In 2025, North Carolina saw an effective repeal of its carbon plan, and the state is now on track to approve over 100 data center projects. This will further imperil the state’s 2050 decarbonization goal while creating a new slew of environmental and public health concerns and electricity affordability problems. The state is charting a harmful path and should change course be...

A fan of place-based education, every year I haul my students to Louisiana’s Maurepas Wildlife Management Area to paddle the swamps and learn about coastal law. This semester, I had ten students with me, each paddling a kayak on the swamp’s shimmering water. Bits of salvinia, a free-floating aquatic fern, eased downstream at an almost imperceptible rate. Stories on the bayou ...

In the past five years, the United States began experiencing a rapid increase in electricity demand, fueled primarily by data centers for artificial intelligence. A single data center can use the amount of electricity consumed by a city of approximately 80,000 people. Most data center companies seek electricity from the same utilities that provide electricity to retail and co...

I was writing in a New Orleans coffee house last spring when another customer noticed the ocean stickers on my laptop and offered me a new one in support of a regional cause: the Rice’s whale, a species that had only recently been identified and is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). That’s because only about 50 of these creatures exist. And they all ...