The United States is on the brink of its most consequential transformation since the New Deal—a colossal shift from a fossil fuel economy toward one based on cleaner and renewable sources of electric power. This difficult yet vital makeover, the sheer scope of it, and the obstacles to its success are at the heart of our May+June print magazine cover package. You will find those stories below, along with related work from our Climate Desk partners.

Yes in Our Backyards

It’s time progressives like me learned to love the green building boom.
—Bill McKibben

The Green Movement’s Best Weapon Has Become a Problem

How environmental laws are used to kill climate-friendly development.
—Chris Elmendorf

Think Globally, Build Like Hell Locally

How can we decarbonize the economy when we can’t even build housing?
—Clara Jeffery

What if Walmart Turned Its Parking Lots Into Solar Farms?

We asked experts to help crunch the numbers.
—Michael Mechanic

The Little City That Could

For Chelsea, Massachusetts, a new microgrid means energy resilience.
—Lois Parshley

What “Electrify Everything” Actually Looks Like

Get ready for a US building spree not seen in generations.
—Jesse D. Jenkins

Snapshots From a Clean Energy Future

Across America, microgrids are changing the power dynamic.
—Michael Mechanic

Big Utilities Are “Diabolical, Man!”

Unscrupulous monopolies endanger the transition to clean energy.
—David Roberts and David Pomerantz

From our Climate Desk partners

To Ditch Fossil Fuels, We’ll Need to Raise an Army of Electricians

Labor shortages could derail efforts to “electrify everything.”
—Emily Pontecorvo (Grist)

A Colorado Town Tried to Discourage Fossil Fuel Dependency. The Utility Wasn’t Having It.

How powerful energy interests meddle in local affairs.
—Nick Bowlin (High Country News)

The Woman Daring Us to Build a World Without Oil and Coal

Tzeporah Berman is pushing a new kind of nonproliferation treaty.
—Jude Isabella (Hakai Magazine)

Why Are We So Afraid of Nuclear Power?

It's greener than renewables and safer than fossil fuels—but facts be damned.
—Tyler J. Kelley (Undark)

The Next Big Thing in Recycling: Expired Solar Panels

As arrays age out, firms are looking to harvest valuable materials.
—Jon Hurdle (YaleE360)

Why Kentucky Is Dead Last in Wind and Solar Energy Production

Big Coal and climate denial paved its race to the bottom.
—James Bruggers and Dan Gearino (Inside Climate News)

The Double-Edged Sword of Deep Sea Mining

We need raw materials for electric cars—but there will be consequences.
—Avery Arena (Slate)

Arizona Utility Just Won’t Let This Historic Black Community Be

“We won, they lost, but they won’t accept it.”
—Nina Lakhani (The Guardian)

How Just a Fraction of EV Owners Could Protect the Power Grid

And get paid to do it.
—Matt Simon (Wired)

More partner stories

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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