Climate and Environmental News in Brief: Spring 2025

Biden also advanced important climate policies, rejoining the Paris Agreement, committing to halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and targeting net-zero emissions by 2050. He pushed for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which injected $370 billion into clean energy — the largest such investment in US history. He undertook a number of conservation measures, including the largest expansion of US public lands and waters of any president in history.

After he dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024, Biden continued to advance an environmental agenda, introducing $4.3 billion in Environmental Protection Agency grants aimed at combating climate change, reducing pollution, and promoting environmental justice. In the last days of his presidency, he signed proclamations creating two national monuments in California, which will help protect important Indigenous cultural and ecological sites across nearly 850,000 acres of newly protected land.

Critics argue that Biden’s approval of drilling projects, like Alaska’s Willow project, undermined his climate goals. The US, after all, remains the world’s largest oil and gas producer.

“Two things are true,” Stevie O’Hanlon of the Sunrise Movement, told Inside Climate News. “One is that President Biden did more than any other president to tackle the climate crisis and really kick-start development of a renewable energy economy.… And at the same time, oil and gas production is at record highs, and the policies that Donald Trump is foreshadowing spell out the worst reality for our generation’s future.”

For his part, President Trump has already begun to undo regulations that he argues harm US “energy independence” and economic growth. Key Biden policies at risk include greenhouse gas standards for vehicles and power plants, restrictions on oil and gas drilling, and protections for sensitive ecosystems. It remains to be seen which of Trump’s executive rollbacks will survive legal challenge.

UPDATE

Another Pandemic?

A pandemic may not be inevitable, but the ongoing avian influenza outbreak has passed enough key milestones in past months to heighten researchers’ worry that it is entirely possible.

This strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) — first detected in 2020 — has swept through wild bird and mammal populations. In North America, it has jumped over to poultry, cattle, cats, and humans, as well. Globally, the US currently has had the most cases of bird flu in humans. According to January figures from the Centers for Disease Control (before Trump ordered it to pause external communications), there have been 67 human cases of bird flu in the US since 2024, including the first reported fatal case in Louisiana. The virus has been found in dairy herds in 16 states and poultry farms in all 50 states.

The impact of the virus has been far worse for wildlife. Wildlife biologists say it has set off an “unprecedented panzootic” that has already killed tens of thousands of birds and mammals in every continent except Australia. It has affected around 320 species of birds and mammals and killed an estimated 24,000 Cape cormorants in South Africa, more than 57,000 pelicans in Peru, tens of thousands of elephant seals and sea lions in Argentina and Chile, bears and foxes in Alaska, endangered condors and mountain lions in California, and more. The virus threatens to disrupt ecosystems already at risk from climate disruption and habitat loss and to push some endangered animals closer to extinction.

In humans, most of the infections have been mild, but scientists say that the H5N1 variants spreading in North America, which appear to be adapting to new hosts, may cause severe illness and death, especially when passed directly to humans from birds.

“I’m still not pack-my-bags-and-head-to-the-hills worried, but there’s been more signals over the past four to six weeks that this virus has the capacity” to set off a pandemic, Richard Webby, an influenza expert at the Tennessee-based St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told The New York Times in late January.

Efforts to contain the outbreak are unfortunately going to be hampered by the Trump administration’s decree that US public health officials stop working with the World Health Organization and other international agencies monitoring the outbreak.

What you can do: If you see dead or sick birds don’t touch them. Don’t let your pets near them either. Inform your local health and wildlife officials instead.

LEGALESE

Kids Win Climate Suit. Again.

Much of the news on the climate front is bleak these days, but a recent legal decision in the youth lawsuit Held v. Montana gives us something to celebrate. As the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports, in December the Montana Supreme Court upheld a 2023 district court ruling in the case, affirming that the state’s young people have a constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, including a stable climate.

“Plaintiffs showed at trial — without dispute — that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future,” the decision states.

The finding is historic. The suit, which was brought by 16 youth from across the state, was the first constitutional climate case in the US, and also the first youth-led climate case to go to trial in the country. Montana must now consider the environmental and health impacts of all proposed fossil fuel projects, including how those projects harm children. “This ruling is a victory not just for us, but for every young person whose future is threatened by climate change,” lead plaintiff Rikki Held, now 22, said in a statement.

In more good news, in January the US Supreme Court nixed fossil fuel companies’ attempt to block a lawsuit brought against them by the state of Hawaiʻi. The suit seeks to hold 17 oil and gas companies — including Sunoco, Shell, and Chevron — accountable for deceiving the public about the climate impacts of fossil fuel dependence. The case will now proceed in Hawaiʻi state court, and is being celebrated not only by Hawaiʻi, but by the 11 other state attorneys general who have filed similar accountability lawsuits against Big Oil.

Future Tense

Biased Bots

Artificial intelligence sucks up a lot of power, but according to new research, it’s also bad for the environment in a more insidious way: It has a bias against the kind of information that could lead humanity out of the climate crisis.

In a study published in December in Environmental Research Letters and led by Hamish van der Ven, a sustainability researcher at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that AI chatbots are shaping public understanding of environmental crises in ways that obscure corporate accountability, overlook marginalized communities, and promote incremental solutions misaligned with urgent climate action.

Researchers questioned four AI chatbots about major environmental issues and found systematic biases in their responses. The bots favored moderate policy and technological solutions while avoiding radical measures such as dismantling colonialism or questioning economic growth. Chatbots were reluctant to discuss broader social and economic issues, the study notes, pointing out that terms like “environmental justice” were largely absent.

Worse still, as investors look toward potential sponsors for AI development, van der Ven wrote for The Conversation recently, “it is not difficult to see a world in which a description of climate change and its attendant solutions will be brought to you by the good folks at ExxonMobil or Shell.”

TEMPERATURE GAUGE

Polar Meltdown

New research at both ends of the Earth shows a greening up — and not in a good way.

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate, with projections estimating a loss of up to 1,735 gigatons of ice per year by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed. One gigaton is the weight of 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, so that’s a lot of ice going into the sea. “This would put millions of lives at risk in coastal areas around the world, [with these areas] exposed to increased risks of flooding and submersion,” says Xavier Fettweis, head of the University of Liège’s Climatology Laboratory, who led the Greenland modeling research published in Geophysical Research Letters.