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Households and businesses are driving a solar boom in Africa, where rooftop arrays and other small systems account for the bulk of new solar installations. But this rapid buildout, which is driving solar additions to record levels, is largely unaccounted for in official statistics, analysts say.

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Burdened by rising fuel import costs and an “ocean crisis” of record-breaking heat, Pacific island nations are seeking to build support for a new regional fund ahead of COP31, intended to channel investment into renewable energy, community resilience and ocean protection, experts said.

Leaders from the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), including Australia and New Zealand, are expected to issue a call for global pledges to the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF) at a high-level meeting this coming week in Palau, seeking to build a new model for financing climate action.

The new regional fund was formally launched in May this year and is meant to “serve communities at a community level”, swiftly channelling investments for their projects on the ground, according to Fiji’s assistant minister for foreign affairs, Lenora Qereqeretabua.

“We are expecting pledges for the PRF, and these funds will go to communities that apply,” she told journalists at an online briefing. “We have organised it in such a way that it makes our application processes much, much easier than applying for global funding.”

Qereqeretabua added that she expects that PRF funds will be “utilised by communities to protect themselves from climate change and the effects of climate change.”

The Pacific Islands Forum meeting is expected to shape the region’s priorities ahead of this year’s pre-COP, hosted by Fiji and Tuvalu, and COP31, which will be co-led by Australia and Türkiye.

At COP31, a dedicated session on the climate finance needs of small island states will seek to drive pledges into the PRF. The fund has so far received about $172 million in capital – with about $67 million coming from Australia – and aims to close the year with $500 million.

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Ocean heat and fossil fuel shocks

Leaders from the Pacific will meet in Palau from Sunday amid an “ocean crisis” of record-breaking ocean heat caused by this year’s “super El Niño”, according to Kevin Chand, Pacific ocean policy director at National Geographic’s Pristine Seas conservation project.

Leaders at the PIF are expected to put forward commitments towards new marine protected areas, which will be key for shielding ecosystems from future climate extremes, Chand said. The forum is expected to issue a statement on the need for ocean action at COP31, and announce commitments towards reaching the global goal of protecting 30% of the planet’s land and sea ecosystems by 2030.

Rising ocean heat could lead to food insecurity and lost government earnings in the region, as key fish stocks like tuna start migrating away from their coastline in search of colder waters, said Coral Pasisi, director of climate change and sustainability at the Pacific Community (SPC).

Climate shocks are deepening existing economic pressures, as Pacific nations have spent up to a quarter of their GDP on fossil fuel imports due to the war in Iran, according to a recent report by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

Wesley Morgan, one of the study’s authors, told journalists that partner nations “ought to be putting their money where their mouth is”, and should support the energy transition in the Pacific by covering the upfront costs of switching from polluting diesel to solar power, batteries and electricity grid upgrades.

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Given the increase in climate-related shocks and sea-level rise, the PIF should also mention the need to phase out fossil fuel extraction and consumption, said Sindra Sharma, international policy lead at the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).

Last year’s COP30 failed to deliver a global roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels, which led to a group of countries – including several Pacific island nations – pursuing their own fossil fuel phase-out summit in Santa Marta, Colombia. Next year’s conference will be hosted by Tuvalu and co-chaired by Ireland, which should also receive backing from the PIF, Sharma said.

Both the chairs of the Santa Marta coalition and the Australian COP31 co-presidency have vowed to continue a push for this topic to be discussed at COP31.

A drought response brigade in Tuvalu in 2020. (Photo: Pacific Community) New fund to test allies

As local communities in the Pacific struggle to access global climate funds, the PRF’s planned model for quick, direct disbursements has “very solid and good” intentions, Sharma said, but it will need political and financial backing from donor countries.

“The proof is going to be when the fund actually starts operating and delivering to communities,” she added. “If there is too much bureaucracy in being able to access the funds, for example. These things will have to be scrutinised.”

