The Trump budget proposal for the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t just slash funding for the EPA. It contains a less-noticed but important policy shift: eliminating federal enforcement where states and the EPA share enforcement authority. The budget plan directs the EPA to stop enforcing laws to protect clean air and water in most cases, based on the false assumption that if the EPA pulls back, the states can pick up the slack. Here’s why that’s wrong.

First, states often don’t enforce the laws within their own borders when the people primarily harmed live downwind or downriver in another state. States don’t want to spend their money or their political capital to benefit other states. The federal government has the responsibility to protect everyone — like the millions of people on the East Coast who suffer the effects from large air polluters in the Midwest.

Geothermal development in the Kenyan Rift Valley shows that even renewable energy can be unsustainable in fragile environments.

The corporate takeover of the International Society for Biosafety Research (ISBR) and its biennial ISGBMO conference is a case study in the methods and the goals of the biotech industry. It exemplifies industry efforts to capture international GMO regulation and showcases the specific regulatory objectives of the biotech industry.

The global warming situation is absolutely crazy.  Millions of people are already experiencing drought, famine, floods, wildfires, superstorms and other climate disasters.  As a species, we are teetering on the edge of full-blown catastrophe, with extinction a distinct possibility.  Yet, we can’t seem to put in place obvious solutions that are sitting right there in front of us.

There’s nothing new about fast food corporations unleashing environmental chaos to maximize their profits. But the recent explosion of palm oil usage is a new threat. Burger King is at the front of the pack of corporations abusing human rights and the environment to satisfy its ever-growing appetite for the oil.

Burger King has always been a corporation defined by its competition. But now it is in danger of becoming the leader in a competition nobody should want to win: fueling the development of rapacious oil palm plantations. Burger King is one of a number of food and drink corporations that rely on palm oil for everything from fry oil to puddings. The recent increase in its use has been exponential: 485 percent in the last decade alone.

Synthetic biology, commonly defined as the science of manipulating or editing genomes to engineer new living organisms, is basically genetic engineering 2.0. This rapidly growing biotech field is expected to be worth $38.7 billion by 2020. And right now, gene drives are the most exciting – and most potentially dangerous – new tool in the bio-hacking toolkit.