re a goner.”
Under former President Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of Energy funded regional hydrogen hubs to study and produce hydrogen fuel and develop a supply chain for its use. Michigan is part of one such hub, the Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen, known as MachH2, which was set to receive up to $1 billion in federal funding as of 2023.
The hub programs are on “standby,” Allen said. Most were in the planning stage when Trump took office and had not yet received much of their promised funds, according to Allen.
“To a great extent, I think the hubs are just stuck,” Allen said. “There’s not a lot of action. I think it’s because the administration is not on a path to provide the big funding.”
Geologic hydrogen may be more appealing to the Trump administration because it requires a familiar process of extracting resources from underground, much like fracking natural gas or drilling for oil, Allen said.
“It could be a (good) thing just in general, a good, useful way of powering modern society, but it could be that the federal government shifts their focus, too,” Allen said. “It’s an extension of the thing we know how to do.”
Governor seeks new North American trade pact
Whitmer’s speech at the auto show Thursday touched on tariffs, Michigan’s economy and some of her goals for her final year as the state’s governor. She can’t run for reelection this fall because of term limits.
She called on Trump’s administration not to abandon the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, which is up for review this year.
“Instead, we should build on the best parts and make it even better,” Whitmer said, according to her prepared remarks. “The USMCA has some of the strictest auto rules of any free trade agreement in the world.
“It raised wages for workers in all three countries, and guaranteed that more parts were made in the U.S. Is it perfect? No. But without our allies, we do not stand a chance.”
The USMCA started in 2020, during Trump’s first term in the White House. But in recent days, he’s downplayed it. During his trip to Michigan on Tuesday, he labeled it “irrelevant.”
Also, on Thursday, Whitmer called on the Legislature to get a new state budget to her desk by June 30.
“With so much uncertainty, we owe it to local governments, schools, and businesses leaders to enact a transparent, timely budget,” Whitmer said. “I’m confident we can get it done.”
FILE: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer delivers the 2025 State of the State address Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025, at the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, Mich. (Katy Kildee/Detroit News via AP)
The holiday season will soon come to a close, but the busiest time of the year for product returns is just beginning.
The National Retail Federation estimates 17% of holiday purchases will be sent back this year. More retailers are reporting extended return windows and increased holiday staff to handle the rush this year.
A major driver for returns is uncertainty. When we buy for other people, finding what they want is a bit of a guessing game. Online purchases have higher return rates because finding the right size and color is tough when you’re just staring at images on screens.
“Clothing and footwear, as you can imagine, because fit is such an important criteria, they have higher rates of returns,” said Saskia van Gendt, chief sustainability officer at Blue Yonder, which sells software designed to improve companies’ supply chain management.
Returns come with an environmental cost, but there’s a lot consumers and companies are doing to minimize it.
The impact of returns
If a company sells a thing, it’s probably packaged in plastic. Plastic is made from oil, and oil production releases emissions that warm the planet. If that thing is bought online, it’s put on a plane or a train or a truck that usually uses oil-based fuel.
If you buy a thing and return it, it goes through most or all of that all over again.
And once those products are back with the retailer, they may be sent along to a refurbisher, liquidator, recycler or landfill. All these steps require more travel, packaging and energy, ultimately translating to more emissions. Joseph Sarkis, who teaches supply chain management at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, estimates that returning an item increases its impact on the planet by 25% to 30%.
Roughly a third of the time, those returns don’t make their way to another consumer. Because frequently, it’s not worth reselling.
If, for example, you get a phone, but you send it back because you don’t like the color, the seller has to pay for the fuel and equipment to get the phone back, and then has to pay for the labor to assess whether it has been damaged since leaving the facility.
“It can be quite expensive,” said Sarkis. “And if you send it out to a new customer and the phone is bad, imagine the reputational hit you’ll get. You’ll get another return and you’ll lose a customer who’s unhappy with the product or material. So the companies are hesitant to take that chance.”
Something as expensive as a phone might get sold to a secondary or refurbishment market. But that $6 silicone spatula you got off Amazon? Probably not worth it. Plus, some stuff — think a bathing suit or a bra — is less attractive to customers if there’s a chance it’s been resold. The companies know that.
And that’s where the costs of returns are more than just environmental — and consumers wind up paying. Even free returns aren’t really free.
“Refurbishment, inspection, repackaging, all of these things get factored into the retail price,” said Christopher Faires, assistant professor of logistics and supply chain management at Georgia Southern University.
What consumers can do about it
If you want to reduce the impact of your returns, the first move is to increase their chances of resale. Be careful not to damage it, and reuse the packaging to send it back, said Cardiff University logistics and operations management lecturer Danni Zhang.
If you have to return something, do it quickly. That ugly Christmas sweater you got at the white elephant office party has a much better chance of selling on Dec. 20 than it does on Jan. 5. Zhang said it’s not worth the cost to the company to store that sweater once it’s gone out of season.
Another tip: in-person shopping is better than online because purchases get returned less often, and in-person returns are better, too — because those items get resold more often. Zhang said it reduces landfill waste. Sarkis said it reduces emissions because companies with brick-and-mortar locations spread out across the country and closer to consumers thus move restocked goods shorter distances.
“If I can return in-store, then I definitely will,” Zhang said. “The managers can put that stuff back to the market as soon as possible.”
Obviously the best thing consumers can do is minimize returns. Many shoppers engage in “bracketing behavior,” or buying multiple sizes of the same item, keeping what fits, and returning the rest.
“This behavior of bringing the dressing room to our homes is not sustainable,” said Faires.
