Read the full story from Illinois Public Media. Illinois is ranked fourth in the U.S. for the number of data centers — totalling more than with over 220 data centers, and this number keeps growing. It is a national trend accompanying the rise of artificial intelligence. Champaign County could see new data centers coming soon, bringing new jobs and investment, but with high demands on electricity and water from Mahomet Aquifer. Activists warn, without proper legislation, AI data centers could disrupt water systems in Illinois.

Read the full story at Investigate Midwest. Since assuming power, the Trump administration has cudgeled what it deems “wasteful” spending on projects related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. Shape Up’s community garden, which serves a community that is three-quarters Black, qualified. The USDA’s purge has resulted in a significant loss of funding for programs increasing access to fruits and vegetables, and some creating pathways for more Americans to enter an industry with rapidly aging farmers.

Read the full story at Inside Climate News. Go behind the scenes with executive editor Vernon Loeb and Washington bureau chief Marianne Lavelle as they discuss the future of the environmental justice movement amid Trump cutbacks.

Read the full story at Inside Climate News. By linking pond size to dam length, vegetation and stream power, researchers give land managers more precise tools to anticipate water storage, biodiversity and climate resilience.

Read the full story at Inside Climate News. Critics say the Trump administration’s willingness to greenlight any of the fossil fuel industry’s requests allows it to spend less on lobbying.

Read the full story from Morgan Lewis. In support of the administration’s efforts to facilitate the development of data centers, on September 15, 2025, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced at a White House artificial intelligence roundtable that the agency plans to readopt a 2017 memo issued by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (the Pruitt Memo) concerning the Clean Air Act's New Source Review (NSR) permitting program.

Read the full story at Grist. The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that it would stop making polluting companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to it, eliminating a crucial tool the U.S. uses to track emissions and form climate policy. Climate NGOs say their work could help plug some of the data gap, but they and other experts fear the EPA’s work can’t be fully matched.

A paw print in baked mud at Joshua Tree National Park, likely from a coyote. Brad Sutton/National Park Service by Steven Sullivan, Miami University Your neighborhood is home to all sorts of amazing animals, from racoons, squirrels and skunks to birds, bugs and snails. Even if you don’t see them, most of these creatures are leaving evidence of their activities all around you.

Read the full story at Canary Media. The satirical video starring Samuel L. Jackson pokes fun at offshore wind disinformation right as the Trump administration is targeting both comedy and clean energy.

Read the full story at Knowable Magazine. In polar bears, dolphins, baboons and more, molecular signatures of aging are changing how conservationists assess population health, resilience and risk

Read the full story from RMIT University. A team at RMIT University has created a cement-free construction material using only cardboard, soil, and water. Strong enough for low-rise buildings, it reduces emissions, costs, and waste compared to concrete. The lightweight, on-site process makes it ideal for remote areas, while its thermal properties naturally cool buildings. Researchers see it as a key step toward greener, more resilient architecture.

Read the full story at Inside Climate News. It was the first open-river swim there in nearly a century, the result of decades of work addressing pollution.

Read the full story at Inside Climate News. Orla Mining's project near Elko will be the first open-pit mine to receive an accelerated review following the Trump administration’s push to speed permitting for extraction. Opponents fear the public’s concerns will go unheard.

Read the full story from Harvard University. Scientists at Harvard have discovered how salts like lithium bromide break down tough proteins such as keratin—not by attacking the proteins directly, but by altering the surrounding water structure. This breakthrough opens the door to a cleaner, more sustainable way to recycle wool, feathers, and hair into valuable materials, potentially replacing plastics and fueling new industries.

Read the full story at Trellis. See also There’s a second DOE project cancellation list from Latitude Media, which includes the complete list of projects. They also have the list of projects cancelled last week. Federal support for two flagship megaton direct air capture (DAC) hubs designed to generate millions of credits for carbon markets has been terminated, according to a leaked list of cancelled grants.

Read the full story at Inside Climate News. Public health advocates pushed back when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it planned to delay for two years a requirement that steel companies monitor air quality at the perimeters of their 11 coke plants in Western Pennsylvania and across the country. Two groups sued. Now, the EPA has reversed course. The deadline to begin so-called fenceline monitoring for emissions of benzene, chromium and other toxic contaminants, set by the Biden administration, had been in July.

Read the full story at Canary Media. XGS Energy, an advanced-geothermal startup, says it has completed crucial testing that proves its novel technology can operate reliably at commercial scale — without losing a drop of water in the process. The milestone, announced on Tuesday, will allow Houston-based XGS to begin financing and building its first next-generation geothermal energy project, according to the company.

Environmental Protection Agency staff and contractors are often involved in large cleanups of toxic waste, such as after the Los Angeles fires of early 2025. Mario Tama/Getty Images by Elizabeth Blum, Troy University and Chris Sellers, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York) As Congress faces a Sept. 30, 2025, deadline to fund the federal government…

Read the full story at Canary Media. States are ramping up efforts to get residents to switch from fossil-fuel-fired heating systems to all-electric heat pumps. Now, they’ve got a big new tool kit to pull from. Last week, the interagency nonprofit Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, or NESCAUM, released an 80-page action plan laying out key strategies to turbocharge heat-pump deployment. Individual states are already putting many of these tactics to the test.

This series of case studies, curated by the Duke University Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability, illustrates past or ongoing projects that have used a variety of mechanisms to finance a nature-based solution in the US. Each case study describes the context, the nature-based solution applied, the financial mechanism used, and ideas for how private capital and/or a green bank or community lender could support similar projects.

Read the full story from North Carolina State University. Heating alone won’t drive soil microbes to release more carbon dioxide — they need added carbon and nutrients to thrive. This finding challenges assumptions about how climate warming influences soil emissions.

Read the full story from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced new funding to understand and reduce grassland fire risk in the Southern Great Plains. The five-year project is being led by grassland fire expert Jon Henn at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

Read the full story at Canary Media. After Trump’s budget law and regulatory rollbacks, the country’s carbon emissions are set to fall much slower than they would have under the Biden admin.

Read the full story from the University at Buffalo. Scientists have uncovered that “forever chemicals” like PFAS are even more acidic than anyone realized, meaning they dissolve and spread in water with alarming ease. Using a cutting-edge method combining NMR spectroscopy and computer modeling, researchers showed that the acidity of notorious compounds like PFOA and GenX had been vastly underestimated—sometimes by factors of a thousand.

Read the full story at Canary Media. A state-funded hub for clean energy workforce development is creating employment and business opportunities in the surrounding community.