ModeShift

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 …

‘Most Momentous Day’ in EPA History? Spare Me.

by Keith SchneiderMarch 24, 2025March 24, 20250

One of the signature moments in contemporary American environmentalism occurred on October 6, 1967, in Suffolk County, New York, when nine scientists and a lawyer formally launched the Environmental Defense Fund. Now a $314-million-a-year global organization with 750 employees, EDF went on to influence pivotal environmental achievements, among them the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and then helping the agency ban DDT and close the ozone hole. In January, Suffolk County bobbed …

Surprise! Trump Order to Increase Timber Harvest Could Make Sense

by Keith SchneiderMarch 13, 2025March 13, 20250

Among the maddening features of Donald Trump’s presidency is this: His instinct for identifying structural weaknesses is keen. His capacity to decide and execute solutions is generally terrible. How else to explain that, for Trump, stopping the killing in Ukraine means siding with the dictator who started the conflict. Or that Trump identified the deep resentment of working people who supported him, but proposes stark changes in health, food, job, childcare, and retirement programs that …

A Big Solar Plant Planned For Hanford

by Keith SchneiderMarch 7, 2025March 8, 20251

There are still a number of Americans, readers of the New York Times, who recall the Pulitzer-nominated project I led in the late 1980s and early 1990s to uncover the decrepit and dangerous conditions at the nation’s secret nuclear weapons production facilities. I reported from all the weapons production sites in 12 states, including the Hanford reservation where the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was manufactured. In December 2024 I returned to Hanford to interview …

Trump’s Attack on Science Drowns Common Sense

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 26, 2025February 26, 20250

Attacking the virtue and validity of research science is nothing new in certain corners of American culture. A century ago, in the famous Scopes trial, a high school teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching evolutionary biology in violation of state law and religious doctrine. In the 21st century, Christian conservatives are at it again. They’ve united with fossil fuel industry executives to attack the scientific research that projects with astonishing accuracy the pace and damaging …

White Plains High School 50 Years On

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 16, 2025February 17, 20251

Woody Allen taught me years ago that “80 percent of success is just showing up.” So I did last October, to attend the White Plains High School class of 1974’s 50th reunion. Let’s just say this straightaway. It was a blast, just like the two others I attended, the 35th and 40th reunions. The 50th was so well staged in an event center on North Broadway in White Plains close to end of the route …

Muhammad Ali’s Courage and Compassion

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 15, 2025February 15, 20250

The memories and the message are everywhere inside the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky. That’s the point of a museum dedicated to honor the life and achievements of the greatest American athlete of the 20th century, and the courage of an activist who influenced the two most significant social and political movements of the post-World War Two era – civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam war. I had the chance to visit the …

Trump’s Plastic Trigger

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 14, 2025February 14, 20250

In mid-December 2020, a month before he left office, President Donald Trump quietly signed the Save Our Seas Act to put the federal government’s shoulder to the work of developing alternatives to disposable plastic products, encouraging recycling, and limiting plastic debris in the world’s oceans. It took years of civic activism about the harm plastic causes to human health and the marine environment to convince Trump to sign the law, which helped prompt leaders of …

CeCe Butcher’s Next Turn In An Artist’s Life

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 3, 2025February 4, 20251

SOMERSET, KY — The studio of CeCe Butcher, the gifted Kentucky artist, is a corner of her home, fit for knitting or painting, close to the shoreline of Lake Cumberland. It’s an early winter day. Calm, quiet, serene. Light from big windows finds a flourish of long-handled brushes, like a bouquet set in a cup. Paints of every color grace the tabletops. A formidable leafy dieffenbachia does its work keeping the air clear from its …

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 …