If you’re buying for someone else, you can also consider taking the guesswork out of the equation and going for a gift card.
“I know we do really want to pick up something really nice to express our love for our friends or our family. But if we are more sustainable, probably the gift card will be much better than just purchasing the product,” Zhang said.
What businesses can do about it
Sarkis wants to see companies provide more information in product descriptions about the environmental impact of returning an item, or how much of the purchase price factors in return costs.
“But I don’t know if they want to send a negative message,” he said. “If you’re telling someone to stop something because of negative results, that’s not going to sell.”
Sarkis and Zhang both say charging for returns would help. Already Amazon is requiring customers pay in certain situations.
On the tech side, Blue Yonder’s recent acquisition of Optoro, a company that provides a return management system for retailers and brands, uses a software to quickly assess the condition of returned products and route them to stores that are most likely to resell them.
“Having that process be more digitized, you can quickly assess the condition and put it back into inventory,” said van Gendt. “So that’s a big way to just avoid landfill and also all of the carbon emissions that are associated with that.”
Clothing is returned most often. Many sizes do not reflect specific measurements, like women’s dresses, so they vary a lot between brands. Zhang said better sizing could help reduce the need for returns. On top of that, Sarkis said more 3D imaging and virtual reality programs could help customers be more accurate with their purchases, saving some returns.
FILE – A person carries a shopping bag in Philadelphia, Dec. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
Hurricane-force winds battered Colorado’s Front Range this week, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, closing highways and dozens of schools and causing extensive delays at Denver International Airport.
While the highest winds were recorded in the mountains and foothills, National Weather Service records show most of the Front Range saw significant wind gusts.
LONGMONT, CO – DECEMBER 19:A large tree lies across the roof of a house on Cornell Drive in Longmont on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. A National Weather Service red flag warning covers the mountains and foothills along the Front Range from Castle Rock to Fort Collins. (Matthew Jonas/Staff Photographer)
Don’t let your Halloween pumpkin haunt the landfill this November.
More than 1 billion pounds of pumpkins rot in U.S. landfills each year after Halloween, according to the Department of Energy.
Yours doesn’t have to go to waste. Experts told us your pumpkins can be eaten, composted or even fed to animals. Here’s how.
Cooking with pumpkin waste
If you’re carving a jack-o’-lantern, don’t throw away the skin or innards — every part is edible.
After carving, you can cube the excess flesh — the thick part between the outer skin and the inner pulp that holds the seeds — for soups and stews, says Carleigh Bodrug, a chef known for cooking with common food scraps. You can also puree it and add a tablespoon to your dog’s dinner for extra nutrients. And pumpkin chunks can be frozen for future use.
“The seeds are a nutritional gold mine,” Bodrug said. They’re packed with protein, magnesium, zinc and healthy fats, according to a 2022 study in the journal Plants.
FILE – Children visit a pumpkin farm ahead of Halloween in Warsaw, Poland, Oct. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, File)
One of Bodrug’s recipes involves removing the seeds, rinsing and roasting them with cinnamon for a crunchy snack or salad topper. Then you can use the stringy guts to make a pumpkin puree for muffins. This version differs from canned purees in grocery stores — which typically use a different type of pumpkin or squash — because carving pumpkins have stringier innards and a milder flavor. A carving pumpkin’s guts can still be used for baking — you’ll just have to amp up the seasoning to boost the flavor.
If you don’t want to eat your pumpkins, you can donate them to a local farm, which might use them to feed pigs, chickens and other animals.
Edible parts should be collected while you’re carving and before it’s painted, decorated or left on your porch for weeks. Paint and wax aren’t food-safe, and bacteria and mold can grow on the skin in outdoor climates.
Once you’ve cooked what you can and donated what’s safe to feed, composting the rest is the easiest way to keep it out of the landfill.
“That way, even though they’re not safe to eat, they can still give back to the earth,” Bodrug said.
Composting at home or donating to a farm
Composting pumpkins keeps them out of methane-emitting landfills and turns them into nutrient-rich soil instead. You can do this at home or drop them off at a local farm, compost collection bin or drop-off site.
FILE – Pumpkins sit at the Tougas Family Farm on Oct. 5, 2025, in Northborough, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
“A large percentage of what ends up going to the landfill is stuff that could have been composted,” said Dante Sclafani, compost coordinator at Queens County Farm in New York. “So even just cutting down something like pumpkins could really help curb how many garbage bags you’re putting out every week.”
Before composting, remove any candles, plastic, glitter, or other decorations — they can contaminate the compost. A little glitter or paint won’t ruin the pile, but it’s best to get it as clean as possible before tossing it in. Then, chop up the pumpkin in 1-inch pieces so it can break down easier.
“Pumpkins are full of water, so it’s important to maintain a good balance of dried leaves, wood chips, sawdust, shredded newspaper, cardboard, straw — anything that’s a dry organic material — in your compost bin,” Sclafani said. If you don’t maintain this balance, your compost might start to stink.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, a healthy compost pile should include a mix of “greens” — like pumpkin scraps and food waste — and “browns” like dry leaves, straw or cardboard, in roughly a three-to-one ratio. That balance helps the pile break down faster and prevents odors.
And if your pumpkin’s been sitting on the porch all month? That’s actually ideal. “It’s never too far gone for compost,” Sclafani said. “Even if it’s mushy or moldy, that actually helps, because the fungus speeds up decomposition.”
“Composting anything organic is better than throwing it out because you’re not creating more refuse in landfills, you’re not creating methane gas,” said Laura Graney, the farm’s education director.
