L.F.A.

Youth Today • 31st October 2022

'Every day was a bad day': Children working in agriculture aren’t protected equally

Jose Velasquez, 20, was only eight years old when he got his first job picking blueberries on a farm outside of Goldsboro, North Carolina. He was tasked with helping his mother fill up buckets of berries, then running them up the row. There, a crew...

The Margin • 4th October 2022

We glow in the dark

It was October 1995, just as the cool evenings set in, in Memphis, Tennessee, when things began making sense to Doris Bradshaw. Earlier that year, her 84-year-old grandmother, Susie Hall, had found a few drops of blood in her underwear.

New York Focus • 13th September 2022

The Price of Private Equity’s New York Power Plant Grab

In November 2021, without fanfare, and having received no public comments, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) issued a succinct declaratory ruling enabling a new company called Generation Bridge LLC to absorb a massive fossil fuel-burning...

Teen Vogue • 25th July 2022

Young Workers Are Bridging the Climate and Labor Movements

This piece originally appeared in Truthout. It is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. New momentum is buzzing through the North American labor movement,...

Youth Today • 29th November 2022

Youth take lead in mapping heat impacts

Growing up in arid Santa Paula, California, an oil town filled with citrus groves, Fabiola Gomez Flores had tricks for dodging the heat. Like many people she knew, her family lived in an apartment without air conditioning, so sometimes, on the hottest...

Truthout • 27th September 2022

Biden Promised "Good-Paying Union Jobs," But It Will Take Organizing to Get Them

Since the historic and controversial Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law in August, the economy has begun showing early signs of shifting and recalibrating beneath our feet.

The Guardian • 4th May 2022

How the oil and gas industry is trying to hold US public schools hostage

The oil and gas industry wants to play a word-and-picture association game with you. Think of four images: a brightly colored backpack stuffed with pencils, a smiling teacher with a tablet tucked under her arm, a pair of glasses resting on a stack of...

Truthout • 14th February 2022

Here’s How the Biden Administration Can Prevent Needless Deaths From Pollution

One year after a newly inaugurated President Biden committed to activating every bough of the government to address the climate crisis and a legacy of racial and environmental injustice — in Executive Order 14008 — elements of that elegant order are...

Truthout • 9th April 2022

Great Plains Farmers Push Back Against CO2 Pipelines Encroaching on Their Land

Farmers, ranchers, and other rural community members across five Great Plains states and Illinois — many of whom were previously sued by developers of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines wanting to build through their land — are finding their...

The Guardian • 16th December 2021

A ‘false solution’? How crypto mining became the oil industry’s new hope

In January of 2019, Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness, recently reunited prep school pals from Denver, drove out to the snow-covered plains of Wyoming to bring a piece of tech culture to the American heartland. Trembling in -20F (-29C) temperatures,...

Truthout • 14th July 2022

70,000 Acres of Federal Land Were Just Handed to the Fossil Fuel Sector

In direct violation of warnings by the International Energy Agency that new oil, gas and coal development should have ceased in 2021, and by UN Secretary General António Guterres that government support for fossil fuel production is “delusional,” the...

The Guardian • 27th May 2022

They once worked for big oil’s enablers. Now they refuse to be complicit

More than a century ago, fossil fuel firms hardly needed help maintaining their image. Coal-powered trains, oil-burning power plants and gas-heated houses were likened to patriotism and social progress. But over time, especially as industry scientists...

Truthout • 13th March 2022

Western US’s Worst Drought in 1,200 Years Brings Year-Long Fire Season

Ten weeks after the wind-whipped Marshall fire blasted through Boulder County, Colorado, on December 30, taking with it one man’s life and over 1,000 houses, some residents with the means to do so are now preparing to build back.

Truthout • 2nd March 2022

Youth Climate Activists: Our Answer to War Must Be Radical Exit From Fossil Fuel

Just before noon on Tuesday, March 1, following a morning of intermittent air-raid sirens, a tweet went live from an account geotagged to Independence Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. “We are scared,” its author wrote. “We need you to be there for us.”

Truthout • 19th December 2021

States Are Letting Utility Companies Cut Off Power Just as Winter Arrives

Millions of U.S. residents behind on bills are at risk of having their electricity, heat and ability to stir up a hot meal cut off on December 22 by private utility companies, just a day after the solstice heralds the colder states’ descent into true...

Truthout • 21st August 2021

Methane Is Flaring Out of Control. Biden Administration, Congress Must Step In.

This summer, methane got a nickname that stuck. Climate scientists and policy analysts have been calling the greenhouse gas a “low-hanging fruit” for years, but the term seems to have caught on more broadly among world leaders, journalists and...

Food and Environment Reporting Network • 13th December 2021

Biogas from America’s favorite meat: pollution solution or a prop for poultry?

When Wayne Morra bought six acres of land hedged by rolling cornfields in 1999, he was looking for some peace. A single father and a nursing instructor at Delaware Technical Community College, Morra considered his new home, in the tiny town of...

The Guardian • 21st September 2021

Will taxpayers bear the cost of cleaning up America’s abandoned oil wells?

Oil and gas companies have a century-old bad habit of drilling wells and ditching them. And while Congress finally has a plan to plug some abandoned wells, new proposals effectively pass the fossil fuel industry’s cleanup costs on to taxpayers and may...

Truthout • 10th August 2021

Fossil Fuel Companies Turn to “Green” Pipelines to Qualify for New Subsidies

On Monday, the world’s leading authority on climate science, the International Panel on Climate Change, issued the first part of its sixth and most dire assessment of the climate emergency, which UN Secretary General António Guterres characterized as...

The Guardian • 22nd April 2021

Pipeline tells Black Memphis landowners: sell us the rights to your land or get sued

The only things Karmen Johnson-Tutwiler has left to remind her of her mother are a few photographs and just under a quarter acre of land covered in bramble and wildflowers that backs up to a railroad track. When her mother, Sharon Watson, died in...