President James Buchanan signed the bill creating the Dakota Territory in 1861 which originally included an area covered today by North and South Dakota as well as Montana and Wyoming. In 1889, North Dakota became a state. “Dakota” is a Native American (Sioux) word for “friend.”
North Dakota is the nation’s nineteenth largest state in area and fourth smallest by population, home to over 790 thousand people with a land area of almost 70 thousand square miles. The Great Plains constitute most of North Dakota’s land; however, at the state’s border with Montana, the land transforms into the rocky Badlands.
North Dakota is vulnerable to inland flooding as well as drought. The frequency of precipitation events has increased dramatically in recent years. In the Red River watershed, river flows during the worst flood of the year have been increasing by about 10% per decade since the 1920s.
A changing climate will have varying effects on North Dakota’s agriculture. Warmer temperatures extend the growing season and may actually increase yields of crops like soybean and corn. On the other hand, the 2017 Northern Plains drought led to crop failures, culling of livestock herds, wildfires, and low water supplies, exceeding $2.5 billion in losses. Over the next 70 years, the number of days above 100 degrees is expected to double in North Dakota, and these hotter conditions can dry soil and impact the health of crops.
There are four federally-recognized tribes in North Dakota today, among them the Standing Rock Sioux, who made headlines around the globe for their resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline amidst militarized construction efforts that the Tribe argued violated treaty rights. Represented by Earthjustice, the Standing Rock Sioux filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2016. A 2020 ruling found that the Corps failed to meet the requirements of NEPA (or the National Environmental Policy Act, which a North Dakota federal judge just struck down) by not producing an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The Corps produced a draft EIS in 2023, six years after the pipeline began operation, even though an environmental review is usually required before construction, and is planning to release a final EIS in 2025.
Weirdly, the pipeline company is currently suing Greenpeace, filing lawsuits in 2017 and in 2019 claiming Greenpeace incited the protests and caused expensive delays for construction. If Energy Transfer wins the case, which went to court on February 24, 2025, experts say it could shut down Greenpeace entirely and set a dangerous precedent for lawsuits against environmental organizing. As Greenpeace USA senior legal counsel Deepa Padmanabha told The Washington Post, “There was no Greenpeace campaign and that was very intentional, because this was an indigenous-led resistance.”
North Dakota is the seventh-largest coal producing state in the nation, and its five largest power plants by generation are coal-fired. In 2023, coal accounted for 55% of North Dakota’s electricity generation, down from 63% in 2019. The second largest source of electricity generation is renewables, mostly wind power which generated 36% of electricity in 2023. North Dakota is sixth in the nation for wind generated electricity, and wind power has more than doubled since 2015. Hydropower contributed 4% of electricity in 2023, while natural gas contributed 5%. North Dakota is one of two states with no utility-scale solar power, and the state has no nuclear power plants.
North Dakota enacted legislation establishing an objective that 10% of all retail electricity sold in the state be obtained from renewable energy by 2015. This goal has been exceeded.
In 2023, North Dakota embarked on developing its first environmental sustainability plan, aimed at identifying practical opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This Climate Action Plan was developed under the EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which involves two phases: a Priority Climate Action Plan due March 1, 2024, and a Comprehensive Climate Action Plan due December 1, 2025. North Dakota’s PCAP involves five main actions: an Energy Conservation Grant Program, an Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture Program, a Soil Health Cover Crop Program, LED Streetlight Upgrades in the city of Fargo, and a Statewide Tree Planting Initiative. However, some environmentalists in the state criticize the plan for avoiding any discussion of emissions or the oil, gas and coal industry.
A plan, conceived in 2015, to turn the Milton R. Young coal-fired power plant in Olivery County, North Dakota into a carbon storage facility is currently in its final development phase. If it begins its commercial operation in 2029 as intended, Project Tundra will be one of the largest carbon capture sites in the world, and the largest permitted carbon storage facility in the United States.
The Climate Policy Dashboard tracks North Dakota’s progress across seven environmental policy areas. According to the Dashboard, North Dakota still has NOT created: climate advisory bodies, environmental justice mapping tools, Just Transition plans, social cost of carbon calculation, clean energy plans, or zero-emission vehicle mandates. It has only partially enacted: weatherization funding, net metering, and shared renewables.
CREDIT: INSIDECLIMATE NEWS