Graney said autumn on the farm is the perfect opportunity to teach kids about composting since it gives them a sense of power in the face of big environmental challenges.
“Even though they’re little, composting helps them feel like they can make a difference,” Graney said. “They take that message home to their families, and that’s how we spread the word.”
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
FILE – A kid carves a pumpkin on the front porch of her home Oct 20, 2023, in Auburn, Maine. (Andree Kehn/Sun Journal via AP, File)
Oakland ISD administrator Dwight Levens Jr. has been awarded the 2025 Exemplary Service and Innovation for Technological Advancement Award.
This national award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding leadership and innovation in advancing educational technology.
Levens, Jr. is the chief technology and information officer for Oakland Schools, which serves over 175,000 students and 40,000 educators across 28 public school districts.
Levens’ team is responsible for instructional technology coaching and infrastructure modernization to cybersecurity and statewide application support.
The department’s initiatives include the AI Collective, which explores artificial intelligence applications in education in all 28 districts.
“Dwight’s leadership has fostered a culture where operational excellence meets educational innovation,” said Oakland Schools Superintendent Kenneth Gutman. “Oakland Schools Technology Services exemplifies the very mission of an educational service agency: to deliver visionary leadership and equitable access to high-quality services that improve outcomes for all learners.”
Levens' department oversees a cybersecurity ecosystem and manages large-scale consortia like MISTAR and MIPEER.
Photo courtesy Oakland ISD
For years, Western leaders have debated the creation of a regional energy market: a coordinated grid to pool solar power in Arizona, wind in Wyoming, hydro in Washington and battery storage in California.
The shared resources would meet the demands of 11 different states, bolstering utilities’ local power plants with surplus energy from across the region.
With the passage of a landmark new law in California, that market is finally on its way to becoming a reality. Proponents say it has the potential to lower energy costs, make the grid more resilient and speed up the deployment of clean energy.
But the market’s success, experts agree, depends heavily on which states and utilities decide to opt in. As energy issues have become increasingly politicized, it’s uncertain whether Western leaders can buy into a common vision for meeting the region’s power needs.
“As we move toward weather-dependent renewables to run our grid, we’ve got to have a grid that is bigger than a weather pattern,” said California Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation aimed at establishing the new market. “A Western energy market is critical.”
The California measure earned bipartisan support, and leaders in conservative and liberal states alike have long touted the benefits of a region-wide market.
But some skeptics worry about merging the power systems of states with varying climate goals. And some fear the new market could give federal regulators appointed by President Donald Trump an opening to interfere and mandate more fossil fuel-powered plants that can be turned on regardless of the weather.
A bigger market
Across the 11 Western states that straddle or sit west of the Rocky Mountains, 37 separate private and public utilities operate portions of the grid.
This fragmented structure differs from the grid systems in Eastern and Midwestern states, where regional transmission organizations, or RTOs, coordinate and plan for energy needs across vast swaths of the country.
Backers of a Western market argue that a region-wide approach would be much more efficient.
Under the current system, each utility is required by state public utility commissions to build enough power to meet peak energy demands. That could mean building gas plants that only turn on a few times a year during extreme heat waves.
As part of a West-wide market, utilities could manage those high-demand events by importing power from other parts of the region that are generating surplus electricity. Such agreements could also prevent the periodic shutdowns of wind and solar farms when they produce more energy than local utilities can use.
“We could be drawing on the solar resources from the Southwest during the day, and then in the evening the wind resources in Montana and Wyoming are a great benefit,” said Austin Scharff, senior energy policy specialist with the Washington State Department of Commerce. “We have a lot of hydro resources, and we can help make sure the regional grid stays balanced when those are needed.”
Some industry leaders say such trading would allow states to pull in cheap electricity from elsewhere, rather than building expensive new power plants.
“When you have this bigger market, not everybody has to build to their peak in the same way,” said Leah Rubin Shen, managing director with Advanced Energy United, an industry group focused on energy and transportation. “Everybody’s able to share.”
Western states do trade electricity on a bilateral basis between individual utilities. Utilities spanning much of the West also transact through a real-time market that allows them to address pressing short-term demand issues. Some are poised to join a new day-ahead market that will conduct planning based on daily demand and production forecasts.
But some lawmakers and officials believe the region needs a larger vision that goes beyond moment-by-moment needs, a market that can plan interstate transmission lines and energy projects to serve the whole region in the decades to come.
“We’re facing really rapidly growing energy demand,” said Nevada Assemblymember Howard Watts, a Democrat. “The best way for us to meet that is to effectively move energy all across the Western U.S. The only way we can do that is through an RTO.”
Watts sponsored a bill, enacted in 2021, that requires Nevada to join an RTO by 2030. Colorado also passed a law that year with a 2030 deadline for utilities to join an RTO.
“Any future is better than our status quo, which is 37 separate grids in the West,” said Chris Hansen, a former Democratic senator who sponsored the Colorado legislation. “We can lower costs and provide greater reliability if we’re sharing resources.”
Hansen now serves as CEO of La Plata Electric Association, an electric cooperative in southwestern Colorado.
A new market
The push for a West-wide market had always faced one major hurdle: Any market would likely include the massive geographical footprint and energy supply managed by the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO. As the West’s largest grid operator, CAISO manages the flow of electricity across most of the Golden State. It’s governed by a five-member board appointed by California’s governor, and other states were unlikely to sign up for a market in which they have no representation.
The law passed by California legislators last month allows for a new organization with independent governance from across the region to oversee Western energy markets.