The facility aims to deliver funds in two categories: one for climate adaptation and “disaster resilience”, and another for social and community resilience that includes areas like community capacity-building, education, data analytics and financial management, among others. It will launch its first call for proposals at the PIF.

Morgan added that Australia will need to “leverage global interests” so that funding is directed to the Pacific Resilience Facility “or else the Pacific won’t be able to trust Australia as a partner”. The country ratified the PRF treaty in May, triggering its entry into force.

“The perception [of Australia] in the region is genuinely divided, and it’s worth being honest about it,” Sharma said, adding that the pre-COP31 in Fiji, which is usually limited to a technical space for negotiations, will determine how meaningful Australia’s advocacy for the Pacific can be.

This time, Pacific nations want to use the pre-COP in early October as an opportunity to demonstrate the challenges their largely low-lying islands face and to advocate for their political priorities, including a renewed global effort to limit global warming to 1.5C by cutting emissions faster and deeper. World leaders are due to visit Tuvalu to experience the frontline of rising sea levels, although Australia and Fiji have yet to confirm who will attend.

“In Bonn, Australia was largely missing on the negotiated outcomes that we so urgently need to see. It’s not enough to get Pacific priorities on the agenda. Agenda placement is not delivery,” Sharma added.

The post Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31 appeared first on Climate Home News.

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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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.”

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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.

Hungary has never had such a good climate bill as the one it could have now if, improbably, its parliament were to adopt the draft written by civil society and put out for public consultation. The fate of this draft legislation – which, with minimal changes, could be of outstanding quality even by international standards – depends on the stance of the Tisza government. But how will Péter Magyar and his party proceed?

Last summer, the Hungarian constitutional court ruled that the climate law passed by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government – which liked to call itself a “champion of the climate” – was inadequate and unconstitutional. The court annulled part of the law, calling on the National Assembly to “remedy the breach of the Fundamental Law resulting from this failure” by June 2026.

Subsequently, the Fidesz government showed no interest whatsoever in the matter. But a regulatory proposal has been drawn up that is virtually ready for implementation and could even have ensured compliance with the deadline. This document was not drafted by any parliamentary group: it is the joint effort of more than 180 civil society and professional organisations, and the proposal currently under public debate is of a particularly high standard.

Built on solid principles…

One of the draft bill’s greatest strengths is that it treats mitigation (alleviating environmental harm), adaptation (adjusting to climate change), and resilience (increasing resistance) as objectives of equal importance. Unusually, the system of guiding principles is also sufficiently detailed: alongside traditional environmental law principles (precaution, the polluter pays, prevention), it also includes distinctly modern, progressive principles such as the “principle of sufficiency” (which focuses on well-being rather than maximum consumption, thereby limiting waste and the over-use of resources), a systems approach, data-driven decision-making, and proportionate individual responsibility. The fact that the prohibition on regression and intergenerational justice are linked to existing constitutional court case law indicates that the drafters of the text drew upon the few effective practices that Hungarian environmental protection has painstakingly developed over recent decades.

Particularly positive is the detailed and forward-looking approach to water management. The proposal entails the requirement to review bilateral water-sharing agreements, ensuring the public availability of groundwater monitoring data, and encourages the use of greywater. These are all elements that were previously absent from domestic legislation and would be indispensable to managing the water crisis Hungary now faces – the most tangible consequence of climate change in the Carpathian Basin.

The section on forest management is also very thorough: avoiding clearcutting, accounting for shifts in climate zones, and calling for support for species migration all point to a distinctly modern approach. Another positive aspect is the inclusion of the concepts and requirements relating to mental health and energy poverty in the cooling sector, which are absent from many otherwise modern European climate laws

The detailed description of the carbon budget mechanism (a legally binding, period-based planning and accounting framework that determines how much greenhouse gas we may emit in each period if we are serious about achieving net-zero emissions) is useful: together, the five-year rolling planning cycle, the carry-over option, the institution of infringement proceedings, and the obligation to submit final accounts form an enforceable system similar to the UK model. The requirement to introduce consumption-based emissions tracking is also welcome, as it can counterbalance the limitations of the territorial approach. The sectoral measures (building renovation, transport, industry, food consumption) are sufficiently wide-ranging and specific, whilst the establishment of an ecological hierarchy for biomass utilisation (modelled on the waste hierarchy) is particularly forward-looking.

