All posts by media-man

Climate

As the Trump EPA Prepares to Revoke Key Legal Finding on Climate Change, What Happens Next?

Four questions on repeal of its 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases

By Marianne Lavelle

Following three of the warmest years on record, as scientists reckon with climate tipping points and states and cities grapple with the escalating cost of extreme weather and more intense wildfires, the Trump administration this week is expected to formally eliminate the U.S. government’s role in controlling greenhouse gas pollution.

Climate

Toxic Beauty: Black Women Most at Risk from Harmful Chemicals in Unregulated Hair Products

Hair extensions used primarily by Black women contain a “shocking” range of dangerous chemicals, including breast carcinogens, new research shows.

By Liza Gross

Elissia Franklin is an analytical chemist with an infectious laugh, a penchant for braided hair extensions and a fierce commitment to reducing health disparities for Black women. Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, she saw firsthand the systemic barriers Black women face and resolved to help her community benefit from all she learned as she pursued her career as a chemist.

Climate

Op-Ed: VinFast is Refocusing on Asia, Planning to Sell 300,000 Vehicles

VinFast’s Retreat From America Was Inevitable A recent Nikkei Asia report said that Vietnamese carmaker VinFast was targeting a 300,000 annual vehicle sales in the coming years, with India and Southeast Asia positioned as core growth markets. That global total still has Europe and North America in mind, and underscores ... [continued]

The post Op-Ed: VinFast is Refocusing on Asia, Planning to Sell 300,000 Vehicles appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Some of world’s oldest trees hit by climate-fuelled wildfires in Patagonia

Wildfires that left 23 people dead were made about three times more likely by global heating, researchers say

The climate crisis inflamed deadly wildfires that left 23 people dead in Chile and devastated forests in Argentina that host some of the world’s oldest trees, scientists have found.

The hot, dry and windy conditions that enabled the fires to blaze across huge areas in January were made about three times more likely by global heating, researchers from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium found.

Continue reading...
Climate

Why Have Automakers Written Off $55 Billion In EV Investments?

An article title caught my attention today for a couple of reasons. The title of the article is: “Major Automakers Have Written Off $55 Billion After Overestimating EV Demand.” Hmm…. First of all, the thing that jumped out to me was $55 billion. That’s a lot of freakin’ money! The ... [continued]

The post Why Have Automakers Written Off $55 Billion In EV Investments? appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Premiere of 3-Row Highlander BEV in North America

Toyota City, Japan — Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) announced that it will expand its battery electric vehicle (BEV) lineup in North America as part of its multi-pathway approach toward achieving a carbon-neutral society. As part of this effort, Toyota Motor North America (TMNA), Toyota’s North American business entity, premiered a ... [continued]

The post Premiere of 3-Row Highlander BEV in North America appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

2026 Nissan Rogue Plug-in Hybrid Pricing Starts at $45,990

NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Combining all-electric convenience for daily commutes with the familiar flexibility of a gasoline engine for longer journeys, the 2026 Nissan Rogue Plug-in Hybrid will reach dealerships in February with a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price1 starting at $45,990 for the SL grade. The 2026 Nissan Rogue Plug-in Hybrid offers an estimated ... [continued]

The post 2026 Nissan Rogue Plug-in Hybrid Pricing Starts at $45,990 appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Trump Administration’s 100% “Buy America” EV Charging Requirement Is Anti-EV Policy

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation announced a new proposal to repeal an existing waiver and dramatically raise the domestic content requirement for electric vehicle charging stations–from 55 to 100 percent–for federal-aid highway projects, including the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program (NEVI). NEVI is a $5 billion federal ... [continued]

The post Trump Administration’s 100% “Buy America” EV Charging Requirement Is Anti-EV Policy appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Sierra Club Appeals EPA Approval of South Carolina’s Do-Nothing Pollution Plan

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Sierra Club appealed the EPA’s approval of South Carolina’s do-nothing plan to reduce air pollution at our country’s most wild and scenic national parks and wilderness areas. The Congressionally-approved Regional Haze program of the Clean Air Act is intended to reduce air pollution, including from coal ... [continued]

The post Sierra Club Appeals EPA Approval of South Carolina’s Do-Nothing Pollution Plan appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Tennessee Valley Authority Goes Back on Commitment to Retire Dirty Coal Plants

NASHVILLE, Tennessee — In an extremely disappointing reversal, the Tennessee Valley Authority announced it is planning to keep its Kingston and Cumberland coal plants operating for the foreseeable future, blowing by its upcoming deadlines to close the polluting facilities. The nation’s largest federal utility had previously committed to shutting down these ... [continued]

