climate and energy

  • The Trash Problem

    ByChris Connors Jr.

    Every bag of trash you leave at the curb gets weighed, priced, and driven somewhere. Where it lands isn’t chance. It follows almost the exact map federal regulators drew when they graded neighborhoods for lending in the 1930s, the practice known as redlining. That’s the trash problem: the poorest places take in the most of it, get paid a dollar a ton for keeping it, and lose far more than that in property values and school funding for decades after.

  • The Machine That Captured the State

    ByChris Connors Jr.

    Somewhere in Virginia, a windowless building the size of an airport draws the power of a small city, and you’re paying for it. Residential electric bills are up forty percent since 2021. The same servers raising your rates are running deportation maps for ICE. The data center, the electric bill, the federal contract, and the surveillance state have become one machine, and almost no one has explained how the pieces connect.