If you’ve followed the world of diesel trucks for the past decade, you’re no doubt aware of the drama surrounding aftermarket tuners and defeat devices used to skirt emissions requirements. For years, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice have gone after manufacturers, distributors, and importers of these devices, as well as individuals who use them on their trucks, for violating the Clean Air Act.

Historically, the DoJ has gone after perpetrators by pursuing civil penalties in the form of fines. But in some cases, the agency has also pursued criminal penalties that include higher fines, probation, or actual jail time. The past few years have seen a handful of high-profile cases in which diesel tuners have been sent to prison for designing, installing, or selling defeat devices, in addition to having to pay civil penalties.

That policy is apparently coming to an end. The Department of Justice announced today it plans to stop pursuing criminal charges for these crimes. Here’s what that means.

Civil Charges Over Criminal Charges

The DoJ announced yesterday afternoon on X that it will no longer pursue criminal charges related to the Clean Air Act when the allegations involve tampering with onboard vehicle devices.

Today, @TheJusticeDept is exercising its enforcement discretion to no longer pursue criminal charges under the Clean Air Act based on allegations of tampering with onboard diagnostic devices in motor vehicles.

— DOJ Environment and Natural Resources Division (@DOJEnvironment) January 21, 2026

In a follow-up post, the DoJ said it was “committed to sound enforcement principles, efficient use of government resources, and avoiding overcriminalization of federal environmental law.” The DoJ also clarified that it would still pursue civil penalties “when appropriate.”

A DoJ memo obtained by CBS News ordered federal prosecutors to stop pursuing criminal cases against those selling, distributing, or manufacturing defeat devices.

The edict, issued by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, marks the first time that the Justice Department has formally taken steps to scale back environmental criminal enforcement since President Trump took office in January 2025.

In the memo, Blanche wrote that he was taking this step “to ensure consistent and fair prosecution under the law, as well as to ensure the best use of Department resources,” according to a copy reviewed by CBS News.

The decision means that violators can no longer be subject to jail time, but it doesn’t mean they’re totally off the hook. The Clean Air Act is still enforceable by the EPA, and civil penalties are still applicable. That means theoretically, Cummins would’ve still had to pay for its near-$1.7-billion civil fine for installing emissions-cheating devices on engines found in Ram 2500 and 3500 pickups.

As for why the DoJ made this change, CBS claims the push was made by a guy named Adam Gustafson, an assistant attorney general appointed in February.

The push to kill all of the pending defeat device cases was championed by Adam Gustafson, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division who previously worked for Boeing and at the EPA, according to two of those sources and government records seen by CBS News.

He has not specialized in the practice of criminal environmental law.

Although Gustafson has previously signed off on at least some of the pending indictments involving after-market defeat devices, a new and novel defense bar argument that surfaced over the summer later changed his mind, the sources said.

That argument, according to CBS, came from the owners of Racing Performance Maintenance Northwest, a shop in Washington state. The two owners were convicted last year of conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act after pleading guilty to tampering with a monitoring device, and each was fined $10,000 and sentenced to three years of probation. They later appealed the conviction using a theory that Gustafson posited as worthwhile.

Her attorneys put forth a legal theory alleging that she cannot be held criminally liable because the software associated with emission controls, known as “onboard diagnostic systems,” is not “required to be maintained” under the Clean Air Act.

For this reason, they claimed that such an offense can only be charged as a civil violation, not a criminal one.

Whether you agree with that argument will depend on a lot of things, but for what it’s worth, it sounds like the folks at the EPA have a different opinion. From CBS:

An internal EPA memo reviewed by CBS News shows that career attorneys disagree with the arguments made by defense lawyers in the 9th Circuit case. The memo argues that there are “multiple respects” in which diesel truck emissions software systems are “required to be maintained” under the law, and therefore tampering with them can be a crime.

“When Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, legislators sought to ensure that regulated motor vehicles/engines would meet applicable emission standards not only at the time of manufacture and initial sale, but thereafter in everyday use,” the memo says.