The post Tennessee Valley Authority Goes Back on Commitment to Retire Dirty Coal Plants appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Trump Admin To Make Climate Denialism US National Policy

Continuing the theme of complete idiocy and mass human harm, the Donald Trump administration is on the verge of making climate change denialism US national policy. Why? Because we are apparently a petrolstate being run by a mixture of Homer Simpson and Mr. Burns. Steve Hanley will write a much ... [continued]

The post Trump Admin To Make Climate Denialism US National Policy appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Nissan Silent & Measured Path Toward Autonomous Public Transportation in Japan

Will Nissan Quietly Lead the Path to Autonomous Public Transport in Japan? The question surrounding autonomous mobility in Japan is no longer whether the technology works, but which companies are structuring it in a way that cities, regulators, and passengers can realistically adopt. On that front, Nissan has emerged as ... [continued]

The post Nissan Silent & Measured Path Toward Autonomous Public Transportation in Japan appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Parked German Hydrogen Garbage Trucks Show The Limits Of Pilot-Driven Infrastructure

The recent case in Bielefeld, where seven hydrogen garbage trucks sit idle because they cannot legally refuel at a nearby hydrogen station for buses, is a small story that exposes a large and structural problem. The vehicles were purchased with public funds, the refueling station was built with public funds, ... [continued]

The post Parked German Hydrogen Garbage Trucks Show The Limits Of Pilot-Driven Infrastructure appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Bad Bunny Put A Spotlight On The Special Relationship Between The US & Puerto Rico

There has been a lot of bellyaching among right wing extremists about the NFL’s decision to make Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny the headline attraction of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, claiming he was “not an American artist.” That dismissive attitude offers insight into the fraught relationship between the ... [continued]

The post Bad Bunny Put A Spotlight On The Special Relationship Between The US & Puerto Rico appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Journalism

Building a syllabus companion to help educators integrate podcasts into their classrooms

A conversation with Jenna Spinelle and Brandon Stover

The Democracy Group is a podcast network of 18 shows that focus on democracy and civil engagement. Jenna Spinelle, host and producer of the Democracy Works podcast and communications lead for Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy, and Brandon Stover, the digital content specialist for the McCourtney Institute and podcast network manager for the Democracy Group, came together to create a curated list of podcast episodes educators could use in their classrooms. 

Brandon Stover, digital content specialist and podcast network manager
Brandon Stover, digital content specialist and podcast network manager
Jenna Spinelle, producer and host of the Democracy Works podcast
Jenna Spinelle, producer and host of the Democracy Works podcast

This syllabus guide covers topics relevant to educators in the political science field. It is based on textbooks for Introduction to American Politics, which Spinelle found was pretty similar across most schools. Although the syllabus first started with the Democracy Works podcast, Spinelle and Stover worked together to expand it to the entire podcast network. 

Madiha: What elements were most important when creating the Democracy Works podcast? 

Spinelle: We tend to lean more into our academic expertise and look at the big picture of ‘okay, these things are happening. Why are they happening? What’s underneath them?’ And then my interest in particular is in democracy and political reform, so people working on gerrymandering and money in politics and that kind of thing, so some of that makes its way into the show, as well. The thing I hear most often from listeners is that they feel hopeful after listening, that it’s kind of a nice counterbalance to the rest of the political information environment.

Madiha: What would you say to educators who struggle with adding podcasts into their curriculum? 

Spinelle: If you haven’t used a podcast in your class before, from what I have seen students respond well. They really like being able to listen when they’re walking around campus or on the bus, doing their laundry, at the gym or whatever it is that they’re doing, and I find that there’s a much more robust discussion when they’ve listened to something, as opposed to if they’ve read it. Of course, not to say that podcasts are going to ever replace textbooks, but I think you can add some variety for students. 

Madiha: If another news organization wants to do something similar, and they don’t have the connections that you do with higher ed, do you have any suggestions of how to get started and how to build those relationships?

Spinelle: The first thing I would say is to figure out what educational discipline most closely maps to the work that you want to share. And what college major is closest to what you’re doing. And so from there you can go to the professional organizations for that field, like in our case, it would be the American Political Science Association and some others like that. They often have newsletters or other communication channels with their members that journalists could use to put themselves on their radar. 

Madiha: Was there anything that made the syllabus easy for educators to use?

Spinelle: Yes, to know that these shows are all coming from reputable organizations, we’ve already listened to them, we know that they’re classroom appropriate. You know they’re coming from a place of learning, not a place of trying to persuade people to one opinion or another, which I know can be problematic in some places, more so than others.

Madiha: What did the process look like for going through the different shows and figuring out how to match it by topic?

