Grist

In April 2024, Tish Taylor and her father, Robert, stood behind President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Michael Regan, as he signed a regulation designed to dramatically reduce toxic pollution from petrochemical plants like those that cluster near the Taylors’ homes along the lower Mississippi River, in Louisiana. 

Taylor struggled not to cry through the signing ceremony, which followed years of demands from communities like hers — in the 85-mile corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that has become known as Cancer Alley — for tighter limits on plants’ emissions. The new regulation, known as the HON rule, was “a wonderful gift to generations ahead of us,” Taylor said. “It’s hard for me to find the words to say how validated we felt.” 

For decades, regulations on emissions of hazardous chemicals such as toluene, ethylene oxide, and vinyl chloride have been weaker than restrictions on more common pollutants, such as those emitted by vehicles. 

The Biden administration took major steps to strengthen Clean Air Act rules on those hazardous air pollutants, and the HON rule was a centerpiece of that effort. Toughening requirements on six different pollutants at more than 200 petrochemical plants, it was one of a slate of regulations the Biden administration enacted on air toxics, each covering a specific industry, from steelmaking to tire manufacturing.

Gulf Coast petrochemical plants regulated by the 2024 HON rule. Source: Environmental Defense Fund. Yale E360

But shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term, his administration began unraveling those rules, including the one the Taylors had so recently celebrated. Last year, Trump granted two-year exemptions from the HON rule to more than 50 petrochemical facilities. This July, he issued 20 more temporary exemptions, and the EPA said it would propose a rewrite of the regulation this fall. The new version is all but certain to significantly scale back the rule’s protections. 

“Everything that the Biden administration did to help protect us was pretty much just thrown in the garbage,” Tish Taylor said in July, and replaced by “a death sentence.” St. John the Baptist Parish, where her family lives, has the country’s highest risk of cancer from air pollution — nearly 50 times the national average. A disproportionate percentage of those exposed to the highest levels of pollution in the region are Black.

A set of amendments to several existing regulations on toxic air pollutants, the HON rule — which stands for Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants — requires petrochemical plants to upgrade their pollution control equipment to reduce emissions of two hazardous chemicals: ethylene oxide and chloroprene. It also mandates air monitors at plants’ fencelines to measure concentrations of those chemicals and four more — benzene, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride, and 1,3-butadiene — and requires operators to carry out necessary repairs if emissions exceed limits. 

Tracey Woodruff, a Stanford University epidemiology and population health professor who formerly worked on toxic assessments at the EPA, said the pollutants covered by the HON rule are “the classic bad guys of toxic chemicals,” compounds that raise risks for breast cancer, liver cancer, leukemia, lymphoma, and reproductive problems. “We’ve known about their toxicity for decades,” she said, and “they should have been more highly regulated a long time ago.” 

Read Next Texas clears the way for petrochemical expansion as experts warn of health risks Shelby Jouppi, Jim Morris, & Savanna Strott, Public Health Watch

The HON rule also closed a long-standing loophole that freed plants from emissions requirements when they were shutting down and starting up — for example when carrying out maintenance, or ahead of a storm. With climate change fueling more extreme weather, that loophole has “a massive impact on what is actually getting released,” said Shiv Srivastava, policy director at Fenceline Watch, a Houston environmental justice group.

The HON rule was one of nine new air toxics rules issued by the Biden administration. The eight other rules targeted emissions from sectors including iron- and steelmaking, copper smelting, tire manufacturing, and coal-fired power plants. All nine have been or are now being rescinded, revised, or reconsidered.  

The HON rule was among the most wide-reaching of those hazardous pollutant regulations. “This is a big rule,” said Joe Goffman, who headed the EPA’s air office under Biden. Because air toxics rules typically address very specific types of industrial facilities, an individual regulation sometimes applies to only a handful of plants in a few locations, with pollution reductions often measured in just hundreds of pounds, he said. But the HON rule covered approximately 220 large petrochemical plants, so its footprint promised to be both bigger and more wide-reaching geographically. Nearly 60 percent of the facilities it covered are in Texas and Louisiana, home to the nation’s largest petrochemical production zones. The rest are scattered across the country, in states including Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, and Alabama. 

The EPA estimated when the rule was finalized that it would prevent 6,200 tons of toxic air pollution annually, and slash emissions of ethylene oxide and chloroprene from the plants it regulates by almost 80 percent. In communities near HON plants, the agency said the regulation would reduce the risk of cancers related to air toxics by 96 percent. Facilities affected by the rule produce ingredients for common products such as plastics, paints, antifreeze, and cleaning and personal care items like detergent and shampoo. 

Weeks into Trump’s second term, the EPA invited companies to email the agency with requests for exemptions from the HON rule and Biden’s other hazardous pollutant regulations. In granting the postponements, Trump invoked a Clean Air Act provision that environmental lawyers say has never been used: allowing temporary exemptions to emissions rules if they are “in the country’s national security interests” and if the technology required to comply with a regulation is unavailable.

Read Next Trump quietly shutters the only federal agency that investigates industrial chemical explosions Tristan Baurick

“The HON Rule imposes substantial burdens on chemical manufacturers already operating under stringent regulations,” Trump’s exemption proclamations said. “Maintaining a robust domestic chemical industry is vital to safeguarding the supply chains that underpin our economy and to reducing the Nation’s dependence on foreign control over materials critical to national resilience.”

Trump’s orders provided no evidence for their assertions. “That’s not how this works,” said Annie Fox, a staff attorney at the Clean Air Council, in Philadelphia. The law requires a president to set out specifics supporting each claim made in justifying an exemption, “not just state it,” she said. “These are supposed to be rare exceptions that are well-grounded in research and facts.” 

Last October, a coalition of local and national advocacy groups, including the Taylors’ Concerned Citizens of St. John, sued Trump and his EPA in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over the exemptions, arguing that Trump’s claims are false and amount to “a pretext to relieve polluters from working to comply” with the HON rule while the administration works to undo the regulation.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade group representing petrochemical producers, said the exemptions “offer a pathway for relief for some sources from some of the unrealistic timelines” in the HON rule. It called the regulation “overly stringent” and said it “exceeds the EPA’s statutory authority, disregards relevant scientific evidence, and imposes some requirements without technological availability.” 

The EPA said in an emailed statement that all its proposals on air toxics aimed to “protect American industry and supply chains, while still minimizing Americans’ unnecessary exposure to hazardous air pollutants.” 

Read Next Trump EPA moves to repeal regulation of cancer-linked chemical ethylene oxide Naveena Sadasivam

The HON rule’s roots lay in a 2016 reevaluation of ethylene oxide gas that revealed it was much more dangerous to those inhaling it than had been previously understood. That reevaluation also led, in 2024, to a regulation that tightened emissions limits on ethylene oxide at facilities that use it to sterilize medical equipment.

In March, the EPA proposed replacing the medical sterilizer rule with a weakened version, arguing that the Clean Air Act gives regulators very limited scope to update rules in accordance with new science on health dangers.

In backtracking on efforts to limit exposure to hazardous air pollutants, Woodruff said, the Trump administration has signaled that “whatever the industry wants to do, that’s what we want to do.” She noted that former fossil fuel and petrochemical industry representatives hold top jobs across the EPA. The policy changes “will lead to people getting sicker and dying,” she said. “This is exactly opposite of what this administration claimed they wanted to do in terms of ‘Make America Healthy Again.’”

Read Next The EPA’s data on cancer risk from air pollution has gone dark Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

HON rule exemptions are not the only change that will increase risks to Americans living near petrochemical facilities, advocates say. The EPA has also proposed undoing changes the Biden administration made to strengthen a safety rule called the Risk Management Program, which empowered workers dealing with hazardous substances to stop operations they believe to be dangerous, and required chemical facilities to prepare for natural disasters, undergo independent audits after accidents, and share information with the public. 

Nationally, there were 131 accidents resulting in reportable chemical releases last year. For those living near the Houston area’s nearly 700 chemical plants, “there are constant explosions, there are constant fires, there are constant black, dark plumes that linger over our communities,” Srivastava said.

The Biden-era update sought to address such dangers, but the Trump administration said the new rule was too costly and burdensome, and that it had made refineries and chemical facilities “less safe and less competitive.” Many of the plants it covered already had effective safety programs, the EPA said in a statement, and eliminating duplicative requirements would enable operators to focus on the most important changes. “Due to the varied, complex nature of chemical facilities, the facility operator is in the best position to assess risks and identify steps to mitigate these risks,” it said. 

Last year, the administration also removed an online data tool the Biden administration had created to give communities located near petrochemical plants information about their operations, including their accident history, emergency response plans, and the chemicals they handle. Srivastava said the tool’s loss cuts off neighbors’ access to even the most basic information about nearby plants — their names and locations, for example — making it hard for communities to even begin preparing for accidents. And easing safety mandates, he said, “makes us extremely, extremely vulnerable to having a massive, catastrophic disaster on the scale of something like what happened in Bhopal,” where a leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant, in India, killed thousands of people in 1984.

Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James Louisiana, an advocacy group in “Cancer Alley,” still has the pen that the EPA’s Michael Regan gave her after he signed the HON rule, and her group is a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging Trump’s exemptions. She said she believes the president’s disregard for the regulation reflects his belief that “we are nothing,” and she vowed to continue fighting to restore the HON rule’s original reach and strength. “When he gets out of office,” she said, “we’re gonna fix it back.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A hard-won rule to cut chemical plant pollution is being unraveled on Sep 6, 2026.

A deadly flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend was probably driven by a confluence of climate factors, including drought, wildfire scarring and warming temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that can supercharge storms.

At least two people have died, nearly 80 people were rescued and one remained unaccounted for after a surge of water and debris swept through the immensely popular tourist destination on Saturday, fueled by torrents of rain that hit the national park’s Bright Angel Creek area.

Flash floods are not uncommon in the region, especially during the monsoon season from June to September, when strong rains pummel the arid landscapes and can quickly fill narrow rock formations. Visiting the Grand Canyon — a crown jewel of the US national park system — can be particularly dangerous in the summer because of the risk of flash flooding, when clear days can give way quickly to thunderstorms and downpours.

The steep, rocky nature of the canyon itself funnels water rapidly, transforming downpours into a charging wall of water.

Debris from the Bright Angel flash flood event, as seen the morning of August 30, 2026. National Park Service

But Saturday’s strong storm also hit part of the burn scar of the Dragon Bravo wildfire, a destructive and fast-moving blaze that swept across nearly 150,000 acres and consumed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge in July 2025.

Runoff tends to flow more quickly in the aftermath of a fire, especially in hotter burns where slopes are left barren of vegetation.

While it’s still unclear how directly long-term damage to the landscape from that fire played a role in last weekend’s disaster, federal models indicated a rise in the risks of debris flows in Bright Angel Creek.

Teams with the Department of Interior charged with assessing post-fire threats to “life, property, and critical natural and cultural resources” found runoff risks would be between two and eight times greater upstream of Phantom Creek. “Hikers on the trails within or downslope from the burned area will experience frequent stabilization issues, especially hazardous rockfall for at least the first year,” the team wrote in a report on conditions.

Park officials were reportedly concerned at the start of this summer that stronger storms could create dangerous conditions near the burned areas. Hikers who had to be evacuated by helicopter after the rushing waters swallowed bridges and other infrastructure told the Arizona Republic that the creek turned black as it filled with runoff.

Debris from the Bright Angel flash flood event, as seen the morning of August 30, 2026. National Park Service

Scientists have long warned that the climate crisis will create stronger extremes and destructive shifts between wet and dry conditions. As temperatures continue to climb, extreme events will not just increase – they are more likely to overlap, causing more calamity and testing the limits of the nation’s resilience and recovery.

So-called “compound extremes”, where a combination of contributing factors come together, are on the rise, according to researchers.

Along with the potential impact from a previous fire, a severe drought that continues to affect the Grand Canyon region — and the Colorado River basin that runs through it — could have contributed to the disaster. The deluge unleashed torrents of rain on hardened and sparsely vegetated steep terrain that is less able to absorb and contain abrupt increases in moisture.

The sudden and strong rainstorm that fueled this catastrophic flood may have been supercharged by the historic El Niño that has sharply increased sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

Read Next How rising temperatures likely contributed to Nepal’s deadly flood Molly Taft, WIRED

The climate phenomenon has the ability to affect weather systems around the world. But in the Southwest, the higher amount of water vapor in the atmosphere due to El Niño is wrung out in the form of rainfall, Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Associated Press.

El Niño is part of a natural cycle, but models show there is a strong likelihood this will become one of the strongest on record. It layers on top of spikes in temperature fueled by the climate crisis. Together, the possibility of severe and extreme weather is expected to dramatically increase.

The link to human-caused climate change and the heavy Arizona rain is moderately strong, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources.

Swain and colleagues recently published a study in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes finding that during the summer, short-term intense downpours in the US West — akin to the one that hit the Grand Canyon — have become 10 percent stronger since 2000.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How intense rains in the Grand Canyon turned into a deadly disaster on Sep 5, 2026.

It has been more than two months since President Donald Trump’s tentative ceasefire with Iran broke down, and gasoline prices are still high. With the midterm elections looming, the president seems to have turned his attention to the problem, rolling out a series of actions he says will secure more crude oil from Venezuela and exempt refineries from renewable fuel mandates. Most recently, he summoned refiners to the White House earlier this week to discuss ways to lower prices at the pump, although the refiners left without making any public statements and the White House didn’t publish a list of the attendees.

In the months since the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the world has found ways to conserve oil and move Middle East crude around, but structural factors are still keeping prices high. The U.S. average gas price on Thursday was around $4.11 per gallon, up more than 90 percent from this time last year, and diesel was even higher.

The “crack spread,” which is the difference in price between crude oil and refined gasoline and diesel, soared to an historic high of more than $70 per barrel. This is a clear sign that the market for refined products is going haywire, and oil companies are raking in profits. The largest refineries in the United States have been operating at almost maximum capacity for several weeks now, longer than at any time in recent history, and they have deferred regular maintenance to take advantage of these soaring prices.

The president’s frustration with the high fuel cost has become clear over the course of the summer.

“Based on a shortage, they’re making too much money,” Trump said at an Oval Office briefing last month. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”

The biggest reason prices have remained high is that there isn’t enough refining capacity to make gasoline from all the available oil. Many refineries in the Middle East have shut down during the conflict, and Russia’s diesel refineries are also offline thanks to Ukrainian drone attacks. The remaining refineries in North America and China are not large enough to fill that gap.

In its effort to lower prices at the pump, the Trump administration first turned to Venezuela, where it kidnapped leader Nicolas Maduro in January and announced a plan to revive the country’s moribund oil industry. Experts said after the Maduro raid that American companies would be hesitant to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves, but the Trump administration has tried to make the country more palatable by easing sanctions and pushing interim leader Delcy Rodriguez to rewrite the country’s oil laws. 

These efforts seem to be paying off. The Pentagon announced last week that it would take a stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, a private Venezuelan company that controls around 20 percent of the country’s reserves; the company plans to increase production in oil fields that had once been drilled by China and Russia. Alejandro Betancourt, the head of the company, has been described as Trump’s “viceroy” in Venezuela, and earlier this year, the Trump administration helped him avoid a Swiss arrest warrant. Chevron, the largest U.S. company that operates in Venezuela, also announced on Wednesday that it would double its production there, signing an agreement with the Rodriguez government at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas.

“In general, the read is positive,” said Ramón Andrade, a lawyer focused on the energy business and a partner at the law firm Ponte Andrade & Casanova in Caracas. He said that the business community in Venezuela is optimistic about a revival of the sector, but cautioned that on the Pentagon deal, “I think we need to look at what’s actually going to be signed.”

Even so, there is no chance that this will help reduce gasoline prices, even after the midterms. For one thing, only a small number of U.S. refineries can process the heavy crude from Venezuela, and they are already working overtime to take advantage of high fuel prices. 

