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    House Votes to Block California Plan to Ban New Gas-Powered Cars in 2035

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    Republicans, joined by a handful of Democrats, voted to eliminate California’s electric vehicle policy, which had been adopted by 11 other states.The House on Thursday voted to bar California from imposing its landmark ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, the first step in an effort by the Republican majority to stop a state policy designed to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.The 246-to-164 vote came a day after Republicans, joined by a few Democrats, voted to block California from requiring dealers in the state to sell an increasing percentage of zero-emission, medium and heavy-duty trucks over time. And, lawmakers also voted on Wednesday to stop a state effort to reduce California’s levels of smog.All three policies were implemented under permissions granted to California by the Biden administration. They pose an extraordinary challenge to California’s longstanding authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act to set pollution standards that are more strict than federal limits.And the legality of the congressional action is in dispute. Two authorities, the Senate parliamentarian and the Government Accountability Office, have ruled that Congress cannot revoke the waivers.California leaders condemned the actions and promised a battle.Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, called the move “lawless” and an attack on states’ rights. “Trump Republicans are hellbent on making California smoggy again,” Governor Newsom said in a statement.“Clean air didn’t used to be political,” he said, adding, “The only thing that’s changed is that big polluters and the right-wing propaganda machine have succeeded in buying off the Republican Party.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Climate Activists Interrupt New York City Ballet Performance

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      Protesters interrupted an all-Balanchine program on the company’s spring season opening night, which coincided this year with Earth Day.A small group of climate change activists interrupted a New York City Ballet performance at the David H. Koch Theater in Lincoln Center on Tuesday, the opening night of the company’s spring season.The protest occurred shortly before 9 p.m., as dancers and orchestra musicians performed Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” the third ballet on an all-Balanchine program for the opening night, which coincided this year with Earth Day.A woman began yelling from the balcony. Then, she shouted, “We’re in a climate emergency,” and unfurled a banner from a balcony.“Our country has become a fascist regime, and we are enjoying this beauty,” said the protester, according to videos of the incident.The dancers and musicians continued to perform through the demonstration for about five minutes. Some members of the audience booed the protesters and demanded their removal.The curtain came down, an announcer said the show would be paused because of the disruption and security officers removed several protesters from the auditorium. About five minutes later, “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” restarted from the beginning and the performance did not face further interruptions, City Ballet said in a statement.Activists had also gathered outside the theater before the performance, holding signs reading “Koch killing the planet” and “No billionaire ballet on Earth Day,” according to photos posted online.The theater is named after David H. Koch, a billionaire who donated vast sums to support the arts but was for some a polarizing figure because of his campaign to counter the science of climate change.The climate advocacy group Extinction Rebellion, which has organized similar protests, said in a social media post Tuesday night that the demonstration was meant to highlight the Koch family’s support for conservative causes and efforts to block policies to fight climate change.The protest follows similar episodes at other high-profile performances. Last year, three climate change protesters disrupted a Broadway performance of “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong. And in 2023, climate activists interrupted a performance of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the Metropolitan Opera. A protester shouted “The spring is tainted,” and dropped a banner that read “No Opera on a Dead Planet.” More

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      Sweating to Shivering: Study Finds Rapid Swings in Temperature Have Increased

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      Flips between warm temperatures to cold and vice versa have become quicker, more frequent and more intense in recent decades, a new study shows.Wildfire smoke tinged the sky orange in Fort Collins, Colo., in the Rocky Mountains region on Sept. 7, 2020, during a heat wave, before temperatures dropped significantly overnight and a snowstorm hit the area.A September heat wave switching into a snowstorm over one day in the Rocky Mountains. Winter snowfall suddenly melting and saturating fields of dormant crops, before refreezing and encasing them in damaging ice. Early spring warmth prompting plants to blossom followed by a cold snap that freezes and drops their petals.Rapid temperature change events like these have increased in frequency and intensity over recent decades, a new study found.The transition periods for these abrupt temperature shifts have also shortened, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.Because the quick changes in temperature give communities and ecosystems little chance to respond, they may pose greater challenges than heat waves or cold snaps alone, said Wei Zhang, an assistant professor of climate science at Utah State University and one of the lead authors of the study.“The impact could really be cascading on a different level,” he said.The researchers warned these temperature flips could have damaging effects on people and natural environments, including destruction of crops, harm to ecosystems and strains on power infrastructure. And low-income countries, where there is less access to weather forecasting and infrastructure is less resilient, are more vulnerable.The researchers examined temperature data from 1961 to 2003 to identify global patterns in sudden weather shifts, where temperatures in an area either jumped from cold temperatures to warm or plunged from warm to cold within five days. They found that instances of these flips increased in more than 60 percent of regions they surveyed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Connecticut Shell Recyclers Are Helping Oysters