Although the 9th Circuit has not yet ruled on the matter, the legal theory resonated with Gustafson, who started raising questions about the pending cases, one of the sources said.

How The Clean Air Act Has Been Enforced Up Until Now

The Clean Air Act is a wide-ranging law, but in the case of vehicle emissions cheating, it outlaws the manufacturing, selling, or installing of a defeat device, which is “a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device,” according to the EPA. The Act also prohibits anyone “from tampering with an emission control device on a motor vehicle by removing it or making it inoperable prior to or after the sale or delivery to the buyer.” Violators are subject to civil penalties “up to $45,268 per noncompliant vehicle or engine, $4,527 per tampering event or sale of defeat device, and $45,268 per day for reporting and record keeping violations,” according to the EPA.

There have been numerous criminal cases brought by the Justice Department based on the Clean Air Act. The most high-profile case is, of course, Volkswagen’s “Dieselgate” scandal, in which researchers discovered the company had installed defeat devices to bypass emissions regulations in secret on around 11 million cars worldwide. More recently, Hino Motors, a subsidiary of Toyota, pleaded guilty in March 2025 to a multi-year emissions fraud scheme involving its diesel engines. No one went to jail, but a judge sentenced Hino to serve five years of probation, where it won’t be able to import diesel engines into the U.S., according to Reuters.

It’s not just OEMs that were subject to criminal prosecution. The DoJ routinely pursued cases of aftermarket defeat device manufacturers, distributors, and installers. In February 2025, an Indiana man was sentenced to four months in prison and given a $25,000 fine after pleading guilty to conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act by tampering with monitoring devices on “hundreds” of vehicles, grossing him $4.3 million in earnings from 2019 and 2021, according to the DoJ.

Back in December 2024, Troy Lake Sr., the owner of the Colorado-based Elite Diesel Service Inc., pleaded guilty to disabling onboard diagnostic systems on at least 344 heavy-duty commercial trucks. He was ordered to pay fines totaling $52,200 and sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison. Lake Sr. served seven months in jail before being released to house arrest to serve out the remainder of his sentence, but was pardoned by President Trump in November 2025.

Trump’s pardon of Lake Sr. came at the behest of Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, who said in a statement that the case was “yet another example of how federal agencies have been weaponized by Democrat administrations against hardworking Americans.”

This move also follows a year of the administration rolling back environmental protection policies aimed at reducing emissions, most notably starting the process to ease fuel economy requirements for new cars and eliminating fuel economy penalties handed out to automakers over the past three years — with the administration’s stated goal being to reduce vehicle costs to the consumer and to help the auto industry. It’s entirely plausible that this move to end criminal prosecutions for defeat device installers and manufacturers is another step in that direction, rather than purely due to different interpretations of the law.

Why You Should Care

There are two sides to this dispute, both with fairly reasonable arguments. On the one hand, people who own their trucks should be able to modify them how they’d like—it’s their property after all, that they paid for with their own money. What they do with their property shouldn’t be anyone’s business but their own. If they want to add things like wider tires, aftermarket intakes, shorter gearing, or different software after the truck has left the factory, they should be able to. This is, in a nutshell, the thought process the DoJ is using to pivot away from criminal prosecutions with regard to emissions tampering.

On the other hand, diesel trucks with defeat devices can be terrible for the air we breathe. A study released by the EPA in 2020 found that more than 550,000 trucks in the decade leading up to the study had their emissions controls tampered with or removed; the results were not good. From the study:

As a result of this tampering, more than 570,000 tons of excess oxides of nitrogen(NOx) and 5,000 tons of particulate matter (PM) will be emitted by these tampered trucks over the lifetime of the vehicles. These tampered trucks constitute approximately 15 percent of the national population of diesel trucks that were originally certified with emissions controls. But, due to their severe excess NOx emissions, these trucks have an air quality impact equivalent to adding more than 9 million additional (compliant, non- tampered) diesel pickup trucks to our roads.

