The Year in Green

In 2025, Truthdig chronicled the evolution and spread of climate denial, profiled activists and politicians at all levels taking on the Trump administration and drilled deep into the ecological cost of the burgeoning artificial intelligence tech boom. We also began partnerships with Covering Climate Now and The 89 Percent Project, reporting networks that allow us to amplify and contribute to coverage by hundreds of like-minded news outlets around the world.  

For two decades, Truthdig has reported on the fight to preserve a living planet. Here are just a few of our most read environmental stories of the year.

This is the year AI became ubiquitous. But while the economic and creative promises of its boosters have yet to materialize, the ecological cost is real, underappreciated and growing. In “The Ecological Cost of AI Is Much Higher Than You Think,” Alistair Alexander explains how the data centers needed to power AI come with catastrophically high environmental and health price tags.

The year began with devastating wildfires in California that again exposed the fragility of the state’s water infrastructure. In “Killing California for a Snack,” Yasha Levine showed why pistachio oligarchs Lynda and Stewart Resnick have become symbols of the unsustainable and profoundly unjust water politics upon which the California dream is built. 

In a different corner of the West, a site that is sacred to the Western Apache of southeast Arizona is set to be destroyed for a copper mine, thanks to a recent decision by the Supreme Court. In “A True American Tale: Indigenous Rights vs. Corporate Greed,” Nicolle Okoren spoke to the coalition that is fighting to stop the destruction of Oak Flat and prevent the U.S. government from breaking yet another treaty with America’s Indigenous peoples. 

Justin Nobel continued his Dig reporting project, “Inside West Virginia’s Chernobyl,” with a story about one of the teenagers who unknowingly exposed herself to radioactivity at the Fairmont Brine Processing plant. In “West Virginia’s Radioactive Party Zone,” 21-year old Ashlin Bailey shared her memories of nights spent partying at the abandoned plant and described how learning the truth about the toxic site turned her into an activist and advocate. As she told Nobel, “My will is stronger to change things that are wrong than to be scared of things.”

In her first piece for Truthdig, Dana Drugmand reported on how state and local officials have entered “Trench Warfare Mode” to protect climate laws and regulations. And in her second, she met the young climate activists who are suing the Trump administration “Like the Future Depends on It.”