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      Summer in New England means lobster rolls, fried seafood and, of course, freshly shucked oysters.But there’s a problem. Those empty shells usually end up in a dumpster instead of back in the water, where they play a key role in the oyster life cycle. Oyster larvae attach to shells, where they grow into adults and form reefs that improve water quality, prevent coastal erosion and create habitat for other marine life.Two men in Connecticut are working to fix that. They’ve started a statewide program to collect discarded shells from local restaurants, dry them and return them to Long Island Sound for restoration projects.50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems. More to come this year.“We fill that missing piece,” said Tim Macklin, a co-founder of Collective Oyster Recycling & Restoration, the nonprofit group leading the effort.It’s one of several shell recycling programs that have emerged to help reverse the steep decline in oyster populations along U.S. coastlines, a drop that experts largely attribute to overharvesting, habitat degradation and disease. Some of the largest programs process more than a million pounds of shell each year.Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live More

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      How Maryland Hit Its 30×30 Goal

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      Nine states have set goals to conserve 30 percent of their land by 2030. Maryland got there first.The protected land includes a one-acre fish hatchery at Unicorn Lake in eastern Maryland and the sprawling Green Ridge State Forest in the west. It includes shorelines, farms and woods around Naval Air Station Patuxent River, and the Chesapeake Forest Lands, some 75,000 wooded acres that are home to species like bald eagles and the once-endangered Delmarva fox squirrel.None of it can be developed, and all of it has helped Maryland reach a landmark conservation goal six years ahead of schedule, before any other state that’s joined an effort known as “30 by 30.”The program is part of a global initiative to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land and waters by 2030. In 2023, Maryland joined the effort and a year later, Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, announced that the goal had already been met. Nearly 1.9 million acres of land has been permanently protected from development, and the state has set a new target, to conserve 40 percent of its land by 2040. More

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      Indiana Evangelicals Are Focusing on Creation Care With Environmental Work

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      The solar panels on the churches were inspired by Scripture.So were the LED lights throughout the buildings, the electric-vehicle charging stations, the native pollinator gardens and organic food plots, the composting, the focus on consuming less and reusing more.The evangelical Christians behind these efforts in Indiana say that by taking on this planet-healing work, they are following the biblical mandate to care for God’s creation.50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems. More to come this year.“It’s a quiet movement,” said the Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental Network, a nonprofit group with projects nationwide.In Central Indiana, a patchwork of evangelical churches and universities has been sharing ideas and lessons on how to expand these efforts, broadly known as creation care. Some have partnered on an Earth Day-like celebration they named Indy Creation Fest.Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live More

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      A Funeral Director Brought Wind Power to Rock Port, Missouri

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      Eric Chamberlain was at work, driving a hearse, when he first caught sight of the wind turbine that would set him on a path to change the fortunes of his hometown.It was the mid-2000s, and Mr. Chamberlain was leading a funeral procession in Iowa, across the border from his home in Atchison County in northwest Missouri, when giant white blades came into view. Mr. Chamberlain had heard of wind energy but not seen a commercial turbine before. He was intrigued, but obviously couldn’t pull over to take a closer look.“I didn’t stop,” said Mr. Chamberlain, whose family has operated Chamberlain Funeral Homes and Monuments since 1968. “I was polite.”Eric Chamberlain, a funeral director, grew up in Atchison, one of Missouri’s most rural counties.After the funeral, he visited a local newspaper in Iowa to ask people there about the wind energy project.Mr. Chamberlain, 70, grew up in Atchison, one of Missouri’s most rural counties, and over the years watched as waning opportunities and population decline steadily ate away at the place. Young people didn’t come back after college. School enrollment fell. Farms got bigger, and fewer farmers meant less tax revenue. Businesses on Main Street closed and the area went from having two grocery stores to one.Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live More