“Everything that the Venezuelans could produce right now, I’m sure they’re squeezing out,” said Al Salazar, an analyst at the energy firm Enverus Intelligence who studies oil and gas markets. “You could get incremental production out of there in six to twelve months, but what really is causing the gasoline and diesel price spike is the lack of refining capacity.”

For another thing, scaling up production will take many years, if the legal agreement with the Pentagon even holds that long — the final details aren’t yet available, and some parties have alleged that conceding resource wealth to the United States would violate the Venezuelan constitution. The interim government has yet to face voters in an actual election.

“You need that long runway to be able to develop this resource,” said Salazar, who spent decades in the Canadian oil industry, which also produces heavy oil like Venezuela’s.

The administration’s other major move this week might do more to keep prices down at the margins, though likely not enough for most consumers to notice. The Environmental Protection Agency ended its summer ethanol blending requirements early. The rules mandate that refiners and fuel importers add ethanol to the nation’s fuel supply to reduce gasoline-caused smog. It also announced a series of waivers that would exempt a few dozen refineries around the country from having to integrate biofuel into their diesel and gasoline products. The purpose of this “renewable fuels standard” is to support farmers and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since biofuels don’t warm the planet as oil does, but many oil industry parties argue that using ethanol drives up costs for refiners.

A number of major lobbies opposed these waivers. Midwestern politicians and biofuel associations argued that they will harm farmers by reducing demand for the corn that makes ethanol, and even the American Petroleum Institute warned that sudden exemptions would create an unpredictable business environment for refineries. The two sides of the biofuel debate argue that the exemptions either will or won’t reduce gasoline prices. Given that crude oil prices are still high, it’s possible ethanol is a cheaper ingredient than oil, and it’s unclear whether the exempt refiners like Marathon and Chevron will pass costs on to customers.

Even with the waivers, gasoline prices in many states are $1.50 above their pre-Iran highs. The early months of the conflict hinged on the question of the Strait of Hormuz, but even if the strait were to open tomorrow, the gasoline market will remain tight, and neither more oil from Venezuela nor cheaper inputs will free up refining capacity. 

“I think it’s going to have a tremendous impact; ultimately, prices are going to come down,” said Trump at the Oval Office on Monday. “Will it happen before the election? I can’t tell you that.” The stubborn high prices do not bode well for Republicans in the midterm elections. On average, the president’s party loses 25 more congressional seats in midterm elections after gas prices spike than in those after gas prices go down, according to a Politico analysis of elections since 1978.

Things could get even worse by then. Around half of U.S. refining capacity is located on the Gulf of Mexico, in the bullseye for Atlantic hurricanes. Forecasters are predicting a quiet season, but there’s still potential for a massive outage. Tropical Depression Edouard formed in the Gulf of Mexico and passed over a Texas refinery complex this week, but it fizzled out before it could become a major storm.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline With the midterms looming, Trump has no real way out of his gas price problem on Sep 4, 2026.

John Boyer grew up on his family’s 131 acres of rolling fields of corn, oats, and wheat in a rural area near the tiny city of East Jordan in northern Michigan. The farm had changed ownership outside the family several times over the decades before Boyer rebought it in 2018. He felt an obligation to repurchase and farm the land to prevent development from encroaching on the area’s community of family farms.

“For any farmer, everything’s personal,” Boyer said. “Every piece of property, every stone you pick up, you spend countless hours out there.”

As millions of farmland acres around the country are expected to change hands in the next few decades, farmers are facing decisions about whether — and if so, how — to preserve farmland amid pressures from rising land values, a shifting climate, and a younger generation that doesn’t want to farm. The number of acres devoted to farming in Michigan has declined in recent decades, as it has in the rest of the country. And ownership of that land is changing. 

In 2022, an estimated 9.5 million acres, or about a quarter of the state, were devoted to farming, a roughly 3 percent dip from 2017, according to the most recent federal farm census. Farmland in Michigan where the majority of operations were family-owned decreased nearly 470,000 acres in those same five years. Conversely, land leased or rented for farming operations increased by nearly 30,000 acres.  

Despite shifts in farm ownership and acreage dedicated to agriculture, the number of farmland acres in Michigan protected by conservation programs has increased in recent years, reflecting a national trend. The state saw an additional 22,000 acres protected in easements between 2017 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“It’s a matter of trying to figure out what exactly is going to be the best fit for everybody’s situation. And there’s a lot of pressure. There’s a lot of money,” said Jon LaPorte, a farm business management educator for Michigan State University Extension.

According to the USDA, Michigan farmland was valued at about $6,800 per acre last year, up 7.8 percent from 2024 and outpacing the national average of 4.3 percent.

The pressure to preserve farmland could be especially strong in northern Michigan. Farmers there are already confronting the effects of climate change, including more extreme precipitation, crop disease, and temperature swings, but some local farmers said those impacts are relatively easier to deal with than elsewhere in the country.

“As the world climate changes, this area could become more and more important for food production and food security,” said Dave Skornia, a farmer in Boyne City, Michigan. “So, you got to have land.”

John Boyer on his farm outside East Jordan, Michigan.
Vivian La / Grist

For Boyer, the best way to protect his farmland was to restrict future development on it by entering into what’s called a conservation easement. He still owns the property, but he sold the future development rights of his 131 acres to the Little Traverse Conservancy, a nonprofit that acquires and protects land. The organization holds those rights even if Boyer transfers land to his kids or decides to sell to another owner down the line.

An easement can be a hard decision for farmers because land is typically their greatest asset, something that can pay for retirement or a college fund, said Joe Graham, chief financial and operating officer for the Little Traverse Conservancy.

“We’re offering them another alternative,” Graham said. “We’re offering a way to capture some of the equity and the value they have in that land without having to sell it and see it leave their ownership.”

Of the conservancy’s 30,000 acres protected in easements across five counties in northern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, about 6,000 acres are farmland. Graham has seen interest in conservation easements growing among small farming communities.

Read Next Georgia is losing farmland fast. Is a state conservation fund enough to save it? Emily Jones

But easements still have their challenges, he said. Conservancies pay landowners for a portion of the overall land value, and selling the development rights earns the landowner less revenue than outright selling the land. As land values rise in rural northern Michigan, the conservancy doesn’t see many farmers purely motivated by financial return entering into such agreements. 

“There can be a question of timing: ‘Is this the right thing to do? What might we be foregoing later?’” Graham said.

Boyer wants to prevent his land from being divided up down the line and sold in smaller parcels “to make a quick buck.” Once an acre is converted for built developments like houses or commercial buildings, it typically doesn’t return to farmland.

“Then suddenly a productive farm field or ground is gone, and it’s gone for generations,” Boyer said. “It’s gone forever.”

Rebecca Carlson, a cherry and apple grower who runs Overlook Orchards in Northport, a village at the tip of Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula on Lake Michigan, also sees land division as a future threat to the farmland in her county. Aging farmers might split up land among multiple kids, leaving a patchwork of ownership that “breaks up multigenerational farms,” Carlson said, especially as younger people in the area choose not to go into the business.

She’s a fourth-generation farmer who married into another multigenerational farming family. She and her husband have grown the original farm from about 200 acres to 1,300 acres over eight years. To expand, the couple bought nearby land, but they also lease some parcels, mostly from family farmers who don’t have a younger generation to take over. 

“In order to be successful in farming, in some cases, it’s one of those, ‘Go big or go home,’ with the climate of farming today,” Carlson said. 

In Michigan, about 39 percent of agricultural land is leased, according to the 2022 USDA census, a number that mirrors the national average.

Leases keep farmland in production for the duration of the contract — most of Carlson’s leases are for 30 years. She pays annual fees that vary based on factors like location or crop productivity. Those fees can be significantly cheaper than owning farmland outright, because Carlson isn’t responsible for property taxes or other costs like insurance for infrastructure.

“It’s a great way to maintain your … farm and grow your farm,” she said. “They don’t make land anymore.”

Leasing does have some limitations. A 2026 MSU survey of Michigan farmers found high lease rates and locating land that matches their needs were the top concerns for those looking to lease. Farmers either have a “crop in mind but no ground, or they had the ground, but in some cases they weren’t sure what they could raise on it,” LaPorte with MSU Extension said.

It’s not just about land, either. LaPorte said the relationship between landowner and farmer is just as important. 

“You might have a great relationship where you never worry a single day about whether or not you’re going to have the property a year from now,” LaPorte said. “Other cases, there’s some differences in terms of what each party’s goals are that kind of create that sense of anxiety about, ‘Is this going to last long-term?’”

Sheep graze among solar panels on the Turkey Creek Solar Ranch in Lancaster, Kentucky. The solar operator pays a local farmer to graze his sheep to keep grass and weeds at manageable levels, and to improve the soil while also producing pasture-raised meat.
Universal Images Group / Getty Images

In the Midwest, farmland values are holding steady or even increasing, even as farm incomes are down nationally. That’s because demand from industrial and residential development in the region is high, said Howard Halderman, president and CEO of Halderman Companies, a farm real estate and management agency working primarily in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

Halderman said high farmland values come from tax-deferred exchanges, which allow landowners to defer capital gains taxes when they sell highly appreciated land and use those proceeds to buy other property.

“That’s where a lot of your farmland value gets support. Are there other buyers out there that keep a floor under it?” he said. “If you’re looking to buy farmland, that might be frustrating. However, if you’re a farmer that owns a lot of farmland and you like to keep your asset values on your balance sheet higher, it’s a good thing.”

As the state pushes for a cleaner grid to combat the effects of climate change, favorable policies are also attracting renewable energy developers to farming communities, where they’re eyeing land for wind turbines, battery storage facilities, and solar panels.

“From a landowner’s perspective, they’ve got bills to pay the same as a farmer, and they’re looking at situations of, ‘Where can I get the most value?’” LaPorte said. “And if they struggle to find an interested farm, they might be willing to go into some of these long-term agreements that you see into wind turbines, solar.”

In Michigan, solar takes up a small share — 0.09 percent — of USDA prime farmland. Like in the rest of the U.S., it’s less than the acreage that’s been converted to suburban development or recreational uses like golf courses, according to the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association. 

Still, local opposition remains fierce. Earlier this year in Wexford County, on the northern end of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, early plans from a renewable energy developer to build solar panels on nearly 1,500 acres of farmland sparked concerns about encroaching development on productive fields and the long-term impact on the ground.

Michigan researchers are hoping to address those concerns by looking at ways that solar panels and farming can coexist, a practice known as agrivoltaics. Solar panels can shade livestock or crops, and leases with renewable energy developers can be a way for farmers to offset declining farm incomes, said Charles Gould, a bioenergy educator with MSU Extension.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a choice between producing power or food, he said.

“If we can do both on the same acre of land, why wouldn’t we?” Gould said. “We want to preserve the family farm. This is a very powerful tool.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As family farms decline and the climate heats up, farmers weigh what to do with their land on Sep 4, 2026.

The summer we love is slipping away From the Southwest to the Jersey shore, climate change is altering the traditions and norms that have defined summer for generations.

By Beth Gardiner

Sep 6, 2026

Topic

Climate + Regulation

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There was a time when summer felt easy to recognize. In childhood, summer was a time of freedom and adventure. Even into adulthood, it is a time many of us feel most free to enjoy each other and the natural world — from lazy afternoons at the beach to camping trips and swimming holes, from family cookouts and neighborhood block parties to the simple pleasure of biting into peaches and tomatoes so ripe the juice runs down your wrist. It’s when our time of dreaming through the cold comes to fruition. The time when the vegetables and fruits we planted in the spring are harvested, the time when we finally spend our precious accrued vacation time and hard-earned cash, when we treat our children to the best of what life has to offer.

But summer is changing. Over the past half-century, annual hot-season temperatures in parts of the United States have warmed by as much as 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit, driving heat waves, droughts, and downpours. This past July was the hottest month ever recorded for the contiguous U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We are witnessing the slow erosion of our old summer normal. As climate change makes the season more extreme, our habits, traditions, and pastimes are also evolving, in ways both subtle and truly seismic. 

The swarm of flickering fireflies at dusk in Georgia, the cool afternoon monsoon rains in Arizona, and the mild mountain summers in the Rockies — none of these are as reliable as they once were. As the planet warms, our relationships with the places we love are evolving, and the summer we once knew is becoming harder to find. Here are some of the changes Grist staff have witnessed in the places they love most.

Southwest Rachel Glickhouse / Grist Arizona

In the Sonoran Desert, rain is a cause for celebration — especially the summer monsoons.

On stormy days, you’ll often see massive curtains of rain in the distance, and rainbows arching against pitch-black clouds in one direction as the sun beams brightly in the other. When a downpour starts, I run to tell my husband and usually head outside to the patio to watch. When it rains as infrequently as it does here in Arizona, it’s easy to revel in the sight of raindrops and inhale the heady scent of petrichor and the herby smell of creosote. I’ll often text my friends or family across town to see if it’s raining there, too, since the storms here are incredibly localized. In other places, the weather may be a source of small talk; in the desert, it is a legitimate conversation topic. 

If it rains a decent amount, I’ll go to a state or national park in search of running water, natural pools, or waterfalls. When there’s a lot of water in those ephemeral streams and pools, I’ll often encounter families with chairs and coolers, and see kids playing in the water like they’re at the beach. When I recently went out of town and my area got a huge downpour, I felt a pang of grief to have missed it.

Summer storms weren’t always such a novelty, though.

In Tucson, annual precipitation has declined by nearly 3 inches since 1970, according to the research nonprofit Climate Central. That’s a lot considering the average annual rainfall is roughly 11 inches. Most of it comes in the summer.

People who have lived here for more than a decade all say the same thing: The monsoon has become more erratic and unpredictable, which sometimes means less rain than normal. During the summer months, the monsoon used to arrive like clockwork nearly every afternoon. Now, it often feels like a happy surprise, and people often post photos and videos of the storms in local social media groups. Even in the five years I’ve been in Arizona, each year has been different: One year, the monsoon brought so much rain that it carved temporary rivers in our nearby state park and flooded the entry road; another year, the rains barely reached our house. 

But it’s not just less predictable precipitation; we’re getting more days of triple-digit temperatures, too. On those rainless, oppressive days, all one can do is stare longingly at the empty sky from the safety of air-conditioning.

— Rachel Glickhouse, director of partnerships

Frida Garza / Grist Texas

I live in New York City, but I grew up in Texas and Mexico, so I brag a lot about being from a warm place. When my peers threaten to wither like grapes on the vine as temperatures reach 88 degrees Fahrenheit, I like to say, Keep it coming. Dry heat, wet heat, I like it best when it’s 90 degrees or higher. I wait all year for the summer heat: I feel most myself with the sun on my bare arms and legs, or when I am reapplying sunscreen (do NOT sleep on sunscreen) and powerful bug spray to said bare arms and legs. These are smells I’ve grown deeply fond of, because they signal that something good could happen any moment now. That was how I felt about summer, at least, until this year. 

For me, trips back home to visit family in El Paso usually involve playing basketball with my brother, swimming in my parents’ backyard pool, counting down the days until my relatives come over for a night of grilling, and telling stories outside late into the night. This year, there was none of that. Even though summers in El Paso are hot (did you get that already?), and in that arid desert climate, triple-digit days are not uncommon, this year’s heat was particularly unrelenting. So far this summer, there have been 45 days where the temperature has been 100 degrees or higher — or roughly half of each month. 

This uptick of very hot days — which this year is expected to last into September — has been driven by climate change. Global warming pushes summer temperatures up, making heat waves in West Texas both more frequent and more intense. On top of the heat, poor air quality disrupted my El Paso summer plans. Dust is an ordinary part of living in the desert, but pollution from vehicle emissions, along with contamination from a local petroleum refinery around the time of my visit, exacerbated the poor air quality. Not wanting to admit the pesky air quality bothered my throat, I ventured into the backyard during my August visit to spend the afternoon with a good book. When my parents asked what I was doing, I remained steadfast: I was going to enjoy being outside! But despite my initial determination, I couldn’t hack it and soon retreated inside. The whole experiment only lasted about 10 minutes. 