This is also far worse than anything seen from Volkswagen’s folly, according to the guy in charge of the firm that uncovered the Dieselgate scandal. From The New York Times:

In terms of the pollution impact in the United States, “This is far more alarming and widespread than the Volkswagen scandal,” said Drew Kodjak, executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, the research group that first alerted the E.P.A. of the illegal Volkswagen technology. “Because these are trucks, the amount of pollution is far, far higher,” he said.

These emissions have real consequences. Nitrogen dioxide and the 5,000 extra tons of industrial soot emitted by these cheating trucks are linked to lung damage and aggravate existing respiratory diseases such as asthma, according to the EPA. Data released by the agency in October suggests that particulate matter causes 15,000 premature deaths every year.

No matter the underlying reason, going forward, the consequences for tuning your diesel truck to roll coal (as an example — there’s other tuning done for drivability/durability reasons) will be a little less dire. Not that I recommend doing it.

Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com, Apple

The post The U.S. Will No Longer Criminally Charge People Who Emissions-Delete Diesel Trucks appeared first on The Autopian.

Michelle Garrison, a state water resources specialist, saw something missing on her January drive from Oregon to Denver. No ice on the roads. No snow in the foothills.

Her mind turned to drought and reservoirs and the recently expired drought management agreement between Colorado and three other states.

“It makes me think that this year is going to be a real challenge,” she said. “It looked like November everywhere I drove.”

Garrison presented this year’s outlook Monday during a meeting in Aurora of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s top water policy agency. As warm and dry conditions continue in the West, the forecasts for the amount of water flowing through the Upper Colorado River Basin keep dropping. For officials like Garrison, it’s hard not to be pessimistic: More dry and warm weather means greater concerns about hydropower generation, recreation and algal blooms on the Western Slope.

And to top it off, the agreement that outlines how Upper Basin states, including Colorado, can help out in drought years expired Dec. 31, and it’s not yet clear from a legal standpoint what that means for this year.

“Things are looking exceedingly grim,” Garrison said as she described this year’s forecasts to the 15-person board.

The meeting kicked off after days of cold temperatures and snow across the Front Range. But the most recent snowstorm was not enough to recover from the worst snowpack on record for Colorado, and the quick return to 40-degree days didn’t help.

Colorado’s mountains harbor a vital water supply that melts and runs through four major rivers and 19 downstream states each year. Garrison’s concerns focused on the water that runs west into the Colorado River Basin, where it collects in an immense reservoir called Lake Powell before it’s released downstream to Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico. 

From November to Jan. 15, the forecasts for that flow of water into Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border, fell by almost 2 million acre-feet. 

One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to four households. Colorado used about 1.9 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year, on average, between 1971 and 2024, according to federal data.

And if the warm and dry conditions continue, the water level at Powell is forecast to fall to levels where turbines at Glen Canyon Dam can’t generate as much (or any) electricity and where low water levels could damage the dam’s infrastructure, according to the January 24-month study, a monthly report from the Bureau of Reclamation.

In 2019, four Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — formed a plan, called the Drought Response Operations Agreement, that outlined what the states could do in dry years to avoid dropping to those problematic elevations.

The agreement, called the DROA by the water wonks, aimed to keep Powell’s elevation above 3,525 feet above sea level by either changing when Glen Canyon released water or by sending emergency releases of water down from upstream reservoirs, including Blue Mesa, a federal reservoir and the largest reservoir in Colorado.

The first emergency releases from Blue Mesa and a Wyoming reservoir, Flaming Gorge, were in 2021 and 2022, dry years when water managers worried about the massive dam’s infrastructure.

Locally, the releases dropped reservoir levels, led to algal blooms and left some Western Slope recreation and marina businesses hanging out to dry.

The agreement expired Dec. 31, and water lawyers are working to clarify what that means for water management in 2026 before May when more emergency releases might be needed. 