“This legislation is a key reset and has been the largest sticking point in building a regional market,” said Amanda Ormond, managing director of the Western Grid Group, which advocates for a more efficient grid. “This is a primary concern of a lot of folks that has now been solved.”
The law sets in motion a yearslong process that will task regional leaders with establishing the organization’s governance and navigating a series of regulatory procedures. The new market could be in place by 2028.
State leaders across the West say the California law is a long-awaited development.
“You get this really good benefit from being able to optimize across a larger footprint than an individual utility can,” said Tim Kowalchik, research director with the Utah Office of Energy Development. “Those resources can play really well together.”
Utah led a study in 2021, collaborating with other Western states, exploring the potential for energy markets in the region. State officials say the research has helped drive the current effort.
“It was fascinating how substantial the benefits were,” said Letha Tawney, chair of the Oregon Public Utility Commission. “The interdependence of the West started to become much more apparent, and it really changed the conversation.”
The study looked at a variety of market options and found that an RTO would have significant benefits, lowering costs for electricity customers and promoting clean energy. Based on the study’s projections, the market would produce roughly $2 billion in gross benefits per year, largely by saving utilities from building extra capacity.
Another study in 2022, conducted by a pair of consulting firms, found that an RTO would create as many as 657,000 permanent jobs and bolster the region’s economy.
While Western leaders say the potential benefits are massive, no states outside of Nevada and Colorado have committed to joining a regional RTO. State leaders say they’ll be watching carefully to see what emerges from the new California law. While the decision on joining the market will largely be left to individual utilities, state regulators can play a major role by directing them to conduct an economic analysis of such a move.
State sovereignty
The push for a regional market has also faced opposition from skeptics who fear it undermines states’ power to set their own energy and climate goals. Some point to Eastern governors’ frustration with PJM Interconnection, the RTO that manages the grid across a swath of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.
“It’s very dangerous,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a California-based nonprofit advocacy group. “We’re giving up control of our sovereignty. Once a state’s in, it’s not the state that has the control.”
Some experts fear that states with significant coal or gas industries may be hesitant to join a market that could incentivize their utilities to import cheap solar power from elsewhere. On the flip side, some climate advocates in California are wary of plugging into a market that could support coal power from out of state.
“Some states are parochial-minded: ‘This is a California thing, and we don’t want anything to do with California,’” said Vijay Satyal, deputy director of markets and transmission with Western Resource Advocates, a nonprofit climate-focused group. “That one state’s government will not decide how a market will be operated, it’s a seismic shift in the industry.”
Backers of an RTO argue that it can incorporate states’ varying energy goals. They point to research showing that the market will support renewable power. But others fear merging fates with coal-heavy states could give federal regulators more leverage to intervene in favor of fossil-fuel power.
Even if Trump is out of office when the market comes online, the regulators he appoints to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will still be serving out their terms. Some believe FERC could set rules that require the new market to favor fossil fuel-powered resources.
“When you have a mixed market with a lot of coal plants, it creates opportunities for the Trump administration to rejigger the rules to favor coal,” said Matthew Freedman, renewables attorney with The Utility Reform Network, a California-based consumer advocacy group. “In another reality, this would have sounded like a hysterical concern, but it’s pretty obvious where [Trump’s appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] want to go.”
Freedman’s group pushed California lawmakers for protections that would have given states more flexibility to withdraw from the market, while also prohibiting “resource adequacy” mandates that could be used by the feds to prop up coal. While those elements were included in a Senate version of the bill, they were stripped from the Assembly bill that ultimately was passed.
Supporters of the bill say such concerns are overblown, and the new market is structured to avoid the pitfalls facing other RTOs.
“The simple economic fact is that right now clean energy resources are the cheapest in the world,” said Petrie-Norris, the law’s sponsor. “We’re going to see solar displacing dirty fuels rather than the reverse.”
Much depends on convincing states and utilities it’s in their best interests to join the market. The strength-in-numbers advantages of an RTO depend on widespread participation. While many Western leaders have long touted a region-wide market, the opportunity is arising at a time where energy has become a partisan issue.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited market emerging from California is facing new competition from the east. The Southwest Power Pool, an Arkansas-based RTO serving the middle of the country, is expanding its footprint in the West, with several utilities poised to join its day-ahead market.
“Anytime you have two neighboring utilities in different markets, you have seams that create a lot of friction and inefficiency,” said Rubin Shen, with the energy industry group. “Whether or not everybody can come together and be all-in on a full West-wide market, it’s too soon to tell.”
When the corroded pipeline burst in 2015, inky crude spread along the Southern California coast, becoming the state’s worst oil spill in decades.
More than 140,000 gallons (3,300 barrels) of oil gushed out, blackening beaches for 150 miles from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, polluting a biologically rich habitat for endangered whales and sea turtles, killing scores of pelicans, seals and dolphins, and decimating the fishing industry.
Plains All American Pipeline in 2022 agreed to a $230 million settlement with fishers and coastal property owners without admitting liability. Federal inspectors found that the Houston-based company failed to quickly detect the rupture and responded too slowly. It faced an uphill battle to build a new pipeline.
Three decades-old drilling platforms were subsequently shuttered, but another Texas-based fossil fuel company supported by the Trump administration purchased the operation and is intent on pumping oil through the pipeline again.
Sable Offshore Corp., headquartered in Houston, is facing a slew of legal challenges but is determined to restart production, even if that means confining it to federal waters, where state regulators have virtually no say. California controls the 3 miles nearest to shore. The platforms are 5 to 9 miles offshore.