I am not much of a hiker, but it is sad to think of how my advice for friends visiting El Paso has changed over the years. The city is home to stunning mountains and ancient caves that are perfect for hiking, and I always recommend them to out-of-towners. But now I caveat that recommendation with statements like, “It’s beautiful, just stay safe! Go early to beat the sun! Bring lots of water!” 

The city I call home is being remade in other ways, too. When my brother and I recently visited downtown, usually a bustling strip of shops, restaurants, and bars, I noticed much less foot traffic than usual — a sign he chalked up to increased fears of apprehensions by immigration officials. El Paso is an international city, bordered by the Franklin Mountains to the north and the U.S.-Mexico border to the south. One of the main strips downtown leads right to a port of entry to Ciudad Juarez, but it was mostly empty that day. A key feature of the city, its binational culture, seems at risk of being dampened by both extreme weather and a national mass deportation agenda, making people practice extreme caution in their day-to-day lives. We spotted very few other people on our walk, mostly office workers heading to or from lunch — as I saw them, I too longed for air-conditioning. 

— Frida Garza, staff writer

The Rockies Austin Corona / Grist Colorado

Every summer, thousands of Texans make an uphill journey to the Rockies, drawn by the mild mountain weather. Though you won’t find them in any botany books, Lone Star state license plates seem to bloom like an alpine wildflower from June to August.

Many Coloradans complain about the southerly visitors, but they also quietly acknowledge their importance to local economies. The high country’s biggest summer export is its cool, dry days; and Texans, along with fellow travelers from other sweaty states, are willing to pay big for it.

But drought, wildfire, and heat have whittled down the luxuries of high-mountain summers. Weather stations above 9,000 feet are recording near-90-degree days at an unprecedented rate. The peaks regularly lose their white winter veils earlier, and then shed their ragged definition entirely as oceans of wildfire smoke obscure the mountain air. Swimming in creeks and rivers often really means squatting on uneven stones beneath the water’s sinking surface. When the rivers are full to brimming, it usually means a federally managed reservoir has released emergency flows to quench the fields of desperate downstream farmers. Servers in mountain resort restaurants overhear harrumphing from tables of Texans: “And to think, we came here to get away from the heat!”

As temperatures climb, one would expect tourist numbers to fall. But even as Colorado saw its second hottest July on record in 2026, resort lodging occupancy at mountain towns is up from the previous summer. Perhaps even a hot, smoky alpine summer is still preferable to an infernal Texas one. Shrunken streams are still full of squatting bathers, and baking streets are still full of lily-white Texas license plates. The trend has left mountain summers feeling less blissful, and more crowded, than ever.

— Austin Corona, energy reporter

Ellis Juhlin / Grist Montana

In Montana, there are several peak events that define summer. For some with seasonal depression, it may be the solstice when we hit almost 16 hours of daylight. For anglers and tourists eager to enjoy blue ribbon trout streams, it’s the salmonfly hatch: Bugs the length of your finger swarm the skies as the trout feast indiscriminately on insects — and their foam replicas at the end of a fishing line. 

And just as the bugs seem to know how to emerge into the world during the right time of the summer, so too do the tubers. As the days grow longer and warmer, flotillas of inner tubes dot the surface of any moving river, along with hordes of paddleboards, inflatable rafts, and even the occasional blow-up shark. It’s a phenomenon known by many as the tube hatch.

But climate change means Montana is warming quickly. Snowpack averages have declined steadily since the 1980s, and snowmelt is happening earlier than ever before. That means rivers run lower, and levels start dropping well before peak floating season — sometimes, before the heat even fully hits. With more summer days over 90 degrees than ever before, traffic on the river is increasing as larger crowds seek a way to cool off while still enjoying the outdoors. Tubers, anglers, and wildlife reliant upon shady shorelines are competing for space across an ever smaller stretch of river. 

Montana isn’t a place that’s always been hot, which means when the heat hits, we’re a lot less prepared for it. We have one of the lowest average number of homes with air-conditioning out of any state in the country. Rivers and lakes can be one of the only effective ways to cool off when the mercury rises. 

That can make for a much less pleasant floating experience. Take this year, when for my birthday in mid-July I decided on a river float. My friends and I loaded up the cooler with ice and beer, blew up tubes ’til it felt like our cheeks would pop, and buckled my dog Zayda into her purple life jacket. We clipped our tubes together with an elaborate rigging of paracord and carabiners, while Zayda and I opted to ride on a paddleboard. 

The first few minutes as the cold water washed over us were a relief, until we rounded the corner to find possibly every other resident of Missoula County floating along, too. I let my pup jump off the boat and swim ashore, her favorite activity. But when it was time to hop back on before the next wave train, she couldn’t figure out which flotilla was ours. I watched in horror as my timid, anxious rescue dog panic-swam between clusters of floaters and for the first time wondered if there really was enough river for us all.

— Ellis Juhlin, regional reporter, Montana

The West Coast Teresa Chin / Grist California

California is big — a region unto itself, one might say — and summer can mean a lot of things to those lucky enough to call it home. In sun-baked SoCal, it might be playing in suburban sprinklers during the day and heading to the beach for sunset. Inland, there are county fairs and harvest festivals (don’t miss out on Gilroy’s garlic ice cream). Along the Central Coast, Highway 1 beckons road trippers with panoramic views of gnarled Monterey cypress and thrashing ocean waves. Farther north, summer is the upside-down of seasons, where cool temperatures can prompt locals to don parkas and unprepared tourists scramble for overpriced “I left my heart in San Francisco” sweatshirts.

But climate change is altering many of these quintessential experiences. Where I live in the Bay Area, cool (nay, cold) summers are part of our DNA. Mark Twain may not actually have said that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, but that doesn’t make it feel any less true. The combination of cold ocean and hot inland creates an enhanced marine layer, or as many here like to call it: Karl the Fog. Yes, our fog is so iconic, he has a name and a social media following. 

But climate change is making Karl less predictable due to factors like warming ocean temperatures. One study found that coastal California’s summertime fog hours declined by 33 percent over the last century. That’s bad news for both locals and coastal redwood trees, which rely on fog as a critical source of water. Even though I grew up in sun-loving Southern California — where summer mornings were so warm that I would often eat my breakfast while lying on a towel in my parents’ backyard — I’ve become attached to the cold and moody mornings here. There’s something so peaceful about watching the mist roll in over the hills with a steaming hot cup of coffee in hand.

Across the state, hotter, drier conditions are increasing wildfire risk. Emergency go-packs now live in closets alongside beach bags, and road trippers need to check for route closures and evacuation orders. While most of California is not currently in a drought, water shortages are expected to worsen over time, which in the past has led local regulators to restrict lawn watering and pool use. For kids on break from school (and harried parents trying to keep them engaged), those conditions can mean sprinklers and splash time often have to give way to screens. That’s a real loss, especially considering that the gorgeous California outdoors is how many of us justify living in such an expensive state.

— Teresa Chin, executive editor of data & design

Kate Yoder; Matthew Craft / Grist Pacific Northwest

According to an old adage, summer in the Pacific Northwest doesn’t actually start until after the 4th of July. The cool, temperate month before is instead known as “Juneuary.” Growing up, I remember donning a specific summer outfit suited to the weather: a light hoodie or fleece on top (for the typical 50-degree mornings) and shorts on the bottom (for the afternoons in the high 60s or low 70s). Few people had air-conditioning, because a breeze from open windows and fans were more than enough to stay comfortable. 

But in the last decade, these idyllic summer days have become rare. Today, Northwest summers are hotter, and the heat starts earlier in the year. This was best exemplified by the infamous heat dome in June 2021, when temperatures in Seattle reached a record-breaking 108 degrees Fahrenheit — roughly 38 degrees hotter than the typical Juneuary highs. According to an attribution study of that event, climate change made the heat dome 150 times more likely compared to preindustrial conditions. 

Climate change is also reducing snowpack across the Pacific Northwest, and the dry, hot conditions have turned the region into a potential tinderbox. Wildfire smoke has become a regular feature of our summers. Checking the air quality index, or AQI, in August has become as routine as checking the weather, and many locals factor smoke levels into their summer activity plans. 

The combination of heat and smoke has made it harder to stay cool the old-fashioned way, with open windows and fans alone. During long periods of smoke, windows might stay shut all week, causing homes to heat up like greenhouses. As a result, Northwesterners are increasingly installing air-conditioning — so much so that Seattle recently lost its rank as the nation’s least air-conditioned big city. 

After enduring months of gray drizzle — known locally as the “big dark” — the promise of an extremely pleasant summer day always felt like the ultimate payoff. While extreme heat and smoke pollution are alarming and dangerous on their own, for many Northwesterners, losing our beloved summer weather is an additional sting.

— Jesse Nichols, senior visual producer

Midwest Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco; Mia Torres / Grist Illinois 

When I first moved to Chicago about a decade ago, it was in the middle of a still-warm September. My timing was terrible, I was told. I’d missed it — the completely singular experience of a Chicago summer. The golden season, they explained, is a hard-earned reward for a city under siege by long, bitter winters. The parties are outrageous, the beer cheap, and the big, blue lake free. 

At the time, I thought they were laying it on thick. But now I can attest to its truth. It’s hard to say exactly what makes a Chicago summer special — and why people here are convinced we have the best version of the season. My sense is that everyone who lives here knows you need to make it count: to be outside, to swim in the lake, to eat ice cream and hotdogs too, to stay up late, to dance, to kiss strangers, to go to the farmers market, to see your friends, to move in with your boyfriend, to wash away the failures and sorrows of the last year and start all over again. Whatever you want, Chicago summers can deliver. 

A lot of people talk like that around here; it’s a kind of boosterism that runs against my own sensibilities and can make us look desperate on the internet. But come to the Windy City in the summer, and you might find yourself drinking the same Malört-laced Kool-Aid. (Don’t actually mix those.) I don’t know if we’re all collectively redirecting 15 one-sided rivalries with other major American cities, but our summer really is something else. 

Which is why it was such a disappointment when this summer played out differently. For one, it was wetter than usual; the city’s emergency 11-billion-gallon reservoir and tunnel system very nearly hit capacity. Canadian wildfire smoke pushed local air quality readings to the unhealthiest levels the city has ever seen. More than 200 tornadoes made landfall in Illinois this year, a record-breaking figure for the state that’s very close to topping the national record. The same powerful winds also caused a terrible power outage in Gary, Indiana, just south of Chicago, where tens of thousands of people were without power for over two weeks. 

A less smoky, less humid, less rainy, less tornado-y do-over would be nice. But that’s not in the cards. Summer temperatures in Chicago are projected to keep climbing and are forecasted to coincide with increased variability between heavy rain and drought. 

The meteorologists tell us summer is technically over, but I’m wondering how much longer our summer will actually last.

— Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, regional reporter, Illinois

Southeast Katie Myers / Grist Tennessee

Small farms and lush backyard gardens are a way of life in the Mountain South.  The growing season is long. But farmers and gardeners are faced with difficult decisions as the region’s humid summer extremes have grown more chaotic and intense.

This was a lesson that really hit home for me the last time I tried farmwork: a brutally hot summer day in 2020 in East Tennessee. I was working in a hundred-plus-degree greenhouse, up to my neck in spiny tomato plants as I strung them up and suckered them, itching, head pounding, blinded with sweat. Later, in the field, as I planted a bed of onions, the landscape seemed to undulate in front of me, and I dashed off to a nearby tree and vomited discreetly behind it. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. 

As I drove home, I thought, the $8 an hour just isn’t worth it.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its plant-hardiness zones, which guide gardeners and farmers based on the annual lowest temperature in their location. Much of the mid-South moved half a zone up — from 7a to 7b, or 7b to 8a — toward the humid subtropics. The USDA cautioned against understanding it as directly linked to climate change but acknowledged that the zones for most plants will shift northward as the planet warms. That’s in addition to the cyclical temperature swings gardeners deal with year to year.

Increasingly ferocious summer storms and flash flooding, interspersed with more extreme flash droughts, have also made growing food even more tenuous. Kelsey, a friend of mine who works as a flower farmer in nearby southeastern Kentucky, told me she had to switch to what she called an Andalusian daily schedule, getting up early and breaking for most of midday, sometimes only returning to the field with a headlamp after dusk. When the financial margins are thin, little costs like replanting, fungicides, and even electrolyte drinks add up. 

Even more than the heat, the uncertainty wears on people. Aside from the financial unpredictability, farmers and gardeners are also feeling the loss of tradition and ritual, like the old-timer’s practice of planting by moon phases and zodiac signs.

As the planet warms, many are focusing on the cool periods of seasonal transition, investing in plants that return annually, experimenting with tropical varieties like amaranth and malabar spinach, or trying to grow crops in the shade to keep them from withering. Kelsey is pinning her hope in seed saving, the ancient art of paying close attention to the plants that seem to survive most easily and preserving their genetics, in hopes of creating hardier varieties that can withstand the summers to come.

— Katie Myers, regional reporter, Appalachia

Jaime Buerger; Lyndsey Gilpin / Grist Kentucky

Going outside on a Kentucky summer day has always felt a bit like stepping into a rainforest. And if you live in mountainous eastern Kentucky, you actually are — the southern Appalachians are a lush temperate rainforest. It’s hot and sticky and beautiful. There are a thousand shades of green. The migratory tanagers and perulas chatter all day; the cicadas scream all night. Deep yellow goldenrod, coral honeysuckle, and purple coneflowers bloom. 

But the temperature and humidity are becoming unbearable: Multiple times a summer over the last three years, Kentucky has had prolonged extreme heat waves with heat index values up to 108 degrees, resulting in air quality alerts and heat advisories. These extreme temperatures usually break with huge thunderstorms that bring heavy rain and violent wind and sometimes lead to tornadoes and flash floods. 

Evenings aren’t the respite from the heat they once were. Last year, for instance, Waterfront Wednesday, Louisville’s free evening summer concert series, fell on heat advisory days two months in a row. It was still 94 degrees when a band took the stage at 7 p.m. (the crowd was large, regardless).

Kentucky’s summer average temperatures have risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. Louisville has seen temperatures rise by over 4 degrees; according to a 2016 study, the city had one of the fastest-growing urban heat islands in the country, and new research shows the problem has grown in the years since. Louisville is working on efforts to address the urban heat, but for the most part, event hours, amenities, and locations remain unchanged. As parents of young children, my friends and I find ourselves skipping out or cutting our day short unless there’s a water source — a playground splash pad, a pool, a decently clean creek — to cool off the kids in. 

In any city in the state in the summer, you’ll find festivals, church picnics, county fairs, and flea markets. But most are still taking place in the middle of the day, often on hot concrete, without fans or mist or free water or enough cooling centers. Of course, the bourbon is still flowing — but even with ice, it doesn’t go down quite as smoothly in 100-degree weather.

— Lyndsey Gilpin, senior manager of community engagement 

Anila Yoganathan / Grist Georgia

Summers have always been hot in Georgia. There’s the dread of getting in your car and burning yourself on the seats while smelling the acrid fumes from the pleather melting. The slick feeling of perpetual moisture on your skin as the humidity surrounds you most days. And there’s the knowledge that, when the sun is at its peak, you should only be outside for the minute it takes to go from your air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned building.

Having been raised in metro Atlanta, it’s something I grew up planning life around, like scheduling outings on days when the heat was tolerable or making plans after sunset. My favorite pastime during the season used to be sitting outside at twilight: the sky a burst of bright colors, the heat receded to the edge of pleasant, and the humidity just enough to feel a little cool moisture on your skin like dew. In those peaceful moments just before it got dark, I would quietly watch the fireflies create a magical scene in my parents’ yard. Now? The conditions of a Georgia summer just feel more intense.

