Great Lakes | 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 …

Political Left, Right, and Everyone Between, United Over Water in Indiana

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 3, 2025September 3, 20250

Residents of Boone County, Indiana, had a lot to be anxious about in 2023 when state authorities revealed the scope of a nearly 10,000-acre innovation and high-tech manufacturing park they were developing outside Lebanon, a half-hour drive northwest of Indianapolis. One concern was the public taxpayer cost of the LEAP project – short for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace – now nearing $1 billion. Another was the way authorities made big decisions for the “mega site with …

Toxic Algae Bloom Forecasts Are a Study in Negligence

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

Back in 2003, when researchers began predicting with excellent accuracy how much of western Lake Erie would be coated with the green slime of a toxic algae bloom, there were important points to be made. The annual forecasts, largely funded with $20 million annually from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provided water quality regulators and public health authorities in the U.S. and Canada real-time assessments on where the poisonous algae, which is capable of …

Trump’s “Thrilling New Era” Is A Gas

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 31, 2025January 31, 20250

President Trump blew a lot of smoke at his inauguration. He promised more oil production, less regulation, fewer clean cars, less clean energy. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, and opened Alaska to more development. Like dry branches dropped in a dark forest, Trump’s inaugural pledges and the executive orders that came shortly thereafter were dry kindling stoking the bonfire of fossil fuels. The president’s allegiance to producing more carbon pollution set …

Halt the Oil Flow Across Straits of Mackinac

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 26, 2025January 26, 20250

From the perspective of Americans who live in Michigan and Wisconsin, the Line 5 oil pipeline across the Straits of Mackinac makes no sense. It’s old, 72 years old. Line 5 is older than the U.S. interstate highway system, and that’s been in major repair for a quarter century. It’s in the wrong place. The pipeline’s 645 mile-long corridor from Superior, Wisconsin, to a refinery in Sarnia, Ontario, includes 4.5 miles of bottomlands submerged 130 …