The Trump administration has hailed Sable’s plans as the kind of project the president wants to increase U.S. energy production as the federal government removes regulatory barriers. President Donald Trump has directed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to undo his predecessor’s ban on future offshore oil drilling on the East and West coasts.
Environmentalist sue to stop the project
“This project risks another environmental disaster in California at a time when demand for oil is going down and the climate crisis is escalating,” said Alex Katz, executive director of Environmental Defense Center, the Santa Barbara group formed in response to a massive spill in 1969.
FILE – Clean up crews remove oil-laden sand on the beach at Refugio State Beach, site of an oil spill, north of Goleta, Calif., May 20, 2015. (AP Photo/Michael A. Mariant, File)
The environmental organization is among several suing Sable.
“Our concern is that there is no way to make this pipeline safe and that this company has proven that it cannot be trusted to operate safely, responsibly or even legally,” he said.
Actor and activist Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who lives in the area, has implored officials to stop Sable, saying at a March protest: “I can smell a rat. And this project is a rat.”
The California Coastal Commission fined Sable a record $18 million for ignoring cease-and-desist orders over repair work it says was done without permits. Sable said it has permits from the previous owner, Exxon Mobil, and sued the commission while work continued on the pipeline. In June, a state judge ordered it to stop while the case proceeds through the court. The commission and Sable are due back in court Wednesday.
“This fly-by-night oil company has repeatedly abused the public’s trust, racking up millions of dollars in fines and causing environmental damage along the treasured Gaviota Coast,” a state park south of Santa Barbara, said Joshua Smith, the commission’s spokesman.
Sable keeps moving forward
So far, Sable is undeterred.
The California Attorney General’s office sued Sable this month, saying it illegally discharged waste into waterways, and disregarded state law requiring permits before work along the pipeline route that crosses sensitive wildlife habitat.
“Sable placed profits over environmental protection in its rush to get oil on the market,” the agency said in its lawsuit.
Last month, the Santa Barbara District Attorney filed felony criminal charges against Sable, also accusing it of polluting waterways and harming wildlife.
Sable said it has fully cooperated with local and state agencies, including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and called the district attorney’s allegation “inflammatory and extremely misleading.” It said a biologist and state fire marshal officials oversaw the work, and no wildlife was harmed.
FILE – A worker removes oil from the sand at Refugio State Beach, north of Goleta, Calif., May 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
The company is seeking $347 million for the delays, and says if the state blocks it from restarting the onshore pipeline system, it will use a floating facility that would keep its entire operation in federal waters and use tankers to transport the oil to markets outside California. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, the company updated its plan to include the option.
Fulfilling the president’s energy promise
The U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said in July it was working with Sable to bring a second rig online.
“President Trump made it clear that American energy should come from American resources,” the agency’s deputy director Kenny Stevens said in a statement then, heralding the “comeback story for Pacific production.”
The agency said there are an estimated 190 million barrels (6 billion gallons) of recoverable oil reserves in the area, nearly 80% of residual Pacific reserves. It noted advancements in preventing and preparing for oil spills and said the failed pipeline has been rigorously tested.
“Continuous monitoring and improved technology significantly reduce the risk of a similar incident occurring in the future,” the agency said.
CEO says project could lower gas prices
On May 19 — the 10th anniversary of the disaster — CEO Jim Flores announced that Sable “is proud to have safely and responsibly achieved first production at the Santa Ynez Unit” — which includes three rigs in federal waters, offshore and onshore pipelines, and the Las Flores Canyon Processing Facility.
State officials countered that the company had only conducted testing and not commercial production. Sable’s stock price dropped and some investors sued, alleging they were misled.
Sable purchased the Santa Ynez Unit from Exxon Mobil in 2024 for nearly $650 million primarily with a loan from Exxon. Exxon sold the shuttered operation after losing a court battle in 2023 to truck the crude through central California while the pipeline system was rebuilt or repaired.
Flores said well tests at the Platform Harmony rig indicate there is much oil to be extracted and that it will relieve California’s gas prices — among the nation’s highest — by stabilizing supplies.
“Sable is very concerned about the crumbling energy complex in California,” Flores said in a statement to The Associated Press. “With the exit of two refineries last year and more shuttering soon, California’s economy cannot survive without the strong energy infrastructure it enjoyed for the last 150 years.”
California has been reducing the state’s production of fossil fuels in favor of clean energy for years. The movement has been spearheaded partly by Santa Barbara County, where elected officials voted in May to begin taking steps to phase out onshore oil and gas operations.
Associated Press writer Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana contributed to this report.
FILE – Workers prepare an oil containment boom at Refugio State Beach, north of Goleta, Calif., May 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
BOOTHBAY HARBOR, Maine (AP) — Republican lawmakers are targeting one of the U.S.’s longest standing pieces of environmental legislation, credited with helping save rare whales from extinction.
Conservative leaders feel they now have the political will to remove key pieces of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted in 1972 to protect whales, seals, polar bears and other sea animals. The law also places restrictions on commercial fishermen, shippers and other marine industries.
A GOP-led bill in the works has support from fishermen in Maine who say the law makes lobster fishing more difficult, lobbyists for big-money species such as tuna in Hawaii and crab in Alaska, and marine manufacturers who see the law as antiquated.
Conservation groups adamantly oppose the changes and say weakening the law will erase years of hard-won gains for jeopardized species such as the vanishing North Atlantic right whale, of which there are less than 400, and is vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear.
Here’s what to know about the protection act and the proposed changes.