For one thing, the heat from the day doesn’t drop as much as it used to at night. From June through July this year, the minimum temperature in Georgia was 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the average from 1901 to 2000.

If I’m not tired of the heat and can tolerate the humidity, I still have to prepare to be eaten alive. Rising nighttime temperatures can “enhance mosquito growth” during the summer, according to the University of Georgia. So I don’t go outside at dusk as often as I did growing up.

Things have also changed inside the house. In the summertime, my dad and brother often argue over the thermostat. My brother wants cooler temperatures so he can sleep better, and my dad worries about the rising electric bills, an issue that other Georgians are also grappling with. My parents’ late-1960s house, while beautiful, is energy-inefficient. The old attic fan that used to keep us pretty cool years ago kept breaking down, and we no longer use it. While we’ve debated upgrades, the costs are still high. So the inter-generational thermostat war continues.

These days when I visit Georgia, I still try to venture outside at dusk to see my favorite lightning bugs. And while I may see a few, I’m all too aware that they face growing threats from light pollution, pesticides, development, and yard management, which can impact larvae. Without them, summer in Georgia feels just a little less magical.

— Anila Yoganathan, regional reporter, Nebraska

Sachi Mulkey / Grist Florida

The pleasures of a summer in Florida were once simple: the sensation of hot concrete pushing through the soles of your recently air-conditioned feet. A cold gas station Slurpee in one hand and a bag of boiled peanuts in the other. The steam from an afternoon rainstorm, rising from the sun-baked roads. A frozen custard from Rita’s Italian Ice truck by the beach, where you spent the afternoon collecting sand dollars and bouncing in waves with your family.

But Florida’s subtropical climate, low elevation, and exposure to warm ocean waters on three sides leave it with little buffer against the changing climate. Scores of tourists are now passing out amid 100-degree heat at Disney World. In many neighborhoods, sidewalks become hot plates after 10 a.m., scalding dogs’ paws into pink blisters. It may not rain at all, for weeks at a time. And when it does, scientists say it’s raining harder. You can feel it — gripping your steering wheel during a sudden deluge that whiteouts the road and floods sidewalks. At night, the air is muggy and laden with mosquitoes while, somehow, still unbearably hot.

So if your family is like mine, you might hop in the car and head to the beach in the hopes of trading the pavement for sand, and reconnecting with the magic of summer.

But if that beach is near Miami or the Florida Keys, you might find yourself facing thousands of tons of sargassum, brown seaweed that can clog shorelines and prevent sea turtles from nesting. In recent years, the kelp has been growing relentlessly thanks to the right conditions: bathwater-like ocean temperatures and shifting climate patterns that boost ocean nutrients. The result is a rotting mass that releases hydrogen sulfide as it decomposes, making beachgoers’ eyes and lungs burn with noxious fumes.

Or if you drive toward Tampa, you might encounter a monthslong surge of red tide, shorthand for toxic algae blooms, also caused by warm waters and similar nutrient patterns. From Sarasota to Clearwater, locals know to stay away when piles of dead fish (and sometimes manatees, dolphins, or sea turtles) litter the beaches. In smaller beach towns like Sanibel and Cedar Key, rising sea levels and hurricane damage have crumpled the economy and closed the vintage shops I once loved to peruse. Whether your refuge is cooled by AC or whirring ceiling fans, summer in the Sunshine State has increasingly become a time to stay indoors.

— Sachi Mulkey, reporter

Northeast Katherine Bagley / Grist New Hampshire

After harsh winter temperatures and muddy spring months, summer in New England feels like a well-earned prize. The peaks and lakes of the Appalachian Mountain range, rocky coastlines, and cool waters of the Atlantic Ocean are a venerable playground after months of being largely stuck inside. There’s hiking and boating, lobster rolls and ice cream, and blueberry fields ripe for picking. We New Englanders don’t let a single moment during the precious months between Memorial Day and Labor Day go to waste.

But a warming planet has changed the conditions in which we are engaging in these activities. The region is heating up faster than any other place in the contiguous United States. The weather whiplashes between intense rain and flash droughts. And then there are the ticks. So. Many. Ticks.

Growing up in the 1980s and ‘90s, these blood-sucking insects were not a thing I worried much about. Their populations were isolated to small patches of coastal regions and stands of long grass. My friends and I played outside all day before crawling into our beds when the streetlights came on. Parents didn’t conduct nightly tick checks or spray their yards with pesticides. People didn’t keep tick-removal devices on their keychains or lint rollers in their cars to swipe down bodies after being in the woods. They didn’t capture embedded ticks in clear tape, waiting to submit them to a doctor if a bull’s-eye rash appeared at the bite site. 

Now, I do all these things. The ticks are everywhere. My son was just a year old when I found his first one on him, embedded in his upper thigh. We were at a lake where I spent my summers, and where I had never once gotten bitten growing up.

New Englanders still cherish their summers — our iconic stubbornness ensures that never goes away — but these months are a little less carefree, and the woods and lakes and coastlines a little less safe.

— Katherine Bagley, editor-in-chief

Jake Bittle / Grist New York

I’ve always thought of New York City as a summer town. There are a lot of people who disagree with me, as evidenced by the clogged outbound highways heading upstate and out to the Hamptons, but to me the best times to live here are when you can stroll a hot street with a Mister Softee cone and take the subway out to Rockaway Beach. The city has been getting hotter and muggier for some time now. The panel of scientists who ran the National Climate Assessment reclassified the city in 2020 from “humid continental” to “humid subtropical,” meaning it now has more in common with the lowlands of the Southeast than it does with the crisp pine forests of New England. 

I’m originally from Florida, so humidity and sudden afternoon thunderstorms don’t bother me. What does get to me, and the millions of other New Yorkers, is the smoke. This past summer, a curtain of smoke from wildfires in Ontario blanketed the city for days, elevating the air quality index so high that it was unsafe to step outside. I made the mistake of trying to attend a party in Lower Manhattan on what should have been a sultry Thursday night and found myself returning home through empty streets with a headache. I had planned to go to the beach the next day and the day following, but I canceled my plans. (A few weeks later, when I tried to go to the beach again, my friend Chris and I got caught in an apocalyptic thunderstorm.)

This year was nowhere near as bad as the smoke drift from Canada in 2023, which blocked out the sun and raised air quality to levels exceeding that of polluted cities like Mumbai, causing a jump in emergency room asthma visits. That time I went days without stepping outside, until I got a cold from prolonged exposure to my window AC unit. When I did go outside, I had to wear an N95 mask, as did the construction workers and delivery bikers who were still laboring for hours at a time in air that was toxic enough to make one faint. In both cases, scientists have found that climate change made the wildfires in Canada at least twice as likely.

Most of the Midwest and Northeast experienced at least some smoke this summer, but it felt acute in New York, where the line between inside and outside is always a little blurry in the summer. Most New Yorkers have at least one window air-conditioning unit, but around 1 in 5 residents of the poorest neighborhoods don’t. Even in homes that do have window units, they don’t cool down whole apartments, and many people leave other windows open to air out other rooms and save on power bills. When we leave the house, most of us can’t get anywhere without walking for 10 or 20 minutes to the subway. The whole premise of life here is freedom, the freedom to go wherever you want, to go nonstop day and night. In two different summers now, I’ve seen the impossible — climate change brought the city that never sleeps to a standstill.

— Jake Bittle, staff writer

Samantha Swinsburg New Jersey

The Jersey Shore is famous for a reason. It’s the quintessential summer destination for New Jersey and its neighboring states. The long series of barrier islands shielding the mainland boasts wide, white-sand beaches that have attracted summer visitors since the 18th century. Easy access from the nearby population centers of Philadelphia, North Jersey, and New York has guaranteed hordes of tourists enjoying the beaches and boardwalks from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day for more than a century.

But for the people who actually live here, the day after Labor Day is the best of summer.

As if the atmosphere can read the calendar, the weather shifts from the brutal heat and humidity of August to the more temperate warmth of September. The ocean, cold enough to be uncomfortable throughout most of the summer, finally accumulates enough heat to be the perfect swimming temperature. Most of the crowds depart, leaving the usually-packed beaches open for those who live close enough to steal one more day of summer before the school year begins.

It’s a day for getting to the beach late because there’s no need to stake out territory, and staying until the sun sets because there’s no reason to leave. A day for long, lazy floats in the Atlantic, for finishing the last dregs of ice cream left in the freezer, for sneaking the dog onto the deserted beach even though dogs are technically still banned for a few more weeks.

At least it was. Now the warming air and water have made that crisp turn-of-the-page fuzzier. The warm September water is arriving sooner: In the third week of August this year, sea surface temperatures were already hitting the upper 70s, according to satellite data compiled by Rutgers. In the air, August’s dog days are bleeding into fall. Average temperatures from September through November in Atlantic City have already increased 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, according to the research group Climate Central, with 14 more days of above-normal temperatures annually.

Or as my mom — a lifelong denizen of the shore — put it, “October is the new September.”

But October can’t be that first Tuesday in September, not with school in session and island businesses closed for the season. And the more summer temperatures bleed beyond their former season, the more that perfect, final, magic day of summer becomes just … another hot day at the beach.

— Emily Jones, regional reporter, Georgia

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The summer we love is slipping away on Sep 3, 2026.

One of the hottest, most fascinating new fields in science doesn’t sound particularly exciting: distributed acoustic sensing, aka DAS. It involves using fiber optic cables to spy on the environment, and is proving to be enormously powerful. By analyzing the way that vibrations scatter light through the wires, scientists can detect volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and even footsteps above. Last year, researchers laid a cable on the seafloor near a Greenland glacier, providing unprecedented insight into how the ice is rapidly deteriorating.

Now a team working in the mountains of Switzerland has used DAS to expose another troubling trend in ice, known as hydrofracturing, in which meltwater seeps deep down and creates pressure. By studying the phenomenon, scientists can get a better idea of how ice the world over will decline, and therefore better predict consequent problems like sea level rise. 

“It’s hypothesized to be a mechanism that can cause mass disintegration of ice shelves and ice sheets in the Antarctic, Greenland, et cetera,” said Thomas Hudson, a seismologist at ETH­ Zurich in Switzerland and lead author of a recent paper describing the work. “But no one’s really observed the mechanism in any detail.”

For all its simplicity, DAS provides incredible amounts of data. On a Swiss alpine glacier, Hudson and his colleagues laid out fiber optic cables in a grid pattern. Then, using a device called an interrogator, they fired laser pulses through the cable. Even the tiniest of disturbances along the cable sent the tiniest bits of light back to the device, where they were logged. 

A zoomed-in view of the grid of fiber optic cables (right) and its positioning on the glacier. Courtesy of Thomas Hudson

Using calculations based on the speed of light, the researchers could pinpoint an “icequake” — a fracture that generates seismic activity, similar to an earthquake — at different distances along the cable, since farther ones take ever so slightly longer to travel back. With an extensive grid pattern of cable, they detected vibrations in extreme detail. Compare this to a traditional seismometer, which detects shaking at a single point. “We can break that fiber optic cable into thousands of strain sensors,” Hudson said. “So, effectively equivalent to thousands of seismometers.”

In addition, fiber optic cables are relatively cheap, so if something catastrophic happened to the glacier, the researchers wouldn’t take as big of a financial hit. With all these crevasses around, glaciers can be extremely dangerous places for scientists to work. With DAS, though, they can lay the cable, leave the site, and get a constant stream of real-time data beamed from the interrogator. 

“Whereas streaming data back from seismometers is not trivial, and then you have to process all the data back in your lab,” Hudson said. “DAS is actually more promising as a monitoring method, just purely from a data logistics point of view.”

Indeed, using DAS, the team found that this alpine glacier isn’t just threatened with melting from rising air temperatures. Because liquid water is denser than solid water, it flows deep down into cracks and forces the ice apart, creating crevasses that compromise the overall structural integrity. “How deep these cracks go, and how many cracks there are, really matter for the stability of the glacier,” Hudson said. “These glaciers overhang critical infrastructure like train lines or villages, and so it’s really important in the future to potentially apply this technology.” 

Theoretically, a long-term DAS deployment could provide early warning of changes in stability. In just a week of this fieldwork, Hudson and his team detected more than a thousand icequakes. Furthermore, the resulting fractures allow meltwater to get deep into the glacier, which likely holds true for others beyond Switzerland.

One goal would be to develop DAS into an early-warning system for the kinds of catastrophic glacial collapses like what recently happened in Nepal. “I would be 99.999 percent certain that there were signals that you could pick up,” Hudson said of the disaster, though there would still be several steps to getting that information out in a way that would help protect people. “It’s still challenging, right? Our research still doesn’t address the question of how you turn the signals into an accurate early-warning system.”

DAS could also help monitor the ice in Greenland and Antarctica that is already collapsing into the world’s oceans. The issue isn’t so simple as the sun beating down on these ice sheets. In Antarctica especially, warming waters are eating at the undersides of ice shelves (the bits that float on the ocean), as underwater “storms” add more destructive turbulence. That other recent DAS study in Greenland found another dynamic: As ice violently calves, it stirs the water and breaks up an insulating layer of cold water resting against the ice, leading to still more melting — a sort of self-perpetuating cycle.

With DAS, scientists get an unprecedented look inside the ice, as seismic waves propagate and betray the destabilizing cracks. “If we can use this technology to understand how deep those cracks go,” Hudson said, “and how many cracks there are in the subsurface, then we will get a better idea of how stable those bigger glaciers are. And obviously that has implications for how fast these glaciers might break up and cause sea level rise.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Fiber optic cables reveal ‘icequakes’ in endangered glaciers on Sep 3, 2026.

Even if you’re not wearing polyester now, it’s probably sitting somewhere in your closet — after all, it is the most ubiquitous fabric for textiles on Earth. Is that bad? 

Judging by social media, the answer is solidly “yes.” Influencers want you to know it’s a form of plastic, fashioned from melted crude oil or PET bottles and extruded into threads. That disgust factor (“ugh, I’m wearing plastic?”) might help explain why “polyester” is now trending as an insult on TikTok.

“Polyester lifestyle,” says the top comment on a viral video in which an 18-year-old imagines his oddly specific dream life — wearing blue-light glasses in a coffee shop while a Claude agent does half his job during lunch break; getting a call that he has to pack for a sudden business trip to Europe while watching the sunset from the tennis court — as a 1987 composite sketch of the Unabomber gradually fades into view.

There’s just one problem with the story that “polyester” is, as Mashable put it last month, “Gen Z’s new way to call you fake”: The term has already been used this way for about half a century. The Oxford English Dictionary gives examples from 1979 (“A gleaming brazen polyester clown”) and 1987 (“Clifton wears polyester suits and a polyester smile”). 

“TikTokkers just seem to be leaning into the ‘inauthentic’ and ‘low-quality’ edge of that meaning,” said Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and author.

Read Next When plastic companies write the lesson plans Joseph Winters

While it may be hard to imagine now, polyester was once sold as “miracle” fabric. Wrinkle-free, quick-drying polyester promised housewives liberation from the drudgery of ironing. The 1950s and ’60s were the era of “plastic fantastic,” when chemical companies promoted plastic and synthetic materials as convenient and durable. As polyester became less expensive, chemical companies ramped up its production, outpacing cotton starting in the ’60s.

As cheap polyester flooded the market, the novelty wore off, and it turned from “treasure to trash,” as the anthropologist Jane Schneider once wrote. The environmental movement was born on Earth Day in 1970, and awareness of pollution spread alongside a suspicion of artificial fibers. As hippie culture took off, people longed for a more authentic, “back to nature” kind of life. (It’s not a coincidence that people started using “plastic” as an adjective meaning superficial or insincere, too.)