It’s one of several agreements that expire this year and must be replaced, including Mexico’s Colorado River agreement and reservoir operation rules from 2007. Negotiations among states to replace the 2007 rules have been at an impasse for two years.

Technical experts like Garrison, however, are still planning for potential emergency measures. 

“The Upper Basin is so strongly hydrology-driven, that I think (drought) is always on our minds,” Garrison said. “We always feel like we have to be planning for drought.”

Powell’s water level can vary by as much as 20 to 30 feet in a year, Garrison said. 

Keeping Powell’s elevation above 3,525 feet preserves an important cushion above 3,490 feet, when the dam hits a crisis point.

At that elevation, Glen Canyon Dam’s turbines can’t generate any electricity — and that would prompt electric utilities to turn to more costly, less renewable energy sources. The dam’s electricity is normally pooled with other power sources to serve customers in Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and Utah.

Lake Powell’s elevation was 3,536 feet as of Monday. It stored 6.2 million acre-feet of water, or about 25% of its capacity.

Under the drought agreement, the reservoirs can release about 500,000 acre-feet for Powell. But if warm and dry conditions continue, the DROA emergency releases might not be enough to fill the gap and avoid problems at Powell, Garrison said. 

At that point, Reclamation might have to cut releases from Powell for Arizona, California and Nevada, Garrison said. The releases are currently set to be 7.48 million acre-feet but can be cut as low as 6 million acre-feet under a 2024 interstate agreement.

The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages Glen Canyon, is already reining in winter reservoir releases, Garrison said. Technical experts are meeting monthly, or even more frequently. Federal officials called top negotiators and governors from the seven basin states to meet in Washington, D.C., this week to try to resolve differences over how to manage the river. 

The whole situation has left water officials, like Garrison, worried. The Colorado River’s water provides water for 40 million people in the West. It’s the foundation of western economies and national food supplies.

Looking at the forecast, Garrison said she was feeling pessimistic. 

“It’s just a real struggle for everybody to be dealing with hydrology this dry when you’re trying to set up what you’re going to do in the future,” she said. “It’s going to be hard.”

One of the biggest differences between running a gas-powered car and an electric car is that an electric car does not emit any local exhaust fumes or particulate matter. Because of this, most people have simply assumed that replacing gas-powered cars with electric cars would, in a given environment, improve air quality and subsequently improve the health of people living there.

That assumption, according to Phys.org, a science and research news site, hasn’t really ever been tested on a large scale, due to the limitations of testing equipment. That is, until now.

Thanks to satellite data from NASA, the Keck School of Medicine at USC has been able to create “the first real-world study showing statistically significant reductions in observed NO₂ air pollution associated with the ongoing transition to light-duty electric vehicles over time.”

Improvements By The Numbers

The USC study, published by the school in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, looked at satellite data from 1,687 California neighborhoods—the study calls them “ZIP code tabulation areas,” or ZCTAs. It found that, on average, for every 200 zero-emission vehicles added to each neighborhood, that area saw a 1.1% decrease in nitrogen dioxide (NO₂₎ levels.

USC was able to analyze these 1,687 areas from 2019 to 2023 using a satellite called Sentinel 5, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It has a device onboard called the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). This tool analyzes light reflected from the Earth’s surface to identify gases that lie in the atmosphere. It’s a pretty trick piece of gear, going by the ESA’s website:

What sets Tropomi apart is that it measures in the ultraviolet and visible (270–500 nm), near-infrared (675–775 nm) and shortwave infrared (2305–2385 nm) spectral bands. This means that a wide range of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, formaldehyde, sulphur dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide can be imaged more accurately than ever before. With a resolution as high as 7 km × 3.5 km, it has the potential to detect air pollution over individual cities.

According to the study, the data is collected by the satellite once a day at roughly 1:30 p.m. local time and published for free by NASA, which is how USC got hold of it. The study links to the raw data on NASA’s site, which you can download and analyze for yourself if you feel inspired to learn about how much nitrogen dioxide might be hovering in your local township.