Why does the 1970s law still matter
“The Marine Mammal Protection Act is important because it’s one of our bedrock laws that help us to base conservation measures on the best available science,” said Kathleen Collins, senior marine campaign manager with International Fund for Animal Welfare. “Species on the brink of extinction have been brought back.”
It was enacted the year before the Endangered Species Act, at a time when the movement to save whales from extinction was growing. Scientist Roger Payne had discovered that whales could sing in the late 1960s, and their voices soon appeared on record albums and throughout popular culture.
Common dolphins swim off the Maine coast on Oct. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Patrick Whittle)
FILE – A seagull flies by a Southern Right Whale calf in the El Doradillo protected area, near Puerto Madryn, Argentina, Oct. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano, File)
A gray seal surveys its surroundings, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025, off the coast of Brunswick, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
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Common dolphins swim off the Maine coast on Oct. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Patrick Whittle)
The law protects all marine mammals, and prohibits capturing or killing them in U.S. waters or by U.S. citizens on the high seas. It allowed for preventative measures to stop commercial fishing ships and other businesses from accidentally harming animals such as whales and seals. The animals can be harmed by entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships and other hazards at sea.
The law also prevents the hunting of marine mammals, including polar bears, with exceptions for Indigenous groups. Some of those animals can be legally hunted in other countries.
Changes to oil and gas operations — and whale safety
Republican Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska, a state with a large fishing industry, submitted a bill draft this summer that would roll back aspects of the law. The bill says the act has “unduly and unnecessarily constrained government, tribes and the regulated community” since its inception.
The proposal states that it would make changes such as lowering population goals for marine mammals from “maximum productivity” to the level needed to “support continued survival.” It would also ease rules on what constitutes harm to marine mammals.
AP illustration Marshall Ritzel
For example, the law currently prevents harassment of sea mammals such as whales, and defines harassment as activities that have “the potential to injure a marine mammal.” The proposed changes would limit the definition to only activities that actually injure the animals. That change could have major implications for industries such as oil and gas exploration where rare whales live.
That poses an existential threat to the Rice’s whale, which numbers only in the dozens and lives in the Gulf of Mexico, conservationists said. And the proposal takes specific aim at the North Atlantic right whale protections with a clause that would delay rules designed to protect that declining whale population until 2035.
Begich and his staff did not return calls for comment on the bill, and his staff declined to provide an update about where it stands in Congress. Begich has said he wants “a bill that protects marine mammals and also works for the people who live and work alongside them, especially in Alaska.”
Fishing groups want restrictions loosened
A coalition of fishing groups from both coasts has come out in support of the proposed changes. Some of the same groups lauded a previous effort by the Trump administration to reduce regulatory burdens on commercial fishing.
The groups said in a July letter to House members that they feel Begich’s changes reflect “a positive and necessary step” for American fisheries’ success.
Restrictions imposed on lobster fishermen of Maine are designed to protect the right whale, but they often provide little protection for the animals while limiting one of America’s signature fisheries, Virginia Olsen, political director of the Maine Lobstering Union, said. The restrictions stipulate where lobstermen can fish and what kinds of gear they can use. The whales are vulnerable to lethal entanglement in heavy fishing rope.
Gathering more accurate data about right whales while revising the original law would help protect the animals, Olsen said.
“We do not want to see marine mammals harmed; we need a healthy, vibrant ocean and a plentiful marine habitat to continue Maine’s heritage fishery,” Olsen said.
A harbor seal rests on a submerged ledge near fishermen harvesting herring, Monday, Oct. 6, 2025, off Portland, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
Some members of other maritime industries have also called on Congress to update the law. The National Marine Manufacturers Association said in a statement that the rules have not kept pace with advancements in the marine industry, making innovation in the business difficult.
Environmentalists fight back
Numerous environmental groups have vowed to fight to save the protection act. They characterized the proposed changes as part of the Trump administration’s assault on environmental protections.
The act was instrumental in protecting the humpback whale, one of the species most beloved by whale watchers, said Gib Brogan, senior campaign director with Oceana. Along with other sea mammals, humpbacks would be in jeopardy without it, he said.
“The Marine Mammal Protection Act is flexible. It works. It’s effective. We don’t need to overhaul this law at this point,” Brogan said.
What does this mean for seafood imports
The original law makes it illegal to import marine mammal products without a permit, and allows the U.S. to impose import prohibitions on seafood products from foreign fisheries that don’t meet U.S. standards.
The import embargoes are a major sticking point because they punish American businesses, said Gavin Gibbons, chief strategy officer of the National Fisheries Institute, a Virginia-based seafood industry trade group. It’s critical to source seafood globally to be able to meet American demand for seafood, he said.
The National Fisheries Institute and a coalition of industry groups sued the federal government Thursday over what they described as unlawful implementation of the protection act. Gibbons said the groups don’t oppose the act, but want to see it responsibly implemented.
“Our fisheries are well regulated and appropriately fished to their maximum sustainable yield,” Gibbons said. “The men and women who work our waters are iconic and responsible. They can’t be expected to just fish more here to make up a deficit while jeopardizing the sustainability they’ve worked so hard to maintain.”
Some environmental groups said the Republican lawmakers’ proposed changes could weaken American seafood competitiveness by allowing imports from poorly regulated foreign fisheries.
This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
A gray seal swims, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025, off the coast of Brunswick, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
Michigan’s dime deposit program is almost 50 years old and is always in the news because of efforts to expand or repeal it. But, do you know what happens to that plastic and aluminum when you take it back to a retailer?