As the ’70s came to an end, the shiny, synthetic men’s suits that once seemed modern now felt cheap and tasteless. In 1981, a John Waters film called Polyester played on the fabric’s tacky associations, starring a father in a polyester-clad suit who owns an adult movie theater. “Polyester and pornography — the fabric could hardly sink lower,” wrote Anneke Smelik, an emeritus professor of culture and history at Radboud University in the Netherlands, in a study detailing the cultural history of polyester.

That same anti-synthetic sentiment is back in force today. The vitriol isn’t exactly subtle: One TikTok influencer with a clothing brand said that polyester makes you “sweat like a dog and smell like f***ing shit.” (Those qualities were true of the polyester suits of the ’70s, but textile manufacturers worked to improve the sweat problem and polyester is widely used in athletic wear today, partly because it can be designed to wick sweat away from your skin.) Wellness influencers on both the right and the left warn about the microplastics shed by synthetic clothing; scientists are concerned about the health effects of exposure to PFAS and other toxic chemicals that are used to treat the fabric during production, in order to help it repel water and resist stains.

But the line between “synthetic” fabrics and “natural” ones like wool, silk, bamboo, and cotton is blurrier than you’d think, Smelik said. It’s not like rolls of cotton grow off the plant: The raw materials all undergo intense chemical processes in order to become the soft, huggable fabric we enjoy putting next to our skin.

There isn’t even an obvious winner from an environmental standpoint, she said. Growing natural fabrics requires resources like land and water: It can take more than 700 gallons of water to produce a single cotton shirt. The cotton industry was a major driver in drying up the Aral Sea in Central Asia, turning what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake into its largest dry lakebed. Polyester is less resource-intensive to make, but, as it’s fashioned from oil, it does generate more greenhouse gas emissions. A new report from the Apparel Impact Institute found that the global fashion industry’s emissions rose 7.5 percent in 2023 and 6.3 percent in 2024, in part because of the increased production of fiber, particularly polyester. The fabric’s durability also becomes a curse when you throw it away: Polyester breaks down very slowly, fragmenting into microplastics that persist in ecosystems for generations.

Read Next Michigan invests $7.5M to find out if it’s sitting on a clean energy gold mine Vivian La

There’s also consumer behavior to keep in mind: The perception that cotton is natural and better for the environment allows people to buy more clothes and not feel bad about it, because hey, at least I’m not buying polyester. The truth is that the most environmentally friendly solution is simply buying less and wearing the clothes you already have as long as you can. “Fast fashion remains fast fashion, and that is a huge problem,” Smelik said.

As good as the new generation of polyester insults are — including “Polyester Prince,” the new nickname for one prominent influencer who sells polyester clothes, and “polyester jester” to mock anyone wearing synthetic fast-fashion outfits — Smelik sees the current social media discussion around polyester as a regression to the 1970s. “It is so uninformed, and it leaves out all complexity,” she said. “You know, it becomes very polarized — like, ‘natural is good, and artificial is not.’”

toolTips('.classtoolTips12','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gen Z is using ‘polyester’ as an insult. It’s actually a throwback. on Sep 2, 2026.

Michigan is investing $7.5 million to research geologic hydrogen — a clean energy source buried beneath the state that experts say could help power a transition away from fossil fuels. That’s because when hydrogen fuel burns, the only byproduct is water. There are no greenhouse gases or other harmful air pollutants emitted, unlike fossil fuels.

If used as a fuel or in fuel cells, a large store of hydrogen could help clean up the state’s high-emissions industries, such as trucking and steel as well as cement manufacturing, said Kevin Mehren, director of the Michigan Infrastructure Office. Energy production, including at natural gas plants, and transportation are the top sources of greenhouse gas emissions in both Michigan and the country at large.

Geologic hydrogen “is a major decarbonization tool, I think one of the strongest that we have come across,” Mehren said. “It has massive potential across all aspects of our economy, just to fill gaps and provide a new energy source for us.”

A 2025 study from the U.S. Geological Survey mapped out areas around the country with a lot of potential for buried hydrogen, with Michigan on the higher end. The study prompted Governor Gretchen Whitmer in January to direct state resources into more research, from which the recent funding announcement stemmed. Companies in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa — states also highlighted in the USGS survey — are currently drilling for geologic hydrogen, according to Sandia National Laboratories.

Mehren hopes this potential can translate into a new industry in Michigan, depending on what further research reveals. “The goal here really is to determine: Is it there? Can we access it? And can this be the tool that we hope it is?” he said.

A portion of this initial funding will support research in the areas that researchers think might store a lot of natural hydrogen, like around Michigan’s lower peninsula.

The state sits on top of what’s called the Midcontinent Rift. It’s where the North American continent started splitting apart more than 1 billion years ago, then stopped. That created the Michigan Basin, a geologic formation that left younger, newer rocks in the middle of the state and deeper, older material — places where hydrogen might have formed — closer to the basin’s edges, including near urban areas like Detroit and Traverse City.

Existing infrastructure for drilling in the region might also make it a good spot for research, said Brian Ellis, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and co-director of MI Hydrogen, the school’s hydrogen research program.

Wells for oil and natural gas drilling already dot northern Michigan, and the region is home to some of the most productive gas fields in the state. The existing equipment can also be used to search for geologic hydrogen.

Read Next What’s geologic hydrogen? What to know about the clean energy source buried under Michigan. Vivian La

“We haven’t typically been looking for hydrogen in the past when we’ve drilled these wells,” Ellis said. “So there’s opportunity to potentially data-mine information that we already have and see if there’s hydrogen.”

Ellis hopes that some of the initial state money can also attract federal funding in the future. The U.S. Department of Energy set aside about $20 million in 2024 for projects related to geologic hydrogen through its Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy program, and national laboratories have conducted early research in the growing field.

“That’s the kind of thing the federal government should be supporting. Those high-risk, high-reward opportunities where we really grow our knowledge base,” he said.

Despite the Trump administration’s hostility toward clean energy, experts said they’re optimistic this research matches federal priorities. President Trump has pushed for more domestic oil and gas production by expanding drilling and rolling back environmental regulations.

Mehren noted how geologic hydrogen might be a uniquely bipartisan issue.

“You are ostensibly drilling — ‘drill, baby, drill’ is the catchphrase they use — for zero-emission energy,” he said. “It’s a domestic resource, but you are providing a new clean resource that could be an economic driver, decarbonize industry, [and] help fight climate change.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Michigan invests $7.5M to find out if it’s sitting on a clean energy gold mine on Sep 2, 2026.

This fall, 54 million K-12 students are headed back to the classroom for another year of lessons in all the classic subjects: math, English, history, biology. But there’s another subject that’s been sneaking into school curricula: plastics.

A new report from the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition documents the many ways the plastics industry has been inserting its agenda into classrooms across the U.S. — including through lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “the contribution plastics make to modern life.”

Industry interests offer these resources to teachers for free or for cheap, according to the report. The materials tend to highlight the necessity of plastics while downplaying their significant downsides to human health and the environment. 

“When that information is provided to kids, it obfuscates the true impacts of plastic pollution,” said Madison Dennis, senior policy and advocacy manager for Plastic Pollution Coalition and one of the report’s main authors. Besides harming marine life, plastics can expose people to hazardous chemicals, clog storm drains and contribute to flooding, and release planet-warming greenhouse gases. The Plastic Pollution Coalition is calling for stricter school policies against the use of industry-sponsored learning materials. 

The report lays out four case studies of plastics industry “propaganda” for schoolkids. One involves the Society of Plastics Engineers, or SPE, a trade group that recently became a division of the Plastics Industry Association. SPE’s lesson plans include activities like a “plastic scavenger hunt,” which aims for students to “understand that plastics are ubiquitous and their importance to society and their personal life.” A video titled “Your Bottle Means Jobs” explains how plastics recycling supports local employment. 

Another case study highlights the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, an initiative of the Dow Chemical Company. One of the association’s lesson plans teaches elementary and middle school students how to compare the strength of various types of plastic bags that can be found in a grocery store. After a brief experiment, the lesson invites them to “pretend [they] are an employee for Dow Chemical Company” and are designing a plastic bag for a customer. 

Eve Vitale, chief executive of SPE Foundation, inside a classroom at Warren Mott High School in Michigan in 2024. The SPE’s PlastiVan program tours schools around the country to teach kids the science behind plastics and generate interest in a future career in the industry.
Nic Antaya / The Washington Post via Getty Images

While many of the materials claim to support STEM learning objectives, they do so while promoting familiar industry talking points, emphasizing the affordability and safety of plastics. Some acknowledge plastic pollution as a serious problem, but they blame irresponsible consumer behaviors and, instead of recommending less plastic be produced, propose more recycling as the primary way to address it. 

In reality, only 9 percent of all plastics are recycled worldwide, and scientists have repeatedly warned that recycling will be unable to keep up with projected growth in plastic production. Investigative reporting has shown that industry groups knew this decades ago, but promoted recycling anyway in order to defuse growing concern over plastic pollution.

Wendy Johnson, a science education specialist at the National Center for Science Education, said the industry’s lesson plans and worksheets don’t reflect good pedagogy. Materials claiming to be aligned with state-level STEM standards don’t say which standards they support, or how they’re aligned. Lesson plans instruct students to read teachers’ notes, or list industry-specific vocab terms like “stretch blow molding” or “thermosetting.”

“By using all of these technical terms, it’s tricking people into thinking … that they’re doing science,” Johnson told Grist. What the materials really teach, she said, is “ideological perspectives about the economy,” like the desirability of cheap consumer goods. 

“It’s so clear that the purpose isn’t to make really clear, easy-to-use materials,” Johnson added. “The idea isn’t to teach,” but to get industry talking points into classrooms. The report documents plastics propaganda finding its way into schools since at least the 2000s. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, a plastics trade group lobbied the California Department of Education to add a section on “The Advantages of Shopping Bags” to the state’s high school textbooks. The PlastiVan initiative has been ongoing since 2011, and SPE claims it’s reached over 132,000 students in total.

Plastic Pollution Coalition suggests that the problem is particularly significant in schools located near petrochemical facilities. In Beaver County, Pennsylvania, for example, Shell operates a 386-acre plastics production complex and has invested millions of dollars in the development of plastics-related curricula and recycling programs, both for grade schoolers and for community college students. It has also donated hundreds of backpacks filled with school supplies, and bought one school a basketball court — seemingly in exchange for incorporating plastics recycling into the curriculum.

Shell didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment. Neither did SPE, the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, nor the school district in Beaver County.

The report hints at a broader problem with STEM education in U.S. public schools. Teachers often lack the time and money needed to design their own curricula, or to buy high-quality materials and lesson plans needed for in-class labs or science projects. When vested interests come along offering support — whether it’s the tobacco industry, the junk food industry, the pesticide industry, or the fossil fuel industry — it can be hard to say no. 

Read Next The plan to make climate science harder to erase Kate Yoder

“As a teacher, I’m always looking for free stuff,” said Suzie Hicks, a K-8 environmental educator in California who consulted on the Plastic Pollution Coalition report. Hicks said their education and background make them comfortable vetting materials for greenwashing — but that’s likely not the case with most teachers. 

Dennis recommended that school boards adopt policies banning educational materials sponsored by the chemical, fossil fuel, and plastics industries. She also emphasized the need for better school funding more generally, so that teachers and districts aren’t so desperate for ready-made learning materials.

One way to achieve this would be to eliminate tax breaks for petrochemical processing and plastics production facilities, which deprive communities of much-needed cash.

Katie Allen, executive director of Algalita, a California-based environmental nonprofit that develops educational materials on plastic pollution, pushed back against the idea that schools should ban all industry-sponsored content.

“Once you start banning one thing, where does it end? What I want to do is give educators the benefit of the doubt and allow them to make their own decisions,” she told Grist. She argued that teachers should be trusted to properly contextualize industry materials — and that they could even use them to teach critical-thinking skills.

That said, there are plenty of educational materials on plastics that are developed by non-industry sources. Algalita, for instance, offers free lesson plans on topics like plastic garbage patches in the oceans and biomagnification — the phenomenon where plastics build up inside sea creatures as you move up the food chain. The Story of Stuff, another nonprofit, offers a broader high school curriculum focused on the costs and consequences of producing consumer goods — including those made from plastics.

Those learning materials still come from organizations with an agenda. But Hicks argued they’re more trustworthy, since nonprofits usually aren’t trying to sell something.

Another option is for teachers to simply design their own curricula. That’s what Jacqueline Omania, a recently retired elementary school teacher in Berkeley, California, did in 2015. She turned her classroom into a zero-waste laboratory, and each year for 11 years, Omania and her students developed a set of zero-waste classroom agreements, vowing to minimize their plastics use — by swapping individual glue sticks for a communal tub of glue, for example — while also advocating for more systemic change, like by campaigning for a policy requiring Berkeley restaurants to stop giving out single-use plastic foodware.

“There are so many challenges in the world, but plastic is something tangible,” Omania said. “It’s right there in front of them, and they can see the difference that they’re actually making through their actions.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When plastic companies write the lesson plans on Sep 1, 2026.

In 2024, an interdisciplinary team of social and marine scientists set out to examine whether the prevalence of marine heat waves — prolonged rises in ocean temperatures that are becoming more frequent and more intense because of climate change — has any impact on child and maternal health outcomes. “I was very ready to find nothing,” said Clark Gray, a human geographer and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who led the research.

The researchers published their report this month, which revealed some distressing results. The team discovered that for every standard deviation increase in the number of marine heat waves in a 24-month period — or roughly three more marine heat waves than normal — child mortality increases by 5.4 percent. Child wasting and child stunting, which can result from malnutrition, also increased — by 6.5 and 8.8 percent respectively. 

The ways in which marine heat waves might influence extreme weather on land are still being studied. This study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not without its limitations. The authors specifically looked at health data from low- and middle-income countries. The data analysis also only demonstrates a correlation between marine heat waves and health; the authors are still not sure why or how child malnutrition and mortality spikes when oceans warm. 

For example, marine heat waves have been shown to disrupt oceanic food chains. It’s possible that these warm-water events are causing vital fish or shellfish populations to die off. However, the authors pointed out that other mechanisms — such as terrestrial heatwaves or the spread of mosquito-borne infectious diseases — cannot be ruled out as other drivers.  

Katy Seto, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, called the research important nevertheless. She noted that high-level findings such as these create an opportunity for refining future research. “It is definitely like a first pass at understanding for whom this could be a big problem and what the solutions might be,” she said. 

Moreover, the report’s findings are consistent with existing research on the relationship between global warming and human health. “I’ve been doing research on the social impact of climate for a while, and I’m continuously surprised by how consistently negative the warming effect on health is,” Gray said. “It really shows up pretty much everywhere on every outcome.”

Read Next El Niño is here, and it’s already scrambling fisheries throughout the Pacific Joseph Winters

One of the ways that Gray and the other study authors attempted to narrow their analysis was to group countries by whether they’re more or less dependent on small-scale fishing. “We do see that the negative effects are concentrated in the countries that depend on small-scale fishing, which is what you would expect,” said Gray. Industrial fishing operations are more likely to have the technology to evade heat waves; their fishing boats, for example, could move further out away from the shore. 

But that distinction still does not illuminate why, exactly, these health declines happen in more vulnerable coastal regions. 

It is not the case, for example, that all countries relying on small-scale fishing necessarily depend on those catches for their own diets, said Seto.  Those harvests could still be traded locally or regionally — meaning that maybe marine heat waves contribute to loss of income, driving malnutrition in a more roundabout way. 

Oceans absorb the majority of the planet’s excess energy, but scientists are still working to understand the full range of impacts on marine systems. Marine heat waves, which are complex, three-dimensional events, have not gotten as much attention as, say, sea-surface temperature rises or ocean acidification, said Seto. Still, this study comes at a time when ocean temperatures are the highest in recorded history, so some conclusions can be drawn. Marine heat waves are “very bad in this current moment,” said Gray, and in the broader context of global warming, they “are going to get worse.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline When ocean temperatures increase, so does child malnutrition on land on Aug 31, 2026.

