EnviroPolitics Blog

Lithuania’s Plan to Combat Global Warming (and Russian Tanks)

By Avril Silva, The New York Times, May 13, 2026

In a scrubby forest an hour outside the Lithuanian capital on a recent day this spring, excavators were digging ditches and tree harvesters were whirring in an effort to restore a waterlogged, mosquito-infested ecosystem that was drained in the Soviet era.

The reason is twofold: to help the climate and to defend the country from invasion.

The area was once a vast peat bog, and peat bogs are highly efficient at storing planet-warming carbon dioxide. They also happen to be very good at stopping tanks, because the spongy soil can’t support the weight of armored vehicles. The tanks get stuck and sink, often permanently.

Tomas Godliauskas, the Lithuanian vice minister of defense, said the bogs would form “an integral defensive line” when combined with other military tactics. The project also has the advantage of being relatively inexpensive compared with other measures such as tank ditches and minefields, he added.

Lithuania isn’t the only European Union country using bogs to deter a Russian invasion. Latvia and Finland, for example, are also seeking to restore bogs for both environmental and defense purposes. And Ukrainian bogs helped to delay Russian troops in a failed push toward Kyiv in 2022.

Read the full story here

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U.S.-China Summit: The waning power of US fossil fuel leverage

This week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping illustrates the waning power of US leverage over fossil fuels.

One of the key potential outcomes of the summit is a deal to extend a moratorium on Chinese export restrictions, which are now set to kick back in around the time of the midterm elections in November. Even with the exemption, Chinese export volumes for unpronounceable but irreplaceable things like yttrium and dysprosium are still way down, and prices are way up.

The Trump administration is keenly aware of its rare earths Achilles heel, and has rolled out price floors, equity investments, federal stockpiling, and more — what Gracelin Baskaran of the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently called “the boldest domestic industrial policy in modern history” — to prop up new US mining companies and form new foreign trade deals that sidestep China. But given the lead times required to dig new mines, build new processing factories, and train a new generation of rare earths engineers, none of that will have a meaningful impact on the market until well after Trump leaves office. In the meantime, there’s nothing the US can do but continue to shop in Beijing.

Compare that to Trump’s side of the negotiating ledger. Of course there are some things, such as the most advanced Nvidia AI chips, that China wants and only the US can proffer. But oil and gas, which are usually Trump’s trade cudgel of choice, won’t have much heft with Xi; China is well-supplied with reserves of both and has other options, including US adversaries like Russia, for getting more.

The upshot is that this week, Trump needs a deal on rare earths more than Xi needs a deal on fossil fuels. And that dynamic won’t be changing anytime soon.

The Trump administration “has recognized there’s a national security problem that has to be solved, and our normal processes aren’t solving it,” Barbara Humpton, CEO of USA Rare Earth, told me last month at Semafor World Economy. “But we’re not playing a game of competition against China — we’re simply playing the game of resilience.”

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The Hole in the Ice at the End of the Earth

*Won Sang Lee, right, and a colleague after setting up a tent on the Thwaites glacier*

By Raymond Zhong, The New York Times

The glacier’s rippling mass sprawled from the hills and volcanoes of the Antarctic interior out into the Southern Ocean, covering an area the size of Britain. Won Sang Lee stood on its ice, his tall frame wrapped in a red polar suit, and watched his team at work. Nine scientists, engineers, and guides, some of whom had been planning this mission with him for more than half a decade. Now, they were at its final stage: drilling through the melting glacier to reach the vast ocean cavity beneath it.

They were tired and hungry. They kept themselves going with tea, crackers, and protein bars. They’d crossed the world’s wildest ocean, flown in helicopters over the wasteland of the glacier’s wounded ice, then toiled for days through lashing winds, all for a shot, a single shot, at piercing the ice at the bottom of the Earth. Periodically, they heard booms as the glacier shifted and crevassed under their feet.

The team’s scientists knew that warm currents were eating away at this glacier, the Thwaites, from below. They also knew that, sometime in the coming decades, Thwaites could give out entirely, causing so much ice to heave into the ocean over several centuries that it might raise global sea levels by more than 15 feet

Read the full story here

Raymond Zhong spent two months aboard the research ship Araon

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Opinion: PJM Data Conflicts With The Perception Of A Power Crisis

By Bill Wolf in Wolfenotes

Why are NJ ratepayers paying billions of dollars and outrageous PJM “capacity charges”, when PJM is exporting power and maintaining HUGE and EXPENSIVE reserve margins?

