Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that nearly 100 vessels have used the Jones Act waiver granted by President Donald Trump, which allowed refiners to use foreign-flagged ships to transport fuel between United States ports.
The Jones Act waiver “has been used enormously,” Wright said in testimony Wednesday before the House Science Space and Technology committee. “I think close to 100 ships already have used that Jones Act waiver.”
The Great Salt Lake is in decline. Shorelines that once defined northern Utah’slandscape have receded dramatically over the past two decades, exposing thousands of acres of dry lakebed and intensifying concerns over dust pollution, ecosystem collapse, and long-term water scarcity across the Wasatch Front.
Scientists have warned repeatedly that if current trends continue, the consequences will extend far beyond the lake itself. Public health risks will increase, wildlife habitat will deteriorate, and economic losses tied to recreation, mineral extraction, and tourism will compound.
The Great Salt Lake has grown from an environmental issue to a test of whether the United States is still capable of solving large-scale conservation challenges before they become irreversible.
The Trump administration is not going to set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the rapidly growing data center industry, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday.
While there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, states and communities know what works best for them, Zeldin said at the POLITICO Energy Summit in Washington.
The term “moon shot” was launched in the 1940s, according to research by the Oxford English Dictionary. “The real result of all the work which would have to go into the moon shot,” Rotarian magazine wrote in 1949, “would be the knowledge of how to build and operate rockets of such size.”
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Eventually, the space program threw off scores of scientific advances, some of which are more useful here on Earth than in the cosmos. “Water filtration systems, adjustable smoke detectors, and anti-icing technology all trace their lineage to space research,” NASA writes. High technology spawned by the space exploration program now powers CAT scanners, LEDs, and PCs.
Earlier this year, Americans looked to the sky once again with awe. Four Artemis II astronauts engaged in a 10-day mission that ventured deeper into space than any human ever has. It was the first trip to the moon since 1972, and it unlocked the door to do much more.
NASA plans to visit the lunar surface three more times this year to begin constructing a base there. “We intend to take an iterative approach, sending a demand signal to industry for a lot of landers and rovers and tech demonstrations, and all the scientific payloads these missions can accommodate,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said.
That is exactly the right approach: let the market understand that there is a need, and entrepreneurs will step up and step in to fill that need. Here on Earth, something similar is underway with fusion technology. Investments in fusion technology today could unlock the next big clean energy revolution in the way that natural gas innovation did with the shale revolution.
To prime the pump, the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) has promised to invest $135 million over the next 18 months to help boost the deployment of fusion energy technologies. It is an attempt to keep the U.S. on the cutting edge, and especially ahead of China.
It is a good start that can get the fusion project growing by getting many sectors involved. “I personally take our combination of capital, venture capital and investments from the private sector, along with government spending,” ARPA-E director Conner Prochaska, said, “versus that pure government spend in China any day of the week.”
>>>READ: Five of the World’s Leading Fusion Energy Technologies
Fusion is the cleanest form of energy. The process works the same way that our sun and other stars do. It combines two light atomic nuclei (such as hydrogen) into a single, heavier nucleus (such as helium). Turning the two into one reduces mass and thus releases a massive amount of energy. Fusion, if it can work at utility scale, could deliver as a limitless, clean, and carbon-free energy source that could work almost anywhere.
Scientists at MIT developed fusion technology and spun their idea off into a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS is now at work building what would be the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant. The trick will be getting the process to work at a large enough scale. But that is an effort worth making. The plant, in Chesterfield County, Virginia, could be able to generate some 400 megawatts of clean, zero-carbon power by the early 2030s.
That would be enough to power 150,000 homes, and it could also provide green electricity to power Virginia’s famous data centers, thus leaving more electricity on the grid for domestic users. Either way, if the technology works at scale, and Commonwealth thinks it can, it could unlock a clean electricity revolution.
>>>READ: The Fusion Energy Fast Forward
Virginia is the ideal place to debut a fusion plant, because it is noted for its “all-of-the-above” approach to energy. A fusion plant there, outside Richmond, would be proof of concept and would encourage further experiments in fusion technology.
The American economy has evolved from one that ran on wood to one that ran on coal to one that runs on everything from natural gas, nuclear, hydropower, coal, solar, geothermal, wind and batteries. It will eventually add fusion as well. That’s a down to earth moonshot that could guarantee the cleanest of futures.
Forget about learning to code. Meta says it’s time to pick up a wrench.
The company is starting a “workforce academy” to train Americans to build its data centers as skilled trade workers become a sought-after commodity. The five-week training program, in partnership with CBRE and the Associated Builders and Contractors, is free of charge and guarantees graduates a job at a Meta data-center construction site, the company said.
Last October, DOE canceled $700 million worth of battery and manufacturing projects grants, including American Battery’s grant, saying the projects either didn’t meet certain milestones, were not economically viable or would not “adequately advance the nation’s energy needs.” American Battery says it was one of “hundreds” of grants that were canceled in that process.
In 2022, the DOE had initially selected American Battery for a five-year grant to help build the first phase of the refinery, located on what CEO Ryan Melsert described during a May 11 earnings call as “one of the largest identified lithium deposits in the U.S.”