Stover: Some of our podcasts have transcripts, so I could quickly go through and search through their transcripts to see if a topic matched. But other ones don’t, so I had to start listening through some of the episodes and I found that to be very inefficient with 20 different podcasts and multiple different topics. So, I started to use AI to help me search through the episodes. The nice thing about AI is that it doesn’t go through the entire catalog, especially newer versions of ChatGPT, where it’ll search actual website links. I can drop in our website links, and I’ll say, ‘feed me three episodes related to this specific topic’, and it’ll give me those episodes. It usually searches the titles first, and then it will go through the descriptions and sometimes through the transcripts. Then, I would have to go through and either quickly listen or skim through it to see if it actually did match, or if it had a transcript, I could quickly read through that. 

I also found out that if you do too much of this in one chat, it freaks out and won’t want to load the chat. What the AI does is it reads your entire chat before it does its thinking, so if you’ve been doing this a bunch, it’ll read everything it’s done before it gives you an answer – which is really helpful for you to get the same format of responses and depth that you want searched. But eventually it’s too much for it to think through.

Here are two examples of prompts that Stover used in ChatGPT:

Find up to 3 episodes from the How Do We Fix It? podcast (http://www.howdowefixit.me/) related to Congress and Legislative Branch.

Find up to 3 episodes from The Context podcast (https://kettering.org/thecontext/) related to interest groups (a group of people that seeks to influence public policy on the basis of a particular common interest or concern.).

Madiha:  What did you incorporate to make this syllabus helpful for educators? 

Stover: We wanted a quick way for all the links and all the topics to be in one area so we made the Word document that just has the links so that they can quickly take that and just drop it into their syllabus. Something that we’re thinking about doing now is sort of an email-based course that’s kind of like onboarding – like, hey, here’s the syllabus, and now here are ways that you can use it and give them different ideas. [For example,] you can put it in your syllabus this way or assign podcasts this way, or we can suggest different projects or exercises you can do in combination with an episode.

Madiha: What is one helpful thing for people to know if they are interested in doing a similar project? 

Stover: We think a lot about meeting people where they are. What I mean by that is a lot of times when you’re trying to grow a podcast, you’re thinking about how to market and where else can you show this in front of people, but the people that want to listen to podcasts listen to podcasts and the people that are on social media want to stay on social media. So that means, if you’re promoting your podcast on social media they don’t want to make that jump. So this same idea goes for education as well. Don’t try and bring people to where you’re educating. Go to where they’re already being educated, and put your material there.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Cite this article

Madiha, Ishrat (2026, Feb. 10). Building a syllabus companion to help educators integrate podcasts into their classrooms. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/building-a-syllabus-companion-to-help-educators-integrate-podcasts-into-their-classrooms/

Climate

Scientists uncover the climate shock that reshaped Easter Island

Around 1550, life on Rapa Nui began changing in ways long misunderstood. New research reveals that a severe drought, lasting more than a century, dramatically reduced rainfall on the already water-scarce island, reshaping how people lived, worshiped, and organized society. Instead of collapsing, Rapanui communities adapted—shifting rituals, power structures, and sacred spaces in response to climate stress.
Climate

200 Electric Trucks Can Be Charged At One Depot In A Day?

When I worked at an energy efficiency organization, a manager once said, “There are metrics and there are meaningful metrics.” Some measuring yields numbers that may not be useful or applied productively. Lately while writing about electric vehicle chargers, one metric that stood out from the others was the fact ... [continued]

The post 200 Electric Trucks Can Be Charged At One Depot In A Day? appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Methane spiked after 2020 and the cause was unexpected

Methane levels in Earth’s atmosphere surged faster than ever in the early 2020s, and scientists say the reason was a surprising mix of chemistry and climate. A temporary slowdown in the atmosphere’s ability to break down methane allowed the gas to linger, while unusually wet conditions boosted emissions from wetlands, rivers, lakes, and rice fields around the world. Pandemic-related changes in air pollution played a key role, indirectly weakening the atmosphere’s natural “clean-up” process.
Climate

Covering Disappearing Snowpacks

Welcome to Locally Sourced, a biweekly Covering Climate Now newsletter for journalists working to localize the climate story. Share this newsletter with colleagues and journalism students interested in localizing the climate story. 

Story Spark: Disappearing Snowpack

Snow is hard to find this winter in many places famed for their snowy slopes. Record low snowfall in the Western US has pushed Colorado, Utah, and portions of California into “uncharted territory” with some areas seeing their snowpack, or accumulated compressed snow, at their lowest levels in decades. Even if relief, however unlikely, arrives with a late season snowstorm, this bad season speaks to a larger issue of “snow droughts” afflicting many of the world’s mountain ranges, including the Hindu-Kush Himalayas and the European Alps, as a result of warming temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and weakening storm systems. 