As Phys.org points out, this is not the first time USC has released a study looking at the effects of electric car adoption. It released a study linking EVs to less air pollution in 2023, but that study used limited data from ground-based monitors. Ground-based testing methods were used again, this time, but only to confirm the data from the satellite. From Phys.org:

To confirm that these results were reliable, the researchers conducted several additional analyses. They accounted for pandemic-related changes as a contributor to NO₂ decline, such as excluding the year 2020 and controlling for changing gas prices and work-from-home patterns. The researchers also confirmed that neighborhoods that added more gas-powered cars saw the expected rise in pollution. Finally, they replicated their results using updated data from ground-level monitors from 2012 to 2023.

Here’s Why It All Matters

As a reminder, nitrogen dioxide can be bad for human health. Take it from the people who wrote the study:

“This immediate impact on air pollution is really important because it also has an immediate impact on health. We know that traffic-related air pollution can harm respiratory and cardiovascular health over both the short and long term,” said Erika Garcia, Ph.D., MPH, assistant professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study’s senior author.

[…]

“We’re not even fully there in terms of electrifying, but our research shows that California’s transition to electric vehicles is already making measurable differences in the air we breathe,” said the study’s lead author, Sandrah Eckel, Ph.D., associate professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine.

If you’d rather hear it from a source not associated with the study, take this excerpt from the EPA‘s website:

Breathing air with a high concentration of NO₂ can irritate airways in the human respiratory system. Such exposures over short periods can aggravate respiratory diseases, particularly asthma, leading to respiratory symptoms (such as coughing, wheezing or difficulty breathing), hospital admissions and visits to emergency rooms. Longer exposures to elevated concentrations of NO₂ may contribute to the development of asthma and potentially increase susceptibility to respiratory infections. People with asthma, as well as children and the elderly are generally at greater risk for the health effects of NO₂.

This study seems to show what everyone already assumed: Driving cars that emit no local polluting gases makes the local air cleaner. It also brings up another point: You might not have to go all-in on pure EVs to make a material difference in air quality. It’s important to make the distinction here that USC didn’t just analyze the adoption of pure electric cars. When it collected data from the California DMV, it also counted plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as “zero-emissions cars” for this study, coinciding with California’s definition of the term.

Phys.org argues the 1.1% drop wasn’t just due to battery-electric cars, but a mix of buyers adopting EVs, plug-in hybrids, extended-range hybrids, and hydrogen-powered vehicles. But the study doesn’t actually determine how much of that decrease can be attributed to BEVs or plug-ins. It’s entirely possible that every plug-in hybrid driver included in this study drove purely on gas power, and the BEVs involved were efficient enough to make up the difference.

Either way, this study reveals what was already pretty obvious:  If cars driving around don’t emit any local tailpipe emissions, then of course the air will be cleaner. Now, though, it’s both obvious and measurable.

Top graphic image: Toyota

The post One State Has Purchased Enough Electric Cars To Make The Air Measurably Cleaner: Study appeared first on The Autopian.

In early 2025, Forbes reports, investigators at the FBI served Microsoft with a warrant seeking the BitLocker encryption recovery keys for several laptops it believed held evidence of fraud in Guam's COVID-19 unemployment assistance program. And Microsoft complied with the FBI's request.

BitLocker is the name of the full-disk encryption technology that has been part of Windows for nearly two decades. Though initially only available to owners of the Pro editions of Windows who turned it on manually, during the Windows 8 era Microsoft began using BitLocker to encrypt local disks automatically for all Windows 11 Home and Pro PCs that signed in with a Microsoft account. Using BitLocker in this way also uploads a recovery key for your device to Microsoft's servers—this makes it possible to unlock your disk so you don't lose data if something goes wrong with your system, or if you install a CPU upgrade or some other hardware change that breaks BitLocker. But it also (apparently) makes it possible for Microsoft to unlock your disk, too.

