Environmental News

MPR News is your source for environment news from Minnesota and across the country.

Getting to Green: Minnesota’s energy future

Getting to Green is an MPR News series that shares stories about Minnesota’s clean energy transition, including what needs to be done to get there.

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Climate Cast

Listen to Climate Cast, the MPR News podcast all about our changing climate and its impact in Minnesota and worldwide.

What if houses were warm-blooded, and got cold in December like we do? What if? Then, you'd do to them what we do to ourselves: you bundle them up in something warm. That's what this charming little video (an ad for a natural gas company) does: it dresses a house, covering floors, banisters, radiators, the odd sneaker, toys, stoves, teapots with comfy looking wool. Even the shower gets a wool-over.
SW Minn. residential wells run dry as drought drags on
As severe drought continues across most of the state, residential wells are going dry in parts of Minnesota. The southwest region of the state has been especially hard-hit, making residents and officials scramble to find new water sources as underground aquifers shrink.
Tuning out the news of a massacre may be the best coping mechanism
Today on the MPR News Update, Minnesota mental health professionals and educators address mass shootings. We hear from the son of a victim of a mass shooting in Minneapolis. Also, we have the latest on the Cold Spring police officer killing, a plan to move sand around in Wabasha, and on how the group that pressed for construction of a new St. Croix River bridge is keeping the pressure on.
A Metropolitan Council committee will consider on Monday whether to recommend a half-million-dollar grant to clean up a polluted industrial site where the Surly Brewing Co. wants to build a new facility.
In its first major regulation since the election, the Obama administration on Friday imposed a new air quality standard that reduces by 20 percent the maximum amount of soot released into the air from smokestacks, diesel trucks and other sources of pollution.