New York City has more than 500 miles of coastline. The city’s coastal zone is home to around 1 million people as well as billions of dollars of residential and commercial property, and no two miles of the waterfront are quite the same. The marshy areas of southern Queens, the housing projects in waterfront Brooklyn, and the towers of Manhattan’s Financial District are all vulnerable during high tides and major storm events, and each of these areas is vulnerable in a different way.

The city learned these lessons the hard way in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy sent almost 14 feet of storm surge up New York Harbor and flooded thousands of structures across the five boroughs. In the aftermath of the disaster, the city embarked on one of the most ambitious climate adaptation efforts in U.S. history. Leaders spent billions of dollars to elevate and armor the lower reaches of Manhattan with flood gates and berms, rebuild the destroyed beaches in Queens, and buy out homes in the low-lying neighborhoods of Staten Island. 

Each stage of this effort faced delay and controversy, but the post-Sandy effort is now almost complete. The elevated East River Park in Manhattan is now partly open to sunbathers and tennis players. Farther down the island, construction crews are installing rolling-track flood walls that will be deployed during major storm surge events. These flood defenses will be operational by the 2027 hurricane season, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already laying the groundwork for what comes next. 

Last month, the mayor announced a major expansion of the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, promising to add almost 70 new staff members to a unit that had been on a shoestring budget under prior mayor Eric Adams. The first members of this new team will deploy the flood gates and clear the coastal zone in the run-up to big storm events.

“There was this huge investment of over a billion dollars to build these gates, and once you build it, you have to maintain it,” said Lisa Garcia, the new commissioner for the Department of Environmental Protection, which will oversee the flood system. (Garcia was the director of Grist’s climate solutions lab from 2019 to 2021 and later worked as a regional administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency.)

The new bulkhead at the rebuilt East River Park in Manhattan, with the Williamsburg Bridge in the background. New York City has been working to elevate the waterfront park since Superstorm Sandy flooded thousands of homes on the Lower East Side in 2012. Jake Bittle / Grist

But managing the gates is the easy part. The harder task for Mamdani will be to decide what the city’s next big flood protection effort should be. The stakes of this decision are higher than almost anywhere else in the United States, or for any other climate adaptation in New York. While heat waves, smoke, and flash floods all pose big risks to the city, sea level rise and storm surge have the potential to wipe out huge sections of the city’s most populous areas and cripple its economy. 

“I don’t think that there’s anyone who is saying we can protect all 520 miles of coastline,” said Garcia. “So part of it is this… What lessons can we take to other boroughs or to other communities?” 

Mamdani will have to make some big decisions about where and how to spend the city’s limited capital budget. Is it better to fund marsh restoration in outer Queens, or a coastal park in Harlem, or a bulkhead in the waterfront of Brooklyn? If you want to do all of those things, which of them do you do first?

These decisions are fraught with political and economic risks. When Norfolk, Virginia, another coastal city, created its master resilience plan, city officials made the controversial decision not to build flood protections for areas that were at high risk of flooding but didn’t have the high-value property that would justify the enormous expense. Under its plan, Norfolk would instead help those residents of the “yellow zones” live with rising waters or relocate elsewhere. In other coastal areas like California and North Carolina, efforts to promote “managed retreat” from vulnerable areas have met forceful blowback from residents who want structural protections. 

For its part, New York City says it’s still in the early phases of planning for future protections. Mamdani won the mayoral election last year by assembling a coalition that spanned the lower-income neighborhoods of the outer boroughs, and he took office promising to make life more affordable for the city’s lower and middle classes. The Department of Environmental Protection said it plans to start its master plan (which Garcia wants to analyze both stormwater flooding and coastal risk) next year, with a goal of finishing by 2031. It’s too early, then, to say how Mamdani’s governing philosophy will affect the city’s approach to the risks of climate change. 

New flood walls under construction beneath an elevated highway in downtown Manhattan. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani announced last month that he plans to hire dozens more city staffers to manage this new flood wall system and others under construction around the city. Jake Bittle / Grist

There is no shortage of underserved areas that need flood protection. Perhaps the most glaring example is the western edge of Coney Island, which faces routine “backdoor” flooding during heavy rain as the ocean rushes up through creeks and out of the drainage system. This flooding often makes it impossible for children to walk to school. Even though Coney Island was one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by Sandy in 2012, the city still hasn’t built new flood defenses there.

“After Sandy, neighborhoods in Manhattan had millions and millions of dollars invested,” said Pamela Pettyjohn, the founder of the Coney Island Beautification Project, a neighborhood group that advocates for flood protection and quality-of-life improvements. “There hasn’t been any investment at all in Coney Island other than development — a lot of new development, new buildings, but nothing for the infrastructure.” The city government is now holding meetings with Coney Island residents to decide how to reduce flood risk along local creeks.

In other areas, architects and planners have sketched out possible defenses for which there is no available money. In East Harlem, for instance, the city worked with architecture firm One Architecture to design a plan that would drain stormwater that pools in low-lying streets and elevate the esplanades along the river. The plan has been around for almost a decade, but the city has not been able to raise the money to build it.

In other cases, flood defense efforts have fallen through due to budget constraints. The city pivoted its proposed flood adaptation project in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx to a cheaper project that will provide off-grid backup power to the area’s critical food depot, said Amy Chester, the director of Rebuild by Design, the organization that led the post-Sandy adaptation effort.

“We can plan for it, but it’s all about priorities,” said Chester.

The other problem is that people often disagree about how a given area should defend against flooding, and about what counts as sufficient investment. Garcia has said that in some cases a flood gate or bulwark may be the best scenario, while in other cases home buyouts or nature-based living shorelines may work better. 

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City officials have already encountered pushback over at least one project. The city broke ground late last year on a project in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, which was also hit hard by Sandy. The effort will elevate streets and install new bulkheads along the water, but residents and activists say it’s inadequate: it is only designed to protect against “10-year storms” that have a 1-in-10 chance of happening in a given year, not the much larger “100-year storms” that the Lower Manhattan projects will protect against. The city has said that local topography and privately owned waterfront land make a Manhattan-esque barrier impossible.

The issue of flood risk has also come up farther north in the gentrified neighborhood of Greenpoint. In that area, a real estate developer is proposing to build a large new apartment complex that will contain more than 1,300 homes. The new towers will have steel bulkheads that the developer says will protect them from flooding, but some activists have protested that the bulkheads will push water onto nearby areas. 

These two controversies highlight the extent to which the city’s current flood defenses are a patchwork of individual neighborhood projects. That approach will lead to conflict over each investment and over where the city chooses to invest, says Matthijs Bouw, an architect with the firm One Architecture who helped conceive the flood barrier project that now surrounds lower Manhattan and who has also envisioned flood protections in East Harlem and other areas.

“You can’t build this stuff in isolation; you need to find a way to make sure that you align whatever you design with the way the city changes over time,” he said.

In theory, planners could come up with a comprehensive process for deciding where and how to spend its money, but there are tough choices involved in such a process. Lower Manhattan was an easy place to start after Sandy, since it was home to both the all-important cluster of downtown skyscrapers and a dense neighborhood of vulnerable public housing. Figuring out where to go next is harder.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Manhattan’s flood walls are almost done. What will Mamdani do next? on Aug 31, 2026.

The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the U.S. Army’s military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency, a lawsuit claims.

Dr. Adam Kalkstein, a civilian professor of geography at the New York institution, was terminated after the spring semester this year, six months after a testy meeting with Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, then dean of West Point’s academic board, the court filing said.

According to Kalkstein, who taught Army cadets there for 17 years, he told the dean at a November 2025 meeting that an order to cut from the curriculum content about the human causes of climate change was immoral and potentially illegal.

It “would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” he said.

Reeves responded by “storming out” of the meeting after telling Kalkstein that Donald Trump was commander in chief and set the agenda for West Point, the lawsuit alleged.

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The developments were reported on Wednesday by Stars and Stripes and The New York Times.

Kalkstein’s lawsuit is the second legal action over the stifling of academic freedoms filed by an educator at West Point.

Tim Bakken, the academy’s longest-serving law professor, had a similarly fiery meeting with a uniformed colonel, John Gregory, last year after standing up to a new Trump administration policy ordering civilian colleagues to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, The Washington Post reported in July.

According to Bakken’s lawsuit, Gregory ordered him to “stop talking and sit down” during a meeting of dozens of faculty members. “We’re a military institution. We follow orders,” Gregory is alleged to have said.

The U.S. Military Academy, West Point’s formal name, dropped its challenge to a preliminary injunction against the policy obtained by Bakken’s lawyers this month, military.com reported, and the parties have agreed “in principle” to work toward a permanent solution.

Kalkstein’s attorney, Michael Sussman, told the Times that his client was a conservative Republican who believes military students need to know the truth about the causes of the climate crisis as a matter of national security.

“He is loyal to the cadets and the academy,” he said. “And to his perspective, edicts that he can’t say what’s true in a classroom is beyond his tolerance and totally counterproductive.”

In further comments to Stars and Stripes, Sussman said Kalkstein’s position was not ideological. “There are certainly people who, anything Donald Trump does, they want to complain about it and scream and yell about it. He’s not that guy,” Sussman said.

The lawsuit alleges that Kalkstein first became aware his position was under threat in May 2025, when West Point leaders announced plans to reduce civilian staffing levels, while at the same time opening a new humanities center requiring new geography teachers.

They offered to let him stay as a “term employee,” Stars and Stripes said, and Kalkstein, fearful that colleagues would have to pick up his classes if he quit, accepted a loss of tenure and entitlement to a large severance package to stay.

The order to ban teaching about human contributions to climate change came in September, the lawsuit said, followed by the angry meeting with Reeves a month later. Reeves retired in April after a 30-year military career and is now president of the University of Wyoming’s board of trustees.

Kalkstein’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses West Point of breaching his First Amendment rights to free speech.

In a statement to the Guardian, the academy said it was “aware of the allegations and take[s] such matters seriously,” but declined further comment citing pending litigation.

The Guardian has also approached the White House for comment.

Trump has flipped between calling the climate emergency “a hoax” or “a scam” to admitting it exists but insisting that climate scientists are politically motivated and that the climate “will change back.”

Since taking office for a second time last year he has also attempted to impose numerous cultural changes on U.S. military institutions.

In April last year, Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to purge books found to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, resulting in almost 400 being removed after review. The books were returned a month later after the Pentagon reversed course.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline West Point’s only climate scientist fired after continuing to teach human causes of climate change on Aug 30, 2026.

Roughly 160 people are dead and hundreds more — including dozens of international tourists — are missing after flash floods hit a region on the mountainous border of Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday. Devastating footage posted to social media shows people fleeing a wall of water that washed away buildings and vehicles.

Initial analysis of satellite imagery and reports from the Nepalese government indicate that the flooding was likely triggered by a landslide caused after a piece of a glacier fell hundreds of feet.

As the region warms, its ice is becoming increasingly unstable, raising the risk of catastrophic flooding.

“The glaciers over there are definitely in retreat,” said Joseph Shea, an associate professor of geography at the University of Northern British Columbia. “There’s a lot of glacier mass up there, but we’re seeing thinning, we’re seeing retreating.”

Since 2000, the world’s glaciers have lost 5 percent of their ice, with much more drastic impacts in certain regions. Nepal’s glaciers lost nearly a quarter of their area between 1970 and 2010. More than 160 smaller glaciers in the country, research has found, have vanished entirely.

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A recent study finds that 40 percent of the world’s glacial ice could disappear if the world does not keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The impacts of warming on glaciers in Nepal can cause cascading effects. Shea pointed out that retreating glaciers can help trigger landslides as they get smaller and can no longer hold back sediment. As these glaciers retreat, many are leaving large, dammed lakes at higher elevations. “If you have a landslide suddenly into a lake, you get an overtopping of the dam, and then the whole thing can collapse catastrophically,” Shea said. Known as glacial lake outburst floods, two of these events hit Nepal last year, and research shows millions are living in harms way around the world.

Wednesday’s disaster was more likely due to a glacial collapse that fell into the valley below. Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, told The New York Times that satellite imagery suggested that a 2,000-foot-wide piece of ice may have fallen almost 4,000 feet, “[pulverizing] the ice into water” with the force of its fall. And while Shugar emphasized that it was still too early to make conclusive statements about the cause of the floods, he noted to Reuters that snow that was present on the glacier earlier in the week may have melted due to warm temperatures.

The collapse and debris flow were so large and forceful, they registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event, according the U.S. Geological Survey.

Glaciers elsewhere have broken apart with destructive results. That includes the collapse of a Swiss glacier last year that buried a town while on a smaller scale, a glacier collapse in Italy in 2022 killed 11 mountaineers. Both were linked with rising temperatures.

There’s a lot of factors in a warming world, Shea said, that can play on each other to destabilize glaciers.

“It’s summertime,” he said. “There’s lots of warming, lots of melt happening, lots of water around. There’s also things like alpine permafrost thaws: the ground temperatures warm up, and big blocks and chunks that would have been frozen in place are now suddenly becoming mobile.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How rising temperatures likely contributed to Nepal’s deadly flood on Aug 29, 2026.

Nevada officials have long presented themselves as a voice for compromise and conservation in debates over the Colorado River. The Las Vegas area, home to two-thirds of the state’s population and most of its economy, has become a model of urban water conservation. As the river has declined from overuse and a decades-long drought exacerbated by climate change, southern Nevada water planners built extensive water reuse facilities and implemented tight restrictions on new turf and fountains, dropping the region’s per capita water use by 58 percent in roughly 20 years. Meanwhile, in interstate negotiations over the management of the Colorado River, state representatives have positioned themselves as bridge-builders, sometimes referring to themselves as the “middle basin” between the river’s divided upper and lower basin states. 

When the federal government’s new management plan for the river was announced earlier this month, most observers thought Arizona, which stands to take the largest immediate cuts, would launch the first lawsuit over the plan’s implications for its water supplies. So it came as a surprise to many Colorado River experts when Nevada became the first to sue the federal government over the plan this week.

“I expected that there would be litigation, but it was surprising to me that Nevada fired the first shot,” said Anne Castle, former chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission,

Nevada’s lawsuit comes after more than two years of negotiations among the seven Colorado River states and the federal government over how to reduce water use on the declining river. The states failed to reach a long-term agreement before the river’s current management procedures expire in October, leaving the Interior Department to impose its own plan. The federal government’s plan largely relies on cuts to water use among the Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada, and California — to prop up water levels in the river’s largest reservoirs. Those reservoirs have been draining so quickly that the dwindling water depth could threaten hydropower and dam operations within months without intervention. 

Nevada argues that the federal government’s plan illegally forces it to take too much of those cuts. In a worst-case scenario, the plan could allow for a 71 percent cut to the Las Vegas area’s water supply, the state argued, calling it an unacceptable risk to the state’s largest population center and economic hub. Nevada believes this outcome results from a misreading of the law and also claims the government didn’t consider important alternatives to such drastic cuts.

This worst-case scenario, which experts say is an interpretation of the plan’s implications by Nevada, would become possible if reservoir levels continue to drop and if Nevada couldn’t reach an agreement with Arizona and California to help it absorb more of those cuts. Those three states already have such an agreement, which is incorporated into the federal plan and meant to last through 2028, at which point the plan allows the states to update the operations with a new agreement. Without an agreement, the federal government will implement cuts based on preexisting water rights and agreements, cutting the most from Arizona and leaning increasingly on Nevada and California as potential shortages increase. The plan was created through a decision-making process required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which mandates that federal agencies gather public input and consider environmental and socioeconomic impacts of major decisions.

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At first glance, the lawsuit seems like a departure from Nevada’s long-standing posture as the river’s conciliator, advocating consensus among the river basin’s seven states and 30 tribes, which hold vast water rights but are not formal members of interstate negotiations. John Entsminger, the state’s negotiator on the river, has repeatedly portrayed compromise as the state’s preferred path, telling a Las Vegas water conference just a week before the lawsuit that negotiation and cooperation were the state’s “first, second, and third choice.” 

