Inside Climate News – CREDO Blog – December 2025

Each year, the impacts of the climate crisis are increasingly felt across the country. Devastating wildfires from California to Alaska. Historic drought in the Colorado River watershed. Surging sea level rise along the East Coast. Record-breaking hurricane seasons in the South. Yet this year has also seen a sharp reversal in climate progress: regulatory rollbacks, policy changes, public servant purges, funding cuts, and data erasures. Journalism remains a powerful pillar of accountability, and the need for environmental reporting has never been clearer.

Inside Climate News is the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the country, providing essential environmental reporting for the public and decision-makers. Our journalists cover everything from fossil fuels to politics, food and agriculture, the clean energy transition, climate science, health, justice, super-pollutants, extreme weather and more. We serve as watchdogs of government, industry and advocacy groups and hold them accountable for their policies and actions. Our work is made available to anyone, with no paywall or subscription fee, and we give it away to more than 300 partner publications for free co-publication to further extend its reach and help uplift local news operations around the US.

We opened our doors in 2007 to cover climate change when the mainstream media wasn’t. Over ICN’s first ten years, we built a Pulitzer Prize-winning national climate newsroom. However, another dangerous gap opened with the rapid decline of local news operations. In 2018, we decided that reviving local environmental journalism would be our next challenge to take on.

Through ICN Local, we are opening bureaus across the country to connect readers with what’s happening to their air, land, and water. We now have bureaus in California, Texas, Arizona, Wyoming, Iowa, Alabama, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Baltimore, and New York City.

This year has seen ICN publish some of our most ambitious investigative reporting yet. Our biggest stories of 2025 include:

• Trump 2.0: Tracking the Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental protection in America with over 350 stories and counting. It includes a scorecard that tracks federal environmental climate lawsuits where the administration is a party.

• Planet China: Reporting on China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative that is reshaping the globe with massive infrastructure projects – from Indonesia to Peru to Zambia – with severe consequences for human rights and the environment.

• Upcharge: Following the unprecedented build-out of data centers underway to meet AI’s demand for compute power. Our series of 40 stories (and counting) exposes the staggering amounts of electricity and water required, reveals its impacts on household electricity prices, and follows the communities fighting back.

Our work is resonating loudly. We have 350,000 dedicated subscribers and our pageviews have doubled since 2025. Re-publications of our work from our media partners are up 50%, and our partnership network now spans over 300 outlets, from national outlets like NPR and WIRED, major dailies like The Texas Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, and small town shops like the Laurinburg Exchange (population 15,000) and Marfa Public Radio.

In 2025, ICN’s reporting been found in OSHA public comments; on the front page of papers from San Antonio to Pittsburgh; cited in a ruling by the Texas Supreme Court; in USGS conferences on orphan wells; in EPA newsletters; in rural Pennsylvania town halls; in reports and handouts by local and state environmental advocacy groups; and even in the American Mathematical Society’s monthly blog. We have reined in polluters, inspired new bills, and empowered communities to act.

The climate crisis is here. We will keep following the stories and closing gaps in coverage to ensure that it can’t be ignored.

This month, you can vote to help CREDO distribute a portion of our monthly grant to Inside Climate News and help them further invest in reporting the facts about the climate crisis. Visit CREDODonations.com this December to cast your vote.