The impact of this disappearing snowpack extends far beyond poor conditions for winter recreation — and prospective sites for future Winter Olympic Games. Snow plays a vital role in protecting ecosystems, lowering the threat of wildfires, and replenishing water reservoirs downstream. The US Geological Survey estimates that up to 75% of the American West’s annual water supply depends on snowmelt, while the melting snow in the Himalayas feeds a dozen of Asia’s major rivers — forming the backbone of drinking water, irrigation, and hydroelectric power for billions. 

As warming winters lead to more rain than snow events at historically snowy elevations, investigate how this precipitation change threatens local economies, strains ongoing water scarcity, and impacts your area’s agriculture. Also understand that even in a warming climate, there will still be good snow years. A rebound in snowpack next year does not mean the overall trend has changed; data shows a slow and steady decrease in springtime snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere since the 1980s.

Expert Tips

Daniel Swain, PhD, a weather and climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR), offers tips on reporting on shrinking snowpacks. He frequently provides climate context about extreme events like floods, droughts, and wildfires to facilitate accessible and accurate coverage of these events. 

There’s two main ways to get a low snowpack. One, of course, is to have no precipitation of any kind falling. The other way is to have plenty of precipitation, but it’s too warm, so it melts quickly or simply falls as rain. This is what we have been seeing across much of the Western US this winter — as record warmth is leading to a record low snowpack, despite above average precipitation. Make it clear which issue your area is facing; it could be both. 

Elevation matters. Going up a couple thousand feet can be like going decades back in time in terms of temperatures, and that matters a lot for snowpack. We’re seeing very little, if any, declines in snowpack at much higher elevations, but huge losses at low to moderate elevations, between 3,000 and 6,000 feet, where the majority of people live. What’s going on at the top of the mountain is not just unrepresentative of what’s happening at lower elevations, but also less important when it comes to ecosystems, wildfire risks, and watersheds. 

Winter weather isn’t simple, so speak to a scientist. Communicating the nuances of elevation changes and the competing influences of a warmer atmosphere is important: Warmer temperatures lead to less snow, but warmer air holds more moisture, which can lead to more snow in some situations. Reach out to your local meteorologist and ask about these things, because these details matter and it’s easy to miss important pieces of what’s going on. 

Stories We Like

  • The Xylom highlights how apple farmers in India must haul piles of snow, called “white manure,” from higher elevations to irrigate their orchards left parched by lack of snowfall in the valleys. 
  • Climate journalist Ben Tracy, on assignment for Climate Central, examines how a giant “snow cooler” could help keep some ski slopes alive for winter, and why future Winter Olympic Games will need more than just tech to survive.  
  • A lack of snowpack and other climate change impacts primed the Pacific Northwest for historic and deadly flooding last year, Grist reports.
  • With climate change increasing the spread of wildfires, Inside Climate News explores how the snowpack is melting earlier in burned forests — long after the flames have been extinguished. 
  • KING 5 Seattle examines what the shrinking snowpack in the Pacific Northwest means for fishing, farming, skiing, and more in a recent climate special.
  • In New Hampshire, researchers struggle to piece together the extent of the state’s shrinking snowpack due to scattered historical observations, New Hampshire Bulletin reports.

Resources

Experts

Before We Go…

The next Locally Sourced will highlight battery storage. Have you reported on why this technology is critically important to the renewable energy transition? Send them to us at local[at]coveringclimatenow[dot]org. We’d love to consider them for the next edition of Locally Sourced and our media trainings and social platforms.

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The post Covering Disappearing Snowpacks appeared first on Covering Climate Now.

Climate

Trailblazing Atmospheric Scientist Was ‘a Titan in the Scientific World’

Harvard University researcher Michael McElroy made groundbreaking contributions to climate science and helped shape global environmental policy.

By Phil McKenna

More than half a century ago, at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, Michael McElroy’s classmates had just finished an exceptionally difficult math exam and were ready to vent. But first they wanted to hear from the class’s star student.

Climate

Rethinking Economics, the movement changing how the subject is taught

Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it is reshaping economists’ education

As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.

A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”.

Continue reading...
Climate

Lucid VP for Engineering Says: Technology is Finite, Human Creativity Infinite

In Creating the Factory of the Future, Lucid’s Manufacturing Vision Puts People Ahead of Machines At Rockwell Automation Fair 2025 three months ago, one of the most quietly consequential conversations about the future of manufacturing did not revolve around artificial intelligence, robotics, or automation speed. Instead, it centered on a ... [continued]

The post Lucid VP for Engineering Says: Technology is Finite, Human Creativity Infinite appeared first on CleanTechnica.