Who will ask Gov. Sherrill those questions?

Virtually every news article and statement by public officials about rising electric energy costs – especially including NJ “energy emergency” Gov. Sherrill – emphasizes an alleged growing crisis due to increasing power demand (mostly from data centers) outstripping available supply (due to coal plant retirements).

They claim that this mismatch between growing demand and shrinking supply explains skyrocketing electricity prices and threatens “grid reliability”.

The regional grid operator, PJM, even threatens that rolling blackouts and brownouts are likely.

But PJM’s own data belie these claims.

It’s mostly exaggerations, spin, and falsehoods used to justify skyrocketing energy prices, PJM’s rigged market, and outrageous corporate profits, and to pressure governments to enact fossil and nuclear power-dominated “reliable” “base load” generation capacity and reduce the role of renewable energy options.

The so-called “growing data center demand” is an unreliable projection and an exaggeration.

Read the full essay here

Bill Wolfe is a former NJDEP official and a long-time environmental blogger

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GOP leader wants NJ to withdraw from RGGI, like Pennsylvania

New Jersey Senate Republican Leader Anthony M. Bucco (R-Morris, Passaic) is urging immediate action to address rising energy costs, calling on Governor Mikie Sherrill to consider Republican-led proposals that would deliver immediate relief and sustained relief for New Jersey families.

“Ending New Jersey’s decades-old moratorium on nuclear power plants was a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done to actually bring energy costs down,” said Senator Bucco. “I’ve heard from concerned constituents in my district, and the dollar amount that people are paying on their monthly bills is not decreasing. That is a clear sign that the current policy of freezing electricity rates is not working.”

According to a new report from the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, New Jersey experienced the largest regional spike in energy bills in 2025 (16.9%) compared to Pennsylvania (12.1%) and Delaware (6.1%). Experts are warning that additional price spikes could occur in the coming months.

Senator Bucco and fellow Republican lawmakers in the Senate have proposed a series of initiatives to directly lower energy bills, which were frequently dismissed by Governor Sherrill’s predecessor.

Among the Republican-led proposals is Senator Bucco’s legislation, S2463, to withdraw New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Recognizing that RGGI was causing consumer energy bills to skyrocket, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D), pulled out of RGGI in 2025.

“For months, I’ve warned that New Jersey’s participation in RGGI only serves as a hidden tax on energy that gets passed directly onto residents who are already struggling to afford their bills,” said Senator Bucco. “If other Democrat governors are pulling out of RGGI, why can’t we? Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize an ideological agenda that is making our state less affordable and less competitive.”

Senate Republicans have also introduced the following bills to address rising costs:

* S2466, introduced by Senator Anthony Bucco (R-Morris, Passaic) and Senator Kristin Corrado (R-Bergen, Essex, Passaic). This bill would lower the state sales tax from 6.625 percent to 6 percent, effectively lowering costs on everything from energy to groceries; and

* S1932, introduced by Senator Latham Tiver (R-Atlantic, Burlington) and Senator Joe Pennacchio (R-Morris, Passaic). This bill would suspend the sales and use tax and the Societal Benefits charge (SBC) on electric and gas bills, saving the average household hundreds of dollars in energy costs.

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Drones can provide farmers with a less expensive mapping tool

By Jeff Mulhollem, Penn State University News

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Environmental scientists and water resource managers need precise, high-resolution maps to reveal areas that farmers should avoid when planting crops, to limit the pollution of waters with phosphorus from fertilizer or manure. Making those maps has depended on an expensive, sometimes unavailable technology, but a team led by Penn State researchers has developed a cheaper approach that can be just as effective.

The researchers’ novel system, detailed in a paper available online ahead of publication in the June issue of Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, uses drones and photogrammetry, a technology that develops reliable 3D spatial information by analyzing overlapping 2D photographs. With this system, the team can map hydrologically sensitive areas — locations where water tends to collect or flow, creating high runoff risk — and phosphorus critical source areas, where phosphorus is likely to wash into streams and pollute them. They found that the drone-photogrammetry approach was cheaper, more accessible and nearly as accurate as conventional mapping.

The team tested the accuracy and resolution of maps created with the new method against maps made using a technology called LiDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging. It is a remote-sensing technology deployed from aircraft or satellites that uses laser pulses to measure distances to the Earth, creating precise, high-resolution maps. LiDAR is accurate but expensive and not always accessible, according to study co-author and team leader Patrick Drohan, professor of pedology in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.

Read the full story here

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