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      Trump Opens Marine National Monument to Commercial Fisheries

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      President Trump on Thursday said he was allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves, introducing industrial operations for the first time in more than a decade to a vast area of the Pacific dotted with coral atolls and populated by endangered sea turtles and whales.Mr. Trump issued an executive order opening up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, which lies some 750 miles west of Hawaii. President George W. Bush established the monument in 2009 and President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014 to its current area of nearly 500,000 square miles.A second executive order directed the Commerce Department to loosen regulations that “overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries.” It also asks the Interior Department to conduct a review of all marine monuments and issue recommendations about any that should be opened to commercial fishing.“The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader,” Mr. Trump wrote.The marine monument, a chain of islands and atolls amid more than 160 seamounts, is a trove of marine biodiversity. Environmentalists said opening the area to commercial fishing would pose a serious threat to the area’s fragile ecosystems.Mr. Trump, accompanied in the Oval Office by a fisherman from American Samoa and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, the territory’s delegate to the House of Representatives, said his predecessors had deprived Pacific island communities of “fertile grounds.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sandstorm Turns Iraq’s Skies Orange and Sends Thousands to Hospitals

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      Climate experts say such storms are becoming more frequent and severe in the country. This was its worst of the year so far.A severe sandstorm has swept across central and southern Iraq over the last two days, turning the sky a strange orange, reducing visibility in some places to less than a half mile and sending several thousand people to emergency rooms with respiratory problems.Two airports suspended flights because of poor visibility, and the usually crowded highways of Basra, the largest city in the country’s south, were nearly empty as high winds whipped through the palm trees and aboveground electrical lines.The spokesman for Iraq’s meteorology department, Amir al-Jabri, said that the “heavy waves of dust” had blown across the country after originating in eastern Saudi Arabia, a largely desert area, and picking up additional particles in southwestern Iraq, which is similarly arid.Although sandstorms have long been a feature of Iraq’s winter and early spring, climate experts say the storms are becoming more frequent and severe as the country and neighboring Syria experience longer and more frequent droughts and as desertification engulfs larger and larger areas of once-fertile land.The Shatt al-Arab waterway in Basra, Iraq. The city’s normally busy highways were emptied by the sandstorm.Hussein Faleh/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe storm was the worst so far in Iraq in 2025, but a similarly serious storm paralyzed Baghdad in December, and there were several severe sandstorms in 2022.The United Nations counts Iraq as the fifth most vulnerable country to some aspects of climate change, including extreme temperatures and the diminishing availability of water.Although the storm abated on Tuesday and temperatures were a bit lower, southern Iraq was experiencing daily highs of more than 100 degrees before the sandstorm obscured the sun, reducing the temperature.During the most recent storm, many people donned face masks for protection, especially police officers and emergency workers who were working outside, while others wrapped cloths around their mouths.Using a respiratory in an ambulance in Najaf, a central city where hospitals reported hundreds of patients with breathing difficulties.Qassem Al-Kaabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe sand and dust were so pervasive that they penetrated almost every house and vehicle, coming through the smallest cracks to coat every surface, making it difficult to work on computers and forcing almost all but emergency workers to stay indoors.Iraq’s health ministry spokesman, Saif al-Badr, said that emergency rooms across the south had received 3,747 cases of Iraqis suffering respiratory problems as a result of the storm. More than 1,000 of those were recorded in Basra, where the storm was especially severe on Monday, and 451 were in Najaf, a far smaller city, he said.Also badly affected were residents of Muthanna Province, which shares a long border with Saudi Arabia, he said, adding that most of the thousands who were treated for respiratory problems had been released.The Basra police department put out a list of storm instructions, including one directed at families: “Since the storm is accompanied by frightening sounds for young children, parents should explain what is happening so that their child can sleep soundly.”Visibility in Basra was severely limited.Hussein Faleh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More