Spotlight

Fossil Fuel Infrastructure is Closer Than You (Want to) Think

Boston University’s School of Public Health and the Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) have released a new study that reveals the “sprawling energy infrastructure network that’s largely hidden from view and in close proximity to millions of Americans. They found that 46.6 million people in the contiguous United States, many in cities, live within about a mile of at least one piece of fossil fuel infrastructure—and that it could be putting their health at risk.

January 26, 2026 No Comments

“Judith Enck on the Plastic Crisis—and How to Reduce It at the Source”

Writing for The River, Brian K. Mahoney reviews a new book by former EPA official Judith Enck entitled The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and the Planet Before It’s Too Late. Enck makes the case that plastic pollution isn’t just a matter of personal responsibility. We haven’t all failed to recycle, reuse, and reduce. This narrative, she writes, has been developed to allow the plastics industry—fossil fuel and chemical—to perpetrate environmental injustice.

January 16, 2026 No Comments

WHOI: Sea Level Rise is Accelerating (despite government reports)

A new study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute contradicts a July, 2025 report form the US Department of Energy that found no evidence of climate-related impacts on sea level rises. The WHOI researchers have reached a dramatically different conclusion.

December 19, 2025 No Comments

Predicting Weather: AI Doesn’t Always Get it Right

A new report by the MIT Climate Grand Challenges team reveals that simple, science-based climate prediction models can outperform deep-learning approaches when predicting future temperature changes. Deep learning does have great potential for estimating more complex variables like rainfall.

November 4, 2025 No Comments

“Water is coming for the Seaport; the whole city will be poorer for it.”

The “cash cow” that is the Boston Seaport is increasingly at risk. According to a Boston Globe report by Catherine Carlock and Yoohyun Jung, “Rising seas threaten to reclaim those old mud flats, and, together with more frequent and severe storms, could swamp the neighborhood that has risen atop them. In all, 99 percent of what’s been built in the Seaport in the last quarter-century is at risk of flooding by 2050, according to a recent analysis from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.”

October 28, 2025 No Comments

City Living Isn’t Good for Tree Microbiomes

A new study published in Nature Cities (October 3m 2025) warns that Boston’s oak trees contain far more “bad” microbes, like pathogens and plant decomposers, than beneficial ones. According to the study’s lead author Kathryn Atherton (a former Boston University Ph.D. student in the Urban Biogeoscience and Environmental Health program), the trees are succumbing to city stressors like heat, drought, and atmospheric aerosol deposition (pollution).

October 7, 2025 No Comments