One of the draft bill’s greatest strengths is that it treats mitigation, adaptation, and resilience as objectives of equal importance.

… and strong scientific foundations

The scientific and innovation elements of the concept are particularly strong: the Climate Innovation Centre, the National Climate Data Centre, and the introduction of funding mechanisms similar to Carbon Contracts for Difference initiatives to support emissions-reduction investments create promising institutional and financial instruments. Support for grassroots initiatives and recognition of traditional and community knowledge are also forward-looking and in line with the principle of subsidiarity. Moreover, the obligation to promote climate awareness at all levels of the education system, the development of teacher training, and measures to combat disinformation together form a coherent strategy for shaping public attitudes.

It seems useful to introduce ex-ante climate risk assessment as a separate legal institution to ensure that no government decision may be adopted without such an evaluation. Extending scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions (i.e. those related to purchased energy, on-site emissions, and arising from suppliers, respectively) to cover the entire value chain in environmental impact assessments is also a modern, ESG-compatible, and forward-looking rule.

Involving the Ombudsman for Future Generations in the ombudsman procedure in the event of a carbon budget overrun could also serve as a strong enforcement mechanism. A similar institution once existed, but the 2011 amendments to the Fundamental Law rendered it ineffective.

The enshrinement of the status of the Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Policy is clearly positive: it operates solely in accordance with the Hungarian constitution and the law and has its own budget and secretariat, and proposals relating to climate targets cannot be adopted without its opinion. The joint nomination mechanism of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) and the Hungarian Research Network (HUN-REN) also provides a safeguard against political influence. The operation of the government Committee on Climate Protection under the prime minister’s leadership provides an appropriate framework for inter-ministerial coordination, whilst the mixed (partly non-political) composition of the National Climate Protection Council can strengthen its social legitimacy.

The introduction of the concept of “climate endangerment” into Hungarian law is particularly noteworthy: the public prosecutor could also bring proceedings against major emitters, seeking compensation and a ban on their activities, which represents a significant step forward in climate litigation. The privileged legal status of civil society organisations as claimants, their right to bring legal proceedings, and an exemption from litigation fees also provide a significant safeguard. The Advocate for Future Generations’ powers to intervene and to submit motions to the constitutional court are also commendable.

The introduction of the National Climate Protection Fund is a useful initiative, as it creates a dedicated and predictable funding framework (in contrast to current practice, namely ad hoc budgetary allocations and the routine deductions affecting them). The requirement for green corporate governance obligations and transition plans – particularly in light of the fact that these obligations have been substantially relaxed following the narrowing of the scope of the EU’s CSDDD Directive – is a forward-looking and courageous step. Meanwhile, excluding activities relating to fossil fuels from development bank financing is a clear and correct direction. Furthermore, enshrining participation principles in international climate finance would be fair (although, unfortunately, it seems unrealistic in this form).

Areas for improvement

As noted, Hungarian policymakers have never faced such a well-thought-out and complex climate regulation. That said, there are some minor shortcomings and contradictions, which the current public debate could identify and iron out.

Perhaps the most striking omission is the absence of any explicit reference to the institutional framework of climate justice, including climate litigation and state liability. This would be particularly important, as the “no backsliding” and “polluter pays” principles can only be effectively implemented if backed by a strong enforcement mechanism. It would also be worth incorporating a principle of climate equity, which specifies enhanced protection for socially vulnerable groups (the poor, the elderly, and those with a higher health risk), as they bear a disproportionately greater burden from the impacts of climate change.