But Nevada has consistently paired its call for consensus with a warning that it would defend its water if negotiations failed, and the state’s case seems less surprising in light of the drastic cuts it claims are possible under the federal plan. Unlike other states, Nevada sends its Colorado River water almost entirely to urban areas. That means cuts fall directly on the Las Vegas area, while other states can cushion the blow by fallowing agricultural fields.

“There is an absurdity to a plan that would require Las Vegas to cut 71 percent. That’s existential. Of course Nevada sued,” wrote John Fleck, water expert and author in residence at the University of New Mexico’s Utton Center, in a recent blog post. 

The lawsuit can also be read as a continuation of Nevada’s advocacy for consensus among the basin states and tribes. With the states unable to reach a long-term agreement and the federal government moving ahead with its own plan, Nevada is now using a different tool to make the same basic argument: that a federal decision without full buy-in from all the states can’t accommodate all their needs and find the innovative solution needed to manage the river.

Nevada argues in its suit that the legally required decision-making process that led to the federal plan failed to account for economic consequences to the Las Vegas area or consider creative alternatives to such drastic water cuts, such as changes to the structure of Glen Canyon Dam. Nevadans argue the process was too narrow and failed to consider solutions that would have avoided such massive theoretical water shortages in a major metropolitan area.

“Nobody can deny that the federal government did a ton of modeling and scenario analyses, but in terms of where the rubber meets the road, what were all the inputs, and what were some of the other analyses that could have been done?” said Kyle Roerink, former director of the Great Basin Water Network, an advocacy group for rural Nevada water resources.

How a court will see that issue has become complicated in the wake of a series of Supreme Court cases that reshaped the federal government’s responsibilities when conducting reviews under NEPA, especially with decisions that involve large, multifaceted infrastructure systems.

The suit, experts say, isn’t the cannonball-splash Colorado River experts have feared for years. That case, in which Arizona challenges the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — on whether they have met their obligations under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, may still materialize. Such a case could force judges to determine fundamental questions about who bears responsibility for the river’s decline. The resulting court battle could last years and remove states’ control over the fate of the river. Castle describes this scenario as where the “really big risks are.” 

Still, Nevada’s lawsuit has cast uncertainty over the river’s near-term operations. Nevada hasn’t yet asked for an immediate restraining order against the federal government, which would request that a judge immediately vacate the plan. But if the state convinces a court to rule against the federal plan, it could throw a wrench in the initial two-year arrangement that was expected to keep Lower Basin states afloat in the near future. 

“We are disappointed to see Nevada filing suit here, and are concerned about what the ramifications will be for the operations plans in 2027 and potentially 2028,” said Jay Weiner in an interview, speaking in his capacity as counsel for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, a senior water rights holder along the Colorado River in Arizona and California.

But experts agree this move, and even a theoretical Arizona suit, don’t strike a death knell for collaboration and negotiation on the river. States in the lower part of the basin may still negotiate regular arrangements to share shortages while litigation proceeds, while the possibility of a full seven-state agreement remains possible if negotiations resume.

Speaking at the Paris Las Vegas casino during the Colorado River Water Users’ Association conference in 2024, Navajo Nation Chief Counsel Bidtah Becker reminded the audience that water litigation and negotiation are not mutually exclusive: “You can get along and argue at the same time, and you develop long-term relationships through that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nevada preached peace on the Colorado River. Now it’s suing to protect its water. on Aug 28, 2026.

Across the country, the electricity needs of data centers have been a major driver of the widespread resistance to speedy development. The rapid buildouts of data centers have raised concerns that residential and small business utility customers will end up shouldering the costs, and about the health and climate impacts because much of the new capacity relies on burning fossil fuels. The rush has also given rise to a popular refrain: Make the data centers provide their own electricity.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro recently announced a moratorium on “any AI data center that does not bring, develop, and pay for their own power,” citing electricity costs in a post announcing the move on Instagram. Texas Governor Greg Abbott blocked new data centers from connecting to the state’s power grid. A drumbeat of calls for data centers to make their own power has been sounding for months among regulators, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders. Proponents of this approach argue it will shield utility ratepayers from data center costs. And it might.

But new guidance from the Environmental Protection Agency about “islanded” power plants — those built to serve a single facility rather than the electricity grid — shows there aren’t as many reliable safeguards against the environmental and climate impacts. The EPA published guidance last month clarifying that the Clean Air Act’s Acid Rain Program “does not apply to power generation facilities that are not connected in any way to the larger electricity grid.” It’s part of a broader effort, experts said, to loosen regulations for data centers and the power plants built to serve them.

The Acid Rain Program is just one component of the complex federal air pollution law, which can require one facility to obtain numerous Clean Air Act permits, according to Mindy Goldstein, director of Emory Law School’s environmental law program. Exempting islanded power plants from the acid rain provisions means one fewer permit that independent power plants built for data centers need to obtain, though the EPA’s guidance and several experts contend such plants were never covered by the program.

In 1990, the Acid Rain Program was added to the Clean Air Act to address the emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from large power plants. From the beginning, the program applied only to utility power plants, or those producing electricity for sale primarily for use by the public. It largely captured coal plants that were old enough to have avoided other Clean Air Act regulations, according to University of Texas energy law and politics professor David Spence. Newer gas plants that were already subject to the rest of the Clean Air Act joined later.

Compliance with the Acid Rain Program requires power plants to continuously monitor their emissions and report that data — something, Goldstein said, that states can’t mandate outside of the Acid Rain Program or another program that applies in fewer states. The monitoring inherent to the program has worked; sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from power generation have dropped significantly since the ’90s. 

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“The anchor of the Clean Air Act is a set of programs that are, in the end, the responsibility of states and counties to implement targeting that local pollution,” said Joe Goffman, a former EPA official who’s now with the Environmental Protection Network. “Local regulators will have to decide, and communities will have to ultimately demand, some kind of system that reveals what the emissions profile of these things are.”

Now, following the EPA’s guidance, state agencies have lost one of their most reliable tools to gauge the impact of these data center power plants.

The dedicated data center power plants now being proposed and built come as the entire electric utility sector races to adjust to a new reality. After years of fairly steady demand, the advent of generative artificial intelligence and the hyperscale data centers that run it presented the electricity industry with massive projected load growth for the first time in decades. It’s shifted the trajectory of an industry that was trending away from fossil fuels.

“For a long time, we just didn’t have anybody building gas plants at all because wind and solar are cheaper,” Spence said. “Then along came data centers with their incredibly large demands for power that has to be 24-7 and a lot of money to spend on these things.”

OpenAI has announced a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas plant, to be built by the U.S. Energy Department, at the site of a data center in Ohio. In Texas, Amazon is planning a 7.65-gigawatt gas plant and Nexus has proposed a 6-gigawatt plant. These projects would be some of the largest power plants of any type in the country, but smaller plants are cropping up, too. The EPA’s guidance on islanded power plants cites a 500-megawatt natural gas plant being proposed for an unspecified data center. Microgrid developer VoltaGrid has applied for a permit to build a 90-megawatt facility in Georgia to power a Serverfarm data center.

It will be up to state environmental agencies to issue permits for these projects. Though Goldstein stressed that EPA’s guidance is only that — it’s not a binding rule. State regulators can still do more than the minimum that federal rules demand.

In a statement, the EPA said the Acid Rain Program guidance “expands opportunities for companies to develop and operate islanded power generation facilities for data centers. This will give developers greater flexibility in where and how quickly they can build new facilities while helping to protect the environment and reducing burdens on communities’ electric grid.”

EPA has also proposed a more formal rule change that would further streamline the permitting process for data centers and power plants alike. Under that proposal, new pollution sources classified as “minor” would no longer require public notice and comment before permits are issued.

“The proposal also does not demand that states make particular revisions to their programs and does not alter emission standards or weaken environmental protections,” the agency said in a statement. “This approach is intended to reduce administrative burden and responsibly speed up permitting, supporting American economic development and energy dominance.”

That change, if implemented, would apply to any new power plant classified as “minor” rather than only islanded ones. But the overall trend of federal policy adds up, Goldstein said.

“This is a piecemeal approach to trying to clear the way for data center siting and for the siting of corresponding electric generating units,” she said. “It seems like a continuous knockdown of dominoes to clear the way for these data centers, and they’re leaving states and communities to hold it back.”

Some plants being built to serve data centers, meanwhile, are trying to skirt even local permitting. 

VoltaGrid and Serverfarm applied for state permits for their proposed power plant and backup generators in Georgia, but the Georgia Environmental Protection Division recently issued violation notices to both companies for beginning construction before getting those permits. A lawsuit by the NAACP alleges that xAI did not even apply for permits before building a 495-megawatt power plant in Mississippi to power a data center in Memphis, Tennessee. 

Within the broader context of the utility sector’s race to meet data center demand with fossil fuels, the rash of non-grid gas plants that fall outside some of the regulatory and environmental controls in place for grid-connected plants may raise some eyebrows — though Spence believes it’s unlikely to do more than that in the current political climate.

“If AI had been invented in 1975, all of this growth would have been regulated because politics of regulation was starkly different then than it is now,” he said. “The partisan environment in Congress is not conducive to regulating this explosive growth.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The rush to power data centers is weakening the Clean Air Act on Aug 28, 2026.

In this month’s Ask a Climate Therapist column, we’re tackling two questions at once — each examining similar themes of burnout and paralysis from two very different vantage points. Wherever you are on your own path of climate engagement, I hope the advice will resonate. 

Dear Leslie,

I have been working in sustainability for over 24 years. I’m tired, demoralized, feeling pretty beaten. I try to live by the motto that you only fail when you stop — but with a heavy heart I feel I’m nearly at the point of giving up. Do I give up, and say I tried? Or how do I continue trying in a world that I have little influence or control over?

 —An Exhausted Specialist

I’m 31, and I know more about climate change than anyone I work with. Twice now I’ve driven to a neighborhood canvassing event and left without getting out of the car. The only way I can explain it is that I’ve started to believe that nothing I do could make the slightest dent in the immensity of the planetary crisis. It sounds true when I say it out loud, but I can’t tell if it’s clarity or just fear dressed up as reasoning.

—Frozen Activist

Submit a question for a future Ask a Climate Therapist column

Dear Exhausted Specialist and Frozen Activist,

You’re arriving at the same boulder from opposite directions: One of you has been pushing against it for 24 years with shaking arms, and the other has backed off because you’ve decided that you can’t possibly budge it. And I get it. It’s painful to track worsening climate impacts knowing that they were coming, and to then assume the burden of failure.

What I see in common with your struggles is a belief that you need to be equal to the scale of the crisis. What I would offer you instead is the reality is that none of us can do it alone, and when we try, we’re on the road to burnout. 

Ask a Climate Therapist tackles your questions about how to navigate the emotional side of climate change, with leading climate-aware therapist Leslie Davenport. Have a question? Ask it here!

Cultural shifts happen through collective efforts that don’t always arrive in a straight line, and can be hard to see from our limited individual vantage points. Slow progress in your corner of the work isn’t a fair measure of what’s being done throughout the system; that requires a group mindset, not an individual one. 

Think about what it takes to restore a wetland, pass a new policy, retire a coal plant — these things can take years of unseen groundwork before anything tangible changes. 

But when we put the blame on ourselves as individuals for society’s slow pace of progress, we feel overwhelmed, and then our brains start working overtime to prevent that. That’s what leads to reactions like freezing (Frozen), or walking away (Exhausted), or even intellectualizing until the bad feelings fade.

Your part in this transformation was never about matching the magnitude of the problem: It’s about finding a way to stay in it that’s personally sustainable. Your effort matters, even though it’s never going to be enough on its own — and you can carry that tension without letting it flatten you. Learning to live with the not-knowing, the incompleteness, the years without a clean resolution, is an essential part of the work, too.

There’s a practice I like to use that helps you hold that tension without asking one feeling to cancel out the other. It’s called “Even As.” Make a statement naming the harder truth first, then follow it with one that’s also true, like in the examples below. 

“I’m exhausted by 24 years of pushing, even as I still feel needed in this work.”
“I’m afraid to start participating, even as I feel pulled to take a first step.”
“I’m frustrated by the limits of my capacity, even as I recognize that I’m not alone in this work.”

Try writing a few “Even As” statements of your own. Take a moment to notice what feeling is most present for you right now, and start the sentence that way. Then consider what else may be true. You don’t have to try to reconcile the conflicting feelings.

Burnout often feels like you’re pinned between two polarized choices — push harder or give up. Naming both truths with “Even As” eases that pressure. It can also help you look up from the pain points you’re feeling as an individual and reconnect with the broader mission that you are one part of. 

Take the third example above. It opens up a larger view that includes collective effort, so you’re not carrying the exhausting weight alone. What if your focus was less on the boulder and more on the flow of the river wearing away the stones? A river is a mighty force made up of many drops of water, and it ebbs and flows. Try taking a friend canvassing with you; let a colleague join something you’ve been spearheading; sit in on a new climate group’s meeting and listen to what’s being built. Before you know it, your doubts just may be overpowered by your satisfaction in doing your part in the great work that lies ahead of us — and you may discover pockets of progress you couldn’t see before. 

In this with you,
Leslie

P.S. If the “Even As” exercise resonates with you, find it and more in my new book Transforming Climate Anxiety.

I’m Leslie Davenport, a licensed therapist, educator, speaker, consultant, and internationally recognized voice on the emotional and psychological dimensions of climate change. If you’ve got a question about climate and mental health, please consider submitting it for a future column. Submit a question for a future Ask a Climate Therapist column More from Ask a Climate Therapist

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• Ask a Climate Therapist: Is it still ‘catastrophizing’ if the threat is real?

  Licensed therapist Leslie Davenport breaks down some of the tools that can help manage anxiety in the face of mounting climate catastrophe.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to deal with burnout on a burning planet on Aug 28, 2026.

Somersett, a short drive from downtown Reno, Nevada, is a peaceful place where homes with sweeping, high-desert views line cul-de-sacs, and roads meander through shrubland, trailheads, and golf courses. But in the summer, months of low humidity and hot weather prime the landscape to burn. On the morning of August 22, it did.

In just a few days, strong winds carried the flames of the Hawk Fire more than 23 miles, placing some 90,000 people on evacuation notice as dense smoke and orange skies blanketed the city. By Wednesday, dozens of houses had been destroyed. Two weeks earlier, the Bug Fire burned 150 square miles just north of the same area.

It’s the latest in an era of worsening wildfires in the United States, where more than 7.9 million acres have burned this year. A similar story is playing out in Canada, where First Nations and residents of Ontario have borne the brunt of more than 5,100 fires across the country. Scientists say climate change has made these fires, along with others in Europe, significantly more likely to happen. This year’s blazes in the Western U.S. were exacerbated by record-low winter snowfall, depriving the landscape of the moisture that typically seeps from snowpack throughout the summer, and by extreme and long-lasting heat waves that baked the landscape. 

And the fires have highlighted another, deadly piece of the puzzle: suburban sprawl. 

“What’s happened over the last decades is we’ve had explosive population growth in naturally fire-prone areas,” said Tim Brown, director of the Western Regional Climate Center at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “People are moving in to where fire happens.”

The wildland-urban interface, which researchers often call the WUI, is the phrase given to places where housing is sandwiched between paved city centers and forests or grasslands. Researchers have been raising the alarm about the fire risk posed to homes in these areas since the 1980s. As humans burn more fossil fuels and warm the planet, longer and more severe droughts will likely make that risk worse. Reno is the fastest warming city in the United States, according to the nonprofit Climate Central.

These half-wild, half-suburban neighborhoods remain one of the most rapidly growing types of land in the country, although development has slowed compared to the surge between the 1990s and 2010s. In some places, housing scarcity in cities has pushed home buyers to the outskirts of towns, where building is generally cheaper and faces fewer permitting or zoning requirements.