A Microsoft rep said that the company handled "around 20" similar BitLocker recovery key requests from government authorities per year, and that these requests often fail because users haven't stored their recovery keys on Microsoft's servers. Microsoft and other tech companies have generally refused requests to install universal encryption backdoors for law enforcement purposes, and some companies (like Apple) claim to store device encryption keys using another layer of encryption that renders the keys inaccessible to the company.

But storing your device's recovery keys in someone else's cloud can still represent a privacy and security risk, especially at a time when the US government has become more interested in targeting journalists and the Trump administration's political opponents.

If you want to encrypt your Windows PC's disk but you don't want to store your recovery key with Microsoft, you do have options. We'll recap the requirements, as well as the steps you'll need to take.

You'll need Windows 11 Pro for this

Settings > System > Activation will tell you what edition of Windows 11 you have and offer some options for upgrades. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Before we begin: Disk encryption is one of the handful of differences between the Home and Pro versions of Windows.

Both the Home and Pro versions of Windows support disk encryption, but only the Pro versions give users full control over the process. The Home version of Windows only supports disk encryption when logged in with a Microsoft account and will only offer to store your encryption key on Microsoft's servers.

To access the full version of BitLocker and back up your own recovery key, you'll need to upgrade to the Pro version of Windows. Microsoft offers its own first-party upgrade option through the Microsoft Store for a one-time fee of $99, but it's also possible to bring your own product key and upgrade yourself. This Macworld-affiliated listing from StackCommerce claims to be an official Microsoft partner and is offering a Windows 11 Pro key for just $10, though your mileage with third-party key resellers may vary.

However you get it, once you have a valid key, open Settings, then System, then Activation, click upgrade your edition of Windows, click change product key, and then enter your Windows 11 Pro key (Windows 10 Pro keys should also work, if you already have one). Luckily, changing Windows editions doesn't require anything more disruptive than a system restart. You won't need to reinstall Windows, and you shouldn't lose any of your installed apps or data.

And once you've upgraded a PC to Windows 11 Pro once, you should be able to reinstall and activate Windows 11 Pro on that system again any time you want without having to re-enter your product key. Keep the product key stored somewhere, though, just in case you do need to use it for a reinstall, or if you ever need to re-activate Windows after a hardware upgrade.

Encrypting (or re-encrypting) your PC

Once you've got Windows 11 Pro set up, it's time to either encrypt or re-encrypt your disk.

If you've signed in with a Microsoft account, your disk is likely already encrypted, and the key is likely already stored on Microsoft's servers. If this is the case, this process will actually involve fully unencrypting and re-encrypting your drive, which can take an hour or two depending on the speed of your PC and the size of your drive.

Here's how to check your current encryption status and the steps to follow if you've already got a key backed up with Microsoft:

If you haven't signed in with a Microsoft account, you won't have a key saved to Microsoft's servers, and you can skip the decryption step. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

1. Open the Settings app, click Privacy & security, and click Device encryption.
2. If you see a notification about how you need to sign in with a Microsoft account to "finish encrypting this device," then you haven't saved your recovery key with Microsoft yet, and you can skip ahead to step 4.
   

3. If your device is already encrypted, the first thing you need to do is toggle that device encryption switch to off. You'll need to click through a confirmation screen and then wait for your disk to be decrypted. As Windows says, this may take a while.
4. Once the disk is decrypted, click the BitLocker drive encryption button under the related subheading. It's a mark of how rarely Microsoft expects this setting to be used that this still opens up a legacy Windows Vista-era Control Panel, rather than opening up another section of the Settings app.
5. Click the Turn on BitLocker link next to the C: drive and any other internal disk you want to encrypt. Now, you'll finally be able to do what we came here for: save a recovery key to a place other than a Microsoft account.
6. You can print a physical copy of your recovery key and put it somewhere safe, or save the recovery key in a text file. If you choose this option, you'll need to be able to save the file to an external disk or a network drive—for obvious reasons, Windows won't let you save the recovery key to the disk you're about to encrypt, lest you end up with a drive you can't unlock.