Frederick Lawrence is a logistics faculty in CMU’s College of Business Administration and is the director of internships for the logistics management program. He answers questions about what happens behind the scenes.
Q. What do retailers do with bottles and cans after people return them?
Retailers take action based on their size, resources and capabilities. Generally, retailers collect cans, separate them by brand and store them in anticipation of pickup by distributors or third-party recyclers.
Larger retailers, like supercenters, commonly have reverse vending machines (RVMs) which allow customers to manually return their own cans. These machines are equipped with conveyors and scanners which detect what cans or bottles are being fed into the machine, if they are accepted by the retailer, and which brand the item is. Once this information is processed, the bottle or can is crushed by a compactor and sorted automatically.
Smaller retailers commonly store cans and bottles in bins or bags in a storage area and the retailer manually separates the containers according to the respective brand.
Q. How does storing those bottles and cans affect the layout of a store?
The storage of cans and bottles can impact store layout, but more accurately, how space is utilized. These effects vary based on store size, resources and typical volume of returns.
Large-scale retailers typically have a dedicated return area, often near an entrance or side of the store, with multiple RVMs to accept consumer returns. Stores design return areas with proper drainage, ventilation and easy-to-clean surfaces to manage spills and odors as manual can-return can be quite messy.
Large-scale retailers also coordinate frequent pickups with distributors or third-party recyclers to avoid recycling overflow and must allocate loading dock space for bottle and can removal. Smaller retailers, because of a lack of automation, face more spatial constraints and often adjust their layout, either by reducing product stock space or by limiting return volumes per customer (retailers in Michigan may limit refunds to $25 per person per day).
Returns can be stored in a variety of locations, including backrooms, basements, behind the checkout counter or even outdoor sheds. This is largely due to the space constraint of being smaller and not having an abundance of extra space available in the layout.
Since small stores typically lack automated compactors, they must store full-size bottles and cans, which take up more space than crushed cans and bottles. This may result in smaller retailers making tradeoffs in how they utilize space; as an extreme example, space that could be used to sell merchandise may have to be retrofitted to store returnable items.
Q. What kind of infrastructure is necessary to transport those bottles and cans?
Transporting returned bottles and cans in Michigan requires a specialized infrastructure that includes collection systems, storage facilities, transportation vehicles and processing centers.
Retailers play an integral role in the collection and storage of claimed returnables (cans and bottles that consumers return themselves). Following this, cans and bottles are picked up by distributors (like Pepsi or Coca-Cola) and third-party recyclers.
The transportation equipment varies, but can generally involve the use of box trucks, semi-trucks using specialized trailers with compartments for specific recycled materials or compactor trucks (which can be used to crush aluminum in plastic if the retailer has not already done this).
As cost control and value reclamation in this process are critical, haulers generally work to optimize their networks by developing designated collection routes based on retailer locations and return volume. This is called “network optimization” and is one of the many Logistics Management and Supply Chain skills/strategies that Logistics Management majors at CMU learn!
Cans/bottles are crushed and sorted, if they have not been already, and are transported to various processing facilities that can repurpose or reuse the materials.
Q. How much does transporting bottles and cans cost annually?
Exact cost figures are difficult to accurately calculate due to the number of stakeholders and partners involved in recycling bottles and cans and the various methods and resources used (including collection, sorting and transportation expenses). Additionally, not all cost figures associated with these processes are publicly disclosed.
According to Michigan.gov (2025), Michigan’s refund rate was approximately 73% in 2023 with total Michigan deposits of $389.5 million and total refunds of $284.6 million. This means that 27%, or approximately $105.3 million of deposits went unclaimed. An unclaimed can or bottle refers to a beverage container for which a deposit was paid at the time of purchase (by the consumer) but was never returned for a refund.
In Michigan, consumers pay a $0.10 deposit per container when purchasing certain beverages. To get this deposit back, individuals must return the empty container to a participating retailer or redemption center. The unclaimed deposit amount is simply the difference between the deposits collected and the deposits refunded statewide.
Of the statewide revenue generated by unclaimed deposits, the funds are divided so that 75% of the revenue goes to the state (used for environmental cleanup and pollution prevention) and 25% goes to retailers (to help cover the general costs of managing returns). Based on 2023 data on unclaimed deposits, the state received about $79 million, and retailers got around $26 million to help offset handling costs associated with returns.
At the statewide level, this process relies on financial tracking rather than container counting, so the state doesn’t need to locate unclaimed containers. In fact, many unclaimed cans and bottles may end up in landfills, as roadside litter, curbside recycling or even hoarded in garages.
Q. What ultimately happens to bottles and cans that are returned to stores?
Ultimately, once bottles and cans are returned to Michigan retailers and are picked up and transported by various distributors and recyclers, the material will be processed.
Aluminum cans are crushed, shredded, and melted down and the molten aluminum is rolled into sheets and used to manufacture new beverage cans. Interestingly, aluminum cans can be recycled and reused relatively quickly, with some recycled aluminum being returned to shelves as new products in as little as 60 days.
Plastic bottles may be washed for reuse, shredded into small flakes or melted. The recycled plastic can be used to create new beverage bottles or even repurposed in clothing (e.g., fleece jackets), carpeting, auto parts and many other plastic goods.
Overall, the goal is to reclaim value in the recycled goods and to reduce the creation and use of new “virgin” plastics. Michigan’s bottle return system works to ensure that a significant percentage of beverage containers are recycled and repurposed rather than ending up in landfills.
