Jeff Hough did not pull any punches. What his fellow Republican county commissioners were about to do, he said to the packed courthouse, would violate America’s founding ideals. He quoted the Declarat...

I listened to the audiobook of Home Sick by Rhiannon Grist (narrated perfectly by Mhairi Morrison) several weeks ago as we moved our household 250 miles south to Atlanta which meant I was in the perfe...

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization. It was originally published by Grist. John Boyer grew up on his family’s 131 acres of rolling fields of corn, oats and wheat in East Jordan. The farm changed ownership outside the family several times over the decades before being rebought by Boyer, who said he felt an obligation to repurchase and farm the land so development wouldn’t encroach on the farming community. “For any farmer, everything’s personal,” Boyer said. “Every piece of property, every stone you pick up, you spend countless hours out there.” As millions of farmland acres around the country are expected to change hands in the next few decades, farmers face decisions about whether — and if so, how — to preserve farmland amid pressures from rising land values, a shifting climate and a younger generation who doesn’t want to farm. The number of acres devoted to farming in Michigan has declined in recent decades, and ownership of that land is changing. In 2022, about 9.5 million acres, or about a quarter of the state, were devoted to farming, down from about 9.8 million acres in 2017, a roughly...

Jeff Hough did not pull any punches. What his fellow Republican county commissioners were about to do, he said to the packed courthouse, would violate America’s founding ideals. He quoted the Declarat...

Why we need to ask if open source projects have a way to thrive, and if so, who’s paying for it?

Jeff Hough did not pull any punches. What his fellow Republican county commissioners were about to do, he said to the packed courthouse, would violate America’s founding ideals. He quoted the Declaration of Independence to make his case. The three-person commission was about to vote on an ordinance that would ban utility-scale solar and wind development in Bannock County, Idaho. “We cannot deny the entire county the opportunity to exercise their property rights,” Hough said. “That goes against the principles this country was founded on.” A few minutes after Hough’s emphatic speech, the ordinance passed by a 2–1 vote. Hough was the lone dissenter. Since that consequential vote in March 2024, Hough has become the chair of the county commission and has dedicated himself to overturning that ordinance. He will soon have a chance to make that happen. This fall, Hough and the other two commissioners are set to vote on an ordinance with new language that would allow the development of solar and wind, along with nuclear energy, in the county. The Bannock County vote is a test case of whether — and how — a community can revisit its assumptions about the costs and benefits of clean energy...

Since 2013, the IRS has released data culled from millions of nonprofit tax filings. Use this database to find organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as...

by Emily Jones, WABE/Grist, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission] September 24, 2026 This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE... The post Georgia Power, Google announce deal to pay for nuclear upgrades appeared first on Cobb Courier.

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You are about to time-travel. Off the Pacific coast of South America, the band of warm water known as El Niño is mutating into a freak of nature. At more than 3 degrees Celsius above normal, it’s the warmest El Niño recorded since satellites started measuring sea surface temperatures half a century ago, and it won’t peak for several more months, potentially hitting somewhere around 4 degrees by November or December. “This event is already in record territory,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the research group Berkeley Earth. “And every model expects it to keep growing.” At the same time, this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which began in June, is shattering records in the opposite direction. On average, by this time of year we should have seen four hurricanes, two of them major. But so far, the Atlantic hasn’t produced even one. The previous record for the latest first hurricane in a season was September 11. The two events on opposite sides of the Americas are individually extreme and bizarre. But while they’re both record-breaking, they’re not unexplained. In fact, they’re intertwined in a fascinating way. To understand the link, we need to talk about the ingredients of...

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