It is difficult to understand the complete absence of any mention of the transport sector’s resilience in the proposal. For instance, the text could at least allude to infrastructure risks from heatwaves and extreme rainfall (roads, railways, bridges) and to preparing the vehicle fleet. In the transport section, there is also no discussion of aviation and inland waterway transport, even though their emissions are by no means negligible (although, for the time being, European climate legislation also often treats these as separate categories).

The objective of “phasing out harmful state subsidies by 2030” is correct in itself, but its feasibility is doubtful unless it is accompanied by a mandatory review schedule and a public list of the subsidies concerned. Regarding the management of the National Climate Protection Fund, it would be advisable to ensure its independence from political influence and to give civil society organisations a meaningful role in decision-making (rather than merely representing beneficiaries).

The current wording of the green public procurement requirement – “preference must be given” – is far too weak. To ensure effectiveness, a specific quota requirement or a time-bound obligation should be introduced. What is more, the text includes no provision regarding the responsibility of media actors and social media platforms in combating climate disinformation. In the case of the National Climate Protection Council, limiting membership to nine and granting a minister the role of co-chair pose a risk: despite the principles of proportional representation, government influence could become dominant, particularly if the minister’s department also covers the council’s operating costs. It would be advisable to limit the minister’s role to that of an observer or a non-voting chairperson, and to place the funding under the supervision of the National Assembly.

In the case of local authorities, the phrase “The state shall provide adequate budgetary support” is too general and leaves room for abuse. At the very least, the law should set a minimum funding guarantee or a clear allocation method; otherwise, authorities in smaller parts of the country will be unable to fulfil their statutory obligations due to a lack of resources. Rules on conflicts of interest and disclosure obligations for members are lacking as well, which could allow industry lobbyists to influence the decision-making process.

In addition, it would be advisable to establish a mandatory cooperation mechanism between the Scientific Council and the Ombudsman for Future Generations. Both bodies assess compliance with the carbon budget in parallel, and without coordination, overlapping or contradictory recommendations may arise.

The scope of the climate-threatening offence also appears to be narrow, as it applies only to major emitters subject to the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), whilst medium-sized emitters – whose emissions are significant in aggregate – are excluded. To remedy this, the text should introduce a mechanism for gradual extension.

The possibility of bringing an action for failure to act in the event of a carbon budget shortfall is appropriate, but the provision includes no specific sanction if the government fails to comply even after losing the case, which substantially weakens its enforceability. Furthermore, legality oversight is a useful tool for local authority decisions, but the possibility of withholding funding could disproportionately affect smaller local authorities, which are already under-resourced. So,  it would be advisable to establish a graduated system of sanctions and an appeal mechanism.

That said, these are minor details, and there is still time to refine the bill. The more important question is whether, after its historic win, Péter Magyar’s government will have the will to do so – not just to perfect the legislation, but to put an end to the current unconstitutional situation in the first place.

The civil society document is ‘extremely thorough and wide-ranging, comparable to the most comprehensive legislation at European level’.

How will Tisza proceed?

“Experts are analysing the text of the civil society draft bill to assess what elements can be incorporated into the draft bill to be tabled by the government,” the press office of the Ministry of the Living Environment announced at the end of July.  According to the ministry, the civil society document is “extremely thorough and wide-ranging, comparable to the most comprehensive legislation at European level”. Meanwhile, legislators are also examining which elements should be regulated at statutory level, and which issues are better addressed in strategies or lower-level legislation.

According to the ministry’s position, bolder emission-reduction targets alone are not enough. “A framework must also be established setting out how these targets will be achieved, and what the roles of economic and social actors are in the transition towards sustainability.” The legislation must also address how the country can replace fossil fuels with renewables as well as how it can reduce energy consumption.