By MICHAEL PHILLIS and MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is cancelling $7.6 billion in grants that supported hundreds of clean energy projects in 16 states, all of which voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election.
The cuts were announced in a social media post late Wednesday by Russell Vought, the White House budget director: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”
These cuts are likely to affect battery plants, hydrogen technology projects, upgrades to the electric grid and carbon-capture efforts, among many others, according to the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Energy Department said in a statement Thursday that 223 projects were terminated after a review determined they did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs or were not economically viable. Officials did not provide details about which projects are being cut, but said funding came from the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and other DOE bureaus.
The cuts include $1.2 billion for California’s hydrogen hub that is aimed at accelerating hydrogen technology and production, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office. The private sector has committed $10 billion for the hydrogen hub, Newsom’s office said, adding that canceling the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems threatens over 200,000 jobs.
“Clean hydrogen deserves to be part of California’s energy future — creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs and saving billions in health costs,” the Democratic governor said.
California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla called cancelation of the project “vindictive, shortsighted and proof this administration is not serious about American energy dominance.”
The DOE said it has reviewed billions of dollars awarded by the Biden administration after Trump won the presidential election last November. More than a quarter of the rescinded grants were awarded between Election Day and Inauguration Day, the department said. The awards totaled more than $3.1 billion.
“President Trump promised to protect taxpayer dollars and expand America’s supply of affordable, reliable, and secure energy. Today’s cancellations deliver on that commitment,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said.
The Trump administration has broadly targeted climate programs and clean energy, and is proposing to roll back vehicle emission and other greenhouse gas rules it says can’t be justified. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed overturning a 2009 finding that climate change threatens public health. Many climate scientists have criticized the EPA effort as biased and misleading.
Democrats and environmental organizations were quick to slam the latest cuts, saying they would raise energy costs.
“This is yet another blow by the Trump administration against innovative technology, jobs and the clean energy needed to meet skyrocketing demand,” said Jackie Wong, a senior vice president at NRDC.
Vought said the projects being cut are in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state.
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
Russell Vought, Office of Management and Budget director, listens as he addresses members of the media outside the West Wing at the White House in Washington, Monday, Sept. 29, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
By JOSEPH FREDERICK and MATTHEW BROWN, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — Crowds of people loaded onto boats to tour the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Wednesday morning with no immediate signs of the government shutdown that is triggering the furlough of about two-thirds of National Park Service employees.
But in Philadelphia, the nation’s birthplace, tourists enjoying a crisp fall morning on Independence Mall were thwarted in their hopes of visiting the Liberty Bell. They were being turned away at the entrance and could only steal glances of it inside a glass pavilion.
A shutdown contingency plan released by the park service late Tuesday said “park roads, lookouts, trails, and open-air memorials will generally remain accessible to visitors.” However, given sharply reduced staffing, parks without “accessible areas” will be closed during the shutdown. And sites currently open could close if damage is done to park resources or garbage is building up, the plan says.
Tourist view the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
A guard stands at the entrance to The Liberty Bell center that is closed due to a government shutdown in Philadelphia, Wednesday,Oct. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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Tourist view the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Yet with limited information offered on government websites, questions were popping up across park service social media sites on Wednesday, with people asking if camping permits would still be good at places like Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico and if the gates would be open at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
The furlough of almost 9,300 park employees means parks that stay open can provide only limited services such as protection of life, property and public safety, the plan says.
In Mississippi, the state’s most-visited cultural attraction, Vicksburg National Military Park, was shut down. A nonprofit group was trying to work out an agreement to re-open it using donated money to pay for staff. At Acadia National Park in Maine, there were no park rangers in sight and would-be hikers in search of trail maps found empty receptacles outside a closed visitor center.
The plan did not detail which of the park service’s more than 400 sites are considered inaccessible. The Associated Press requested further details in emails and a telephone call to officials with the National Park Service and Department of Interior on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The park service oversees large national parks such as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, national battlefields, national monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and historic sites including Independence National Historical Park, home of the Liberty Bell. Those attractions often serve as economic engines for nearby communities.
Many national parks stayed open during a five-week shutdown in Trump’s first term. Limited staffing led to vandalism, overflowing garbage, damage to natural resources and illegal off-roading.
A group of 40 former National Park Service superintendents had urged the Trump administration to close the parks during a shutdown to prevent a repeat of the damage that occurred in 2018 and 2019. They warned a shutdown now could be even worse with parks already under strain from a 24% staff cut and severe budget reductions.
During a 2013 shutdown, the park service under former President Barack Obama turned away millions of visitors to its more than 400 parks, national monuments, and other sites. The service estimated that the shutdown led to more than $500 million in lost visitor spending nationwide. That also caused economic damage to gateway communities that border national parks and are heavily dependent on the visitors they draw.
The contingency plan allows parks to enter into agreements with states, tribes or local governments willing to make donations to keep national park sites open.
States where national parks draw major tourism lobbied to keep them open during past shutdowns, and Utah agreed to donate $1.7 million in 2013 to keep its national parks open. Arizona, Colorado, New York, South Dakota and Tennessee have also donated money to keep parks staffed during previous shutdowns.
Colorado’s governor suggested the state could do that again this time for Rocky Mountain National Park. But a spokesperson for the governor of Arizona said last week that it cannot afford to pay to keep open its national parks that include the Grand Canyon.
Brown reported from Billings, Montana. Matt Rourke contributed from Philadelphia and Susan Montoya Bryan contributed from Albuquerque
Tourist crowd around a window to view the Liberty Bell with Independence Hall in the background in Philadelphia, Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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