People are also attracted to living with more space, near outdoor recreation areas with beautiful scenery. More than a third of all homes in the continental U.S. are now considered to be in the wildland-urban interface.

The consequences of all that growth are now on display. A recent study in Natural Hazards, a Nature journal, found that the expansion of this kind of housing in tandem with climate change quadrupled the risk of destructive wildfire in California. In January 2025, the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out in the shrubby sprawl surrounding Los Angeles, forcing more than 200,000 people to evacuate and burning down thousands of structures. Earlier this month, three large wildfires struck suburban areas of Spokane, Washington, the state’s second-biggest city. 

“Maybe we need to stop calling it the WUI and call it what it is: fire-prone,” Brown said. 

People search the wreckage after three large wildfires burned more than 900 structures in Spokane, Washington, earlier this month.
Mario Tama / Getty Images

The Hawk Fire in Reno followed a familiar pattern. After the blaze started on Saturday morning in Somersett, gusty winds and dry, quick-to-light grasses helped it balloon by thousands of acres and quickly spread to other areas. The fire eventually shut down U.S. Route 395, a major thoroughfare that hugs part of the border between Nevada and California.

Chris Buckley, a public information officer with the U.S. Forest Service, said that the chances of a fire increase as more people move into one of these areas. In just the last 15 years, Reno’s population has grown by 26 percent to more than 283,000 people. 

“It’s a very beautiful place to make your home,” Buckley said. “But during this type of weather in this part of the country, anything that can cause a spark is just so dangerous.” Like the vast majority of wildfires, she said, the Hawk Fire was human-caused. 

Evacuating from neighborhoods in these fire-prone areas can be especially fraught. Roads are often narrow and connected by a single road with only one way out. During the recent wildfires in Spokane, the rush of fleeing traffic caused hourslong jams, leaving families sitting in their cars as the flames closed in. Similar scenes of gridlock unfolded during the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and drives that normally took 25 minutes took hours.

“Our roads are not built for all people to leave all at once,” said Brett Taylor, who helps prepare these kinds of communities for wildfires with the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District near Reno. Evacuating early, before mandatory orders, can help avoid gridlock and free up resources, he said. “We really lose our effectiveness if all we’re worrying about is evacuating people and not fighting the fire.”

The flames are just the start of the danger. As the planet warms, researchers estimate that wildfire smoke is on track to kill 70,000 Americans each year by 2050. When fires break out in cities like Reno or Spokane, the burning of cars and plastic objects, rather than just trees and grasses, can create smoke that is especially toxic. Studies estimate that the Los Angeles fires exposed millions of people to high concentrations of chromium-6, a cancer-causing toxic metal. “You can smell the difference in the smoke,” Taylor said.

Recently, California and other states have tightened wildfire-safety rules requiring homeowners in fire-prone areas to clear vegetation around their houses. Removing these plants can boost the chances that a house will survive a wildfire. The odds are even better for homes built with materials or techniques that prevent embers from getting in. “Many homes burn from the inside out,” Brown said.

In dry and hot places like Reno and Truckee, wildfire outbreaks are practically inevitable, Taylor said. He visits homes in the region to advise homeowners what changes they can make to better protect their property. His district is also spending millions of dollars from various state, federal, and other sources to thin or cut down trees and grasses — measures that can slow or block fires from spreading. “We’re making a dent,” he said. “But it’s a tiny fraction of what needs to be done.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In the American West, wildfire comes for the suburbs on Aug 28, 2026.

A new report finds that across the globe, progress toward developing more sustainable, resilient food systems is not advancing fast enough to meet internationally agreed upon deadlines. 

The research builds on previous studies tracking a number of goals, including some established a decade ago by United Nations member countries, like eliminating hunger and poverty. The deadline to reach these targets, known as Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, is 2030. The paper also considers net-zero emissions goals set by the Paris Agreement. For the majority of these goals, researchers involved in this study say it is now virtually impossible to reach the 2030 deadline. 

The report, led by the Food Systems Countdown Initiative, differs from the group’s earlier work by measuring progress at both the global and regional level. Alongside their paper, which was published in Nature Food earlier this month, the authors launched an interactive dashboard that showcases how nearly every country in the world is advancing (or not) on about 50 metrics. These include things like the cost of a healthy diet, fruit and vegetable availability, agricultural yields, greenhouse gas emissions from growing food, and more. 

For certain environmental and climate-related metrics, this food systems report card feels especially dire. 

For example, the authors looked at how much greenhouse gas emissions from agri-food systems have gone up or down in recent years. In order to do this, the team calculated gross emissions from agri-food systems as a percentage of each country’s average historical emissions. They found that globally, change in agri-food emissions is trending in an undesirable direction — that is, up. Emissions from agricultural production present a significant challenge on the road to reducing global warming, as they make up about a third of manmade greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. 

According to the paper, in order to reach net-zero agri-food emissions by 2030, every region in the world would have to increase its progress by about 70 percent every year over the next four years.

That kind of movement “is absolutely not going to happen,” said Bianca Carducci, an independent nutrition scientist and lead author of the paper. “Most countries probably shift about 5 percent per year on some indicators.”

While potentially unflattering or discouraging, this data point should be viewed within a wider context, said Carducci. The 70 percent figure represents the movement that every region of the world (i.e., the Americas, Oceania) would have to undertake. At the country level, there may be some that are actually doing well and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production. 

Regardless of whether you look at the regional or country level, progress must be viewed holistically, Carducci added. There could be one country that is very close to reaching a certain target, but also stagnating in its efforts. 

This wrinkle in the paper’s analysis reveals something tricky about the nature of measuring progress in the first place. “It’s not a binary,” said Michael Puma, a professor at Columbia University’s Climate School who was not involved in the report. “It’s not as simple as success or failure by 2030.”

Read Next The world is getting too hot to feed itself Ayurella Horn-Muller

One  feature of the report that could help illuminate what success would entail is a web of interactions between all metrics surveyed. (The researchers are planning a webinar next month to help the public better understand all its datasets.) Changes in greenhouse gas emissions, for example, are influenced by cropland change, yields, agricultural water withdrawals, fisheries, and more. It’s also affected by civil society participation, the researchers found. These can all be effective entry points to reducing emissions from our food systems, said Carducci. 

In some ways, deadlines like the ambitious ones associated with SDGs can obfuscate opportunities for improvement. When the authors looked at 2050 as an alternate deadline for achieving SDGs, they found that regions across the world are more on track to meet a majority of their nutrition and environmental goals. 

This shouldn’t be a reason to slow down, though, Carducci said. Regional and global leaders “shouldn’t just throw in the towel and say, ‘OK, we’re not going to make it [by 2030] so we don’t really need to do anything for the next four years.’” 

Using deadlines at all to spur action can be tricky, argued Puma. Overly ambitious cutoffs can incentivize quick fixes that don’t hold up in the long run. He cautioned that the focus should be less on the date by which progress should be completed and more on how we get there. 

“It’s really about designing realistic pathways,” he said — as well as building in accountability measures. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New research shows the world isn’t doing nearly enough to fix its food problem on Aug 28, 2026.

As artificial intelligence devours more land and electricity, a new breed of tech companies promises that outer space holds the solutions to our problems on Earth. If data centers are so hard to find a place for down here, why not put them hundreds of miles above the planet instead? Since power demand surges in the evening, why not send tens of thousands of mirrors into orbit to shine sunlight down on demand, powering solar farms after sunset? 

These ideas might sound far-fetched, but they are real proposals from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and start-ups in the space industry. As private industry drives the new “space race,” now launching more rockets than countries do, even the cosmos is starting to feel a bit crowded. A growing amount of so-called “space junk” has led to concerns that all the metal could collide, creating a destructive layer of debris that anything launching into orbit would have to contend with. Earlier this month, part of a discarded SpaceX rocket unintentionally slammed into the moon at 5,400 miles per hour, blasting a new crater.

As Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’ Blue Origin, and other companies expand into space, they risk causing more problems for Earth in the process: air pollution, climate effects, and light pollution. The practice of downplaying these negative consequences while trumpeting the message that space operations can make life better on Earth has a new name: “starwashing,” a term the space researcher Melissa E. Yingling helped popularize in an article published in The Conversation earlier this month. 

It’s a play on the term “greenwashing,” used to critique companies that highlight small sustainable investments to divert attention from the pollution their businesses cause. Space companies are appealing to a sense of “cosmic wonder” and making promises to benefit humankind, along with promoting their environmental bona fides, Yingling wrote.

For example, Blue Origin says its mission is “to restore and sustain Earth” as it sends rockets and lunar landers up into space, touting reusable rockets, cleaner-burning fuel, and the development of carbon-neutral technologies. Reflect Orbital, the California start-up behind the plan to send 50,000 space mirrors into orbit to provide sunlight on demand, promises “abundant energy” and “a healthier planet.”

All the emphasis these companies place on technological progress is a distraction from dealing with the climate crisis, said Gregers Andersen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark who has written a forthcoming book about Silicon Valley overpromising tech solutions to climate change. “The problem is, of course, that it takes attention away from actually solving the problems that are here on Earth,” he said. “And I think that’s also what’s meant by the term of ‘starwashing.’”

Whether or not the term catches on, experts say that companies’ optimistic marketing does obscure real environmental risks. Magali Delmas, a professor of management at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, thinks of the “new frontier” of space as something akin to the Gold Rush. “They were only seeing the positive — they were not seeing the negative impact on the environment of mining,” she said. “This optimism [about space] is really downplaying some of the challenges.”

The growing space industry could wind up polluting the layers of atmosphere in ways that scientists are just beginning to understand, altering Earth’s climate. Rocket engines release soot into the stratosphere, where it can damage the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet radiation. They also release water vapor, which absorbs heat radiated from Earth and amplifies the warming caused by greenhouse gases. Research has found that as satellites disintegrate, they could alter the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, releasing aluminum oxide dust that can lead to warming, the scattering of sunlight, and changes in atmospheric circulation.

Beyond changes to the atmosphere, space expansion has other environmental effects, including the loss of dark sky as satellites reflect sunlight and damage to wildlife habitats around launch sites. That’s not to mention the enormous greenhouse gas emissions involved in building and launching satellites.

Delmas said that some of the companies’ promises are worth considering, and can’t be easily dismissed as greenwashing or starwashing: “Some of it’s actually true — there are these new technologies that are developed that can be just amazing.” There have been some environmental benefits from going up into space: Methane-detecting satellites have uncovered leaks from oil and gas operations in recent years that dramatically exceeded what had been reported, important information for reining in emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas. Astronauts have been shocked by how fragile and delicate Earth’s atmosphere looks from space, and this so-called “overview effect” has turned a surprising number of them into climate advocates.

Read Next Data centers gobble Earth’s resources. What if we took them to space instead? Sophie Hurwitz

Andersen, however, warned against falling for tech moguls’ narratives of “progress.” He thinks they’re trying to manipulate the public into being optimistic about the future, even as scientists show we’re headed toward an even hotter, more disaster-ridden world. He has a different vision of what should be considered “progress” — not establishing colonies in space, where people would live limited lives, but ensuring that humans can thrive on Earth long-term. 

“I think the common human project should be to create a sustainable civilization within the planetary boundaries,” Andersen said. “And I think the narratives that they are presenting are just basically derailing us from that mission.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Starwashing’: The new space race has an environmental problem on Aug 27, 2026.

Less than two years after opening, a liquefied natural gas terminal near New Orleans is seeking a multibillion-dollar expansion under the Trump administration’s new “emergency” permitting process that cuts regulatory review and could put nearby wetlands and waterways at greater risk.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted Plaquemines LNG fast-tracked permitting under a “national energy emergency” that President Donald Trump declared last year. The agency cut the public comment period from the typical 30 days to 10, and is expected to move quickly to approve the expansion, a step that would allow the terminal to more than double in size, growing from nearly 590 acres along the Mississippi River to about 1,220. 

That would make the facility the largest LNG export terminal in North America, according to its owner, Virginia-based Venture Global. 

Environmentalists warn that the expedited review will mean less scrutiny of dredging, in-water construction, and the filling of marshlands in a region rapidly losing land. By the Army Corps’ estimates, Venture Global’s $18-billion expansion could damage up to 470 acres of wetlands and river bottoms in central Plaquemines Parish, about 25 miles south of New Orleans.   

“Louisiana is already dealing with a coastal crisis,” said Matt Rota, a senior policy director with Healthy Gulf, a New Orleans-based environmental group. “Destroying 400 more acres in Plaquemines Parish is ridiculous. I don’t know how many acres they have left, but it’s not that much.”

The Plaquemines LNG terminal in Port Sulphur on July 28.
Christiana Botic / Verite News

Plaquemines Parish has lost more than 250 square miles of land over the past 60 years to subsidence, sea level rise, and erosion. The state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority projects another 300 square miles — about half the parish’s remaining land — could disappear over the next 50 years. Much of Louisiana’s coast faces a similar threat. Since the early 1900s, nearly 2,000 square miles of the state have vanished, an area roughly the size of Delaware.

Hundreds of other projects could receive expedited permitting under the emergency declaration, which Trump said was necessary to maintain a “reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy” for the U.S. military and economy. Last year, the Army Corps identified more than 600 pipelines, power plants, LNG terminals, and others that could speed through the normal review process required by the Clean Water Act.

Fast-tracking permits will likely accelerate the growth of an already booming LNG industry. More than 30 LNG export terminals are under construction or proposed in the United States. Plaquemines LNG is the newest of four terminals in Louisiana, including Sabine Pass, Cameron LNG, and Calcasieu Pass LNG, which is also owned by Venture Global. (The Army Corps and Venture Global did not respond to requests for comment.) 

LNG is natural gas chilled into a liquid for easier shipment overseas, where demand has surged as countries seek alternatives to coal and Russian gas. The industry’s critics say shipping natural gas abroad conflicts with Trump’s stated rationale for declaring an energy emergency: increasing what he described as the “nation’s inadequate energy supply.”

“It’s hard to see how expanding an LNG export terminal is going to help domestic energy independence and reliability,” said Griffin Bird, a research analyst with the Environmental Integrity Project. 

Of the 833 billion cubic feet of gas exported from Plaquemines LNG last year, most went to Europe, with Germany receiving the largest share, at 19 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The terminal is one of Louisiana’s largest industrial facilities, with 1.3 miles of river frontage, three ship berths, two gas-fired power plants, and nearly 30 miles of natural gas pipeline. 

It’s also one of the state’s biggest polluters. Plaquemines LNG is permitted to release about 8.1 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases per year, according to company records. That’s equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 1.7 million gas-powered vehicles.

The only industrial facility in Louisiana that emits more than Plaquemines LNG is an ammonia plant owned by CF Industries that released about 10.4 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2023, the latest year available in the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory. 

Those emissions, along with the carbon dioxide released when natural gas is burned for energy overseas, contribute to climate change, which is accelerating sea level rise and intensifying the storms that drive land loss in Plaquemines. “Burning more natural gas means we lose Plaquemines Parish even faster,” Rota said. 

The terminal’s expansion would increase its production capacity from about 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas per year to around 2.3 trillion. It’s unclear how the expansion will affect emissions, but federal filings indicate the larger facility could produce at least 9 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. Venture says it plans to use carbon capture and sequestration technology to inject a portion of the terminal’s carbon dioxide emissions underground. 

Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG export in 2024, in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.
Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Some Louisiana leaders welcome the expansion, saying it will spur economic activity and create jobs. 

In April, U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Republican from Jefferson Parish, celebrated the rapid development of the Plaquemines site. “This was a cow pasture four or five years ago,” he told reporters during a tour of the facility and the area planned for expansion. “Now it’s the most modern, the most efficient, the largest LNG export facility in the world.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On Louisiana’s disappearing coast, a natural gas terminal is poised to become the largest in the US on Aug 27, 2026.