Notably, the ministry’s response suggests that Hungary’s new climate law will place much greater emphasis on adaptation than the current legislation. “Hungary is one of Europe’s most vulnerable countries to climate change,” the ministry pointed out. According to a previous ruling by the constitutional court, a legal framework must be established to ensure the preservation of the unique landscapes, wildlife, and natural assets of the Carpathian Basin. Accordingly, “The law must address in great detail adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change and the development of flexible resilience to climate change.”

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.”

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('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

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.

The fossil fuel industry isn’t just raking in record profits amid the war with Iran. In California, it’s also spending big to oppose climate and worker-safety legislation.

According to analyses by a coalition of environmental groups called the Last Chance Alliance, oil and gas companies spent more than $17 million on California lobbying during the first half of 2026. That includes $10.3 million during the first quarter — a new record for the sector — and another $6.8 million during Q2.

Much of the spending was directed against legislation proposing new costs and liabilities for the fossil fuel industry, like a state bill that would make companies pay for rebuilding following climate-intensified natural disasters. But other bills targeted were more milquetoast, seeking to clarify existing workplace-safety laws and ensure more thorough reporting of cleanup costs when oil companies want to decommission projects.

Faraz Rizvi, campaign and policy director for the nonprofit Asian Pacific Environmental Network — a member of the Last Chance Alliance — criticized companies for “aggressively lobbying” against straightforward measures to protect communities and boost transparency. “They’re not actors that have consumers’ or communities’ interests at heart,” he told Grist.

Last Chance Alliance pulled the data from mandatory reporting to the California secretary of state. The top spenders in the oil-and-gas lobbying category included the Western States Petroleum Association, which spent $4.3 million over the first half of the year; Chevron, whose spending amounted to $3.7 million; and Phillips 66, an oil refiner that spent just over half a million dollars. Much of the money went to consultants and alleged “front groups” that present themselves as grassroots operations but are funded by the fossil fuel industry, like Californians for Energy Independence.

One big target of the sector’s lobbying was California’s cap-and-invest program, which requires companies to pay for a finite — and declining — number of emissions permits each year. The program covers roughly 80 percent of California’s economy and is considered critical to achieving the state’s climate targets, including carbon neutrality by 2045. Earlier this year, oil and gas interests successfully lobbied regulators to green-light a mechanism that could make a vast pool of free pollution permits available to fossil fuel companies. If finalized, the plan could deprive the state of billions in funding that would have otherwise gone toward public transit and housing. The change is currently facing a legal challenge from environmental groups and objections from some Democratic lawmakers.

The sector also fought a bill, currently awaiting passage by the state Senate, to extend California’s Displaced Oil and Gas Workers Fund. Established under a 2022 law, the $30 million fund distributes grants to help oil and gas industry workers transition to new careers. According to one estimate, the fund has already helped 600 people find new lines of work, and supporters have been discussing the potential for new forms of support, including wage replacement during transition periods and financial support during apprenticeships. 

Other pending bills that oil companies lobbied against propose creating a task force on safe staffing guidelines for oil refineries; preventing fossil fuel companies from abandoning methane-leaking oil wells; and adding new safety and public comment requirements for offshore oil pipelines. One bill would force companies to submit formal retirement plans before they shutter their oil refineries. The bill follows the closure of a Phillips 66 refinery in L.A. County that environmental groups claim was poorly handled. 

A number of the targeted bills have been defeated, giving the oil and gas industry a series of wins. These include SB 1245, which sought to stabilize California’s gas supply, and SB 982, which addressed California’s home insurance crisis. The latter bill would have allowed the state attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies for damages following climate-related disasters like wildfires. It was meant to help pay for skyrocketing property insurance, disaster mitigation, and other expenses that are currently straining the state’s insurer of last resort. Oil and gas lobbying also helped to defeat a bill that would have made it harder for fossil fuel companies to abandon methane-leaking oil wells. There are more than 100,000 of these wells in California, and companies are often able to evade responsibility for plugging them.