7. With your recovery key saved, you'll be asked whether you'll just want to encrypt the portion of the disk you're using or the entire disk. I tend to prefer and recommend full-disk encryption, just to account for the possibility that previously deleted data might otherwise be recoverable from unencrypted parts of the drive, but the choice is up to you.
8. You should also choose the "new encryption mode" when given the option, and I usually allow the system to run the BitLocker system check even though it's probably redundant for most PCs.

9. After a restart, the encryption process will begin. Your drive will take some time to re-encrypt, based on the age of your PC and the settings you chose; progress can be tracked via an icon in the system tray.

Once your disk is re-encrypted, your PC should work just as it did before. The actual encryption technology hasn't changed at all—all we've done is change where the recovery key is saved.

This does put the burden on the user if and when it comes time to use your recovery key. You'll have to remember where you put it and not get it mixed up with any other recovery keys you've stored for other PCs or old Windows installations. But for anyone concerned about Microsoft giving their device's encryption keys to the government or anyone else with a valid subpoena, the extra hassle may be worth it in exchange for the added privacy and peace of mind.

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More people died on Colorado’s roads last year than in 2024, according to new data, which points to an uptick in impaired driving and rising deaths among cyclists and pedestrians.

Last year, 701 people were killed on Colorado roads, up from 689 in 2024. The slight increase ends a steady fall in traffic fatalities across the state that had continued since 2022 when Colorado recorded the largest number of road deaths in more than four decades. 

Of the people killed last year, 392 were inside cars or trucks, 126 were pedestrians, 18 were riding a bike and 147 were on a motorcycle, preliminary data shows. 

Impaired driving caused 234 people to be killed, marking an increase from 215 in 2024.

The data underscores the need to refocus safety efforts this year to avoid deaths that are preventable and brought by poor decisions, state transportation officials said during a news conference Friday. 

“It is absolutely preventable and unacceptable and the only way that we can move this needle is if we all agree on those two points: Traffic deaths are absolutely preventable and they are tragic,” Col. Matthew Packard, Chief of the Colorado State Patrol said. “And none of us want to lose a friend, a family member, a co-worker, a neighbor, a brother, sister, sibling, cousin, anybody in this type of manner.”

The state plans to keep pushing for safety measures, including more automated speed enforcement cameras and building in infrastructure that protects vulnerable road users, like cyclists and pedestrians, officials said.

Among those killed were pedestrians crossing the street in unlit areas and against crosswalks and people on the side of the road changing a tire, Packard said. Districted driving remains a pressing problem and speed is a consistent factor in fatal crashes, he said.

About 30% to 35% of people killed in car crashes in Colorado are “at the hands of an impaired driver,” he added, calling the decision to drive while impaired “the most selfish act” that happens on the state’s roads.

“This is not a problem that we can point a single finger at,” Packard said. “This is a systemic issue that we all need to lean into and recognize that it is all of our responsibility to solve these problems.” 

The warm weather also played a role in propelling this year’s fatalities, Shoshana Lew, CDOT director, said. By November, there was a 7% decline in traffic deaths compared with the same time in 2024, but with the unseasonably high temperatures, more people were on the roads.

“Traffic deaths hit near records in those last two months of the year,” Lew said. “Especially hard hit were motorcyclists where we saw a 167% increase in the number of fatalities.” 

CDOT continues to promote the state’s “Move Over Law” which requires drivers to slow down or move over for cars that are on the side of the road.

Some of those measures led to a 70% drop in deaths in work zones, Lew said. 

“We must redouble our efforts to drive down the total number of traffic crashes on our roads,” she said. “Every one of the 701 deaths last year represents a member of our community. Each one is a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, a friend, somebody who didn’t make it home.”

Last year, for the first time, wind and solar supplied more power than fossil fuels to the E.U., according to a new analysis.

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