Global Climate | ModeShift

Northern Michigan’s Extreme Climate Disaster

by Keith SchneiderMay 14, 2026May 14, 20260

On April 7, 2026, a light drizzle began to fall from the dark clouds over the forests of Michigan’s lower peninsula. A spring rain, nothing especially unusual in a region of uncommonly clean lakes, the magnificent shorelines of two Great Lakes, over a dozen rivers supporting healthy fisheries, and so many places of solitude serenaded by flowing water. Oh, there was one more ecological feature that set northern Michigan apart. It rarely suffered the extreme …

Utah’s Big Nuclear Bet – Feasible or Fantasy?

by Keith SchneiderMay 14, 2026May 14, 20260

BRIGHAM CITY – The gala premiere for Utah’s audacious plan to build a “full scale nuclear energy ecosystem” occurred last November in this city famous for peaches, not atoms. Gov. Spencer Cox and Brigham City Mayor D.J. Bott, trading broad smiles and emphatic handshakes, unveiled a momentous plan to remake this city of 20,000 into the West’s epicenter of commercial nuclear energy development. Their vision, ambitious and expansive, includes a new training center for thousands …

Great Lakes Nuclear Revival Fortified by Ample Water, $Billions In Public Financing

by Keith SchneiderMarch 4, 2026March 4, 20260

COVERT TOWNSHIP, MICH. – As a study in troubled operation, the Palisades Nuclear Plant once was ranked by the federal government as one of the four worst-performing nuclear plants in the country. The 51-year old plant closed in 2022, joining the Big Rock Point nuclear plant near Charlevoix and 11 others decommissioned outside Michigan in what appeared to represent the sunset of the era of splitting atoms to produce electricity. Not so fast. Sometime in …

Jolted by Climate Change, Youth Perch with Strength and Vision

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 4, 2026February 4, 20260

Late last month, Jonathan Fisher, one of the good people devoted to changing the world, got in touch to pitch me on a “participatory photography” project. Fisher was born and raised in Bronx, New York, and after spending much of his life helping manage the New York City subway system, he switched tracks. In 2010 Fisher joined another retired transit colleague, George Carrano, to help start Seeing For Ourselves, a nonprofit that “equips and trains marginalized …

Jane Goodall’s Legacy Included Protecting Clean Water

by Keith SchneiderOctober 17, 2025October 17, 20250

For just one mournful yet brilliant day — the first day of October 2025, the day Jane Goodall died — the deepening menace of our era was eased by the shining example of her life. People around the world took time to simultaneously grieve her passing and exult in her enduring achievements as scientist, conservationist, and protector of wildlife. For once, there was no dissent. Jane Goodall fully merited the public’s laurels. She spent many …

Is Water the Unmentioned Reason for Trump’s Interest in Greenland?

by Keith SchneiderApril 2, 2025April 2, 20250

Say this much, President Trump’s vow to “go as far as we have to” to control Greenland is pernicious, consistent, and ironic. Though he’s obscured his reasons for bringing the world’s largest island under American management, Trump’s aides and geopolitical experts offer three justifications. The first: gaining access to critical minerals, even those for batteries to power the electric vehicles that Trump purportedly dislikes. The second: securing a larger military perch at the top of …

Jason Rowntree’s Cattle Grazing Practices Enhance Water and Environmental Quality

by Keith SchneiderAugust 16, 2024August 16, 20240

LAKE CITY, MI – Two facts about Michigan agriculture are scarcely recognized outside the fences and beyond the drainage ditches of the state’s 45,000 farms. The first: farming is among the most technologically sophisticated industrial sectors in Michigan and every other state. Second: livestock farms are the state’s largest source of water pollution from toxic nitrates and phosphorus, and air pollution from methane, a powerful climate change gas. Here on Michigan State University’s 1,100-acre livestock …

Ethanol and Methane Put US Farms at Center of US Energy Strategy

by Keith SchneiderApril 4, 2023April 4, 20231

With the exception of federal and state programs to convert corn into ethanol and soybeans into biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks the United States has never regarded farming as a primary energy producer. That changed when Congress passed the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act last August. The law provides $140 billion in tax incentives, direct loans, and grants to replace fossil fuels with cleaner renewable energy that lowers emissions of carbon dioxide. …

New Climate Law Includes Provisions That Will Make Midwest Water Pollution Worse

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 8, 2023February 8, 20231

Earlier this year I was awarded an investigative fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to pursue the causes and serious consequences of farm-related nutrient pollution in the nine-state Corn Belt at the center of the country. The project, undertaken with the collaboration of Circle of Blue, The New Lede, and The Guardian, builds on what I learned in 2022 reporting for Circle of Blue on phosphorus contamination for “Danger Looms Where Algae Blooms.” When I …

Earth Day 2022 – Resisting Panic

by Keith SchneiderApril 21, 2022November 24, 20220

More than 30 years ago James E. Hansen, the eminent American physicist, told a U.S. Senate hearing in the hot and dry summer of 1988 that the Earth was warmer than it had ever been since the invention of modern instrumentation, and that â€œwith 99 percent confidenceâ€ the cause was human-induced global warming. As a moment in contemporary American environmental history, Hansen’s appearance before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources ranks with the …