A major grid-tech company is asking the Trump administration to fund a project it says could significantly boost the nation’s ability to move power around — without building a single new transmission tower or line.
Open Access Technology International (OATI) is a Minneapolis-based firm whose software is used by nearly every North American transmission grid operator to manage the flow of electrons. Now, it envisions developing new features for that software. Huge amounts of data, parsed by artificial intelligence, would be used to more accurately calculate how much power can run along power lines — providing both real-time estimates and forecasts days and weeks into the future. That intel would be automatically shared among neighboring grid operators, allowing them to make better decisions about how to run their networks.
Conservation science has long defined itself as a crisis-solution field, rooted in problem-solving. Yet for years it has been better at identifying species and regions at risk than at delivering solutions to help them. Identifying this key downfall, Conservation X Labs has risen to the occasion. A non-profit focused on slowing biodiversity loss, it promotes innovation and the development of cutting-edge technology to tackle conservation challenges.
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One of their breakthrough developments is known as the Extinction Solutions Index, a framework that aims to identify and compare the effectiveness of solutions to biodiversity loss by assessing each one’s potential success rate, cost, and impact. It works in five steps. First, a coalition of partners is assembled, gathering experts across conservation science, including in model development, data analysis, and impact evaluation. Second, they identify potential solutions from groups across society and the economy. Third, a qualitative and quantitative framework is created, tailored to the solution being assessed. Fourth, the solution’s effectiveness is evaluated using that framework and expert input, validating assumptions about the feasibility of the solution and a cost-benefit analysis. Fifth, the findings are compiled into a publication or interactive dashboard that can be utilized by an array of stakeholders across the public sector, private sector, and academia. Ultimately, the Extinction Solutions Index aims to enable solutions to be diverse, impactful, and ready to scale from the very beginning.
Where do these solutions come from? Every year, Conservation X Labs organizes several challenges and competitions to bring together the brightest minds to address the most pressing environmental problems. In 2025 alone, five challenges were organized. The Fire Grand Challenge, for example, sought new ways to manage and live with fire, asking participants to pair traditional knowledge with innovative technology to create scalable solutions. Alternative Proteins: The Amazon aimed to mitigate deforestation in the Amazon by developing alternative proteins for food products. Through these competitions, the organization has been able to support more than 100 innovations and award over 12 million dollars towards breakthrough solutions.
>>>READ: How RESOLVE Is Bridging Conservation and Critical Minerals
Conservation X Labs has also developed innovations of its own. Among their most impactful is Wild Me, an open-source software that supports efficient wildlife population research and assessment. It combines artificial intelligence, computer vision, and citizen science to identify and track wildlife. Anyone can take a picture of an animal and upload it to the platform, where the software identifies the animal and adds the picture to a broader set of citizen science records. Several platforms within Wild Me are specific to different species, including Sharkbook and GiraffeSpotter. The software was recently used in a study that revealed a broader range for whale sharks across the American West Coast than previously understood, demonstrating its value to wildlife research.
Another technology, Sentinel is an AI-powered environmental monitoring system that draws on information from cameras, acoustic sensors, thermal sensors, and other systems to automatically identify events, including poaching and habitat disturbances. Unlike other camera-trap systems, it utilizes edge-AI, processing data directly on the device in the field rather than sending it to the cloud. As a result, the data is processed in real-time, allowing for faster responses to the environmental situations on the ground. The system has been used to track invasive species, detect signs of Feline Leukomyelopathy (FLM) in Florida Panthers, and eliminate incidents of human-elephant conflict in India.
>>>READ: How Conservation Can Improve Global Security
Conservation increasingly depends on contributions from many fields, and organizations like Conservation X Labs are helping bring diverse voices with new solutions to the table. By opening conservation up to innovation, these new voices can help bring it into a new era.
Wildfires have worsened ozone levels across the United States so much over the last decade that they have reversed around four years of progress, a new study has found.
Surface ozone levels, or smog concentrations, steadily increased from 2015 to 2024, deteriorating air quality across the Midwest and Western U.S., researchers at the University of Iowa found in a study released Thursday. According to the study authors, this contributed to an increase of 318 premature deaths per year from fire-sourced ozone since 2013. Their NASA-funded research mapped these ozone levels in kilometer-by-kilometer grids across the entire continental U.S between 2003 and 2024.
Electric utilities and power grid operators increasingly are looking at ways to diminish and avoid disruptions from extreme weather. The power sector also has experience with the financial impacts of wildfires, both with damage to assets and losses incurred when equipment is found liable for causing those events.
Undergrounding lines, in addition to enhancing safety, also can improve the performance of transmission infrastructure, by mitigating hazards such as impacts from trees and other vegetation. A report from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Grid Deployment Office, along with Berkeley Lab in California, notes a “key advantage of underground transmission and distribution lines is substantially reduced vulnerability to disruption from extreme weather and wildfires [by preventing initial ignition as well as propagation], resulting in both reliability and resilience improvements.” Several electric utilities and other agencies have noted that undergrounding offers protection against lightning, animal incursions, high winds (including thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and derechos), and ice and snow. It also eliminates the chances of fallen power lines caused by auto accidents (Figure 1), or simply due to aging infrastructure.
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