Read Next As climate lawsuits advance, the oil industry enters ‘panic mode’ Kate Yoder

Hollin Kretzmann, deputy political director at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, said it’s been a generally disappointing year for Golden State climate policy. “This legislative session was just a huge missed opportunity for California. We didn’t get to show what the world’s fourth-largest economy could accomplish when it comes to protecting our economy, protecting our health.”

The lobbying is a particularly bad look, he added, given the oil and gas industry’s recent earnings. Late last month, Chevron reported $12 billion in net profits during the second quarter, nearly five times as much as it earned during the same period in 2025. Exxon Mobil made $14.5 billion, more than double its second-quarter earnings from last year. These profits have been driven by oil supply disruptions linked to the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, particularly the monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Supply shortages and higher oil prices have benefited oil producers that don’t depend on the strait to export products, as well as companies with oil refineries in the West.

Still, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth has said threats to oil supplies are straining his company. “Every day that goes by, the situation gets more difficult,” he told CNBC in late July. His company has also blamed California energy policies for high gasoline prices, deflecting accusations of price gouging. Chevron, Phillips 66, and Californians for Energy Independence did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association declined to comment.

Ryan Schleeter, communications director for the nonprofit The Climate Center, said curtailing Big Oil’s influence over the California Legislature should be a priority moving forward. He suggested starting with the reduction of public subsidies — including from the cap-and-invest program’s free allocations, but also from tax loopholes that allow companies to report only a fraction of their global earnings to the state. “We’re essentially subsidizing their profit margins,” he told Grist. 

Kretzmann said more measures are needed to limit both the number of lobbyists visiting Sacramento and the amount of money they’re allowed to spend; otherwise, legislators and environmental advocates will keep running into the same problem year after year. “It gets to the heart of why our policies in California don’t reflect the will of the people,” he said. “I don’t have an easy solution, but we need our legislators to listen to the public … rather than oil industry lobbyists.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The fossil fuel industry is spending record amounts to keep California from regulating it on Aug 27, 2026.

In 2024, the Biden administration enacted wide-ranging regulations to protect communities near petrochemical plants from air toxics. The Trump administration has since granted exemptions to scores of polluting facilities and is working to rewrite the long-awaited rule.

Read more on E360 →

A study from Scotland found that living near an accessible urban woodland significantly lowered the likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants.

Read more on E360 →

The US is expected to resume its attempt to sink measures for a greener global shipping sector at closed-door talks between governments at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in early September.

The US and oil-producing allies like Saudi Arabia want to weaken a proposed plan for cleaner fuels that aims to reduce planet-heating emissions from the industry, which relies heavily on dirty bunker fuels. Shipping currently represents 3% of global emissions.

Those that want a softer system are likely to back a Liberian proposal which expert analysis suggests would see emissions fall by only half at most by 2050, far short of the sector’s agreed climate goals.

After several years of debate, governments provisionally agreed in April 2025 on the “Net-Zero Framework” (NZF), a series of emissions reduction targets for shipowners, backed up with financial rewards for meeting the targets and fees for missing them.

But in October 2025, after a high-profile intervention from US President Donald Trump and threats of sanctions and visa restrictions, the US convinced a majority of voting nations to postpone the adoption of the NZF for a year.

Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister for the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, called the delay “unacceptable” given the urgency of accelerating climate change.

After a round of low-profile talks in May, the first of three further sets of talks on how to clean up shipping will begin at the IMO’s riverside headquarters in London on Tuesday, culminating in a final public session in November.

Em Fenton, who follows the talks as senior director of climate diplomacy at Opportunity Green, an NGO focused on aviation and shipping, said governments should not be sidetracked by alternative proposals to the NZF, calling them “a distraction from a hard-fought multilateral compromise”.

“If countries want to deliver a just and fair maritime transition, there is really only one choice: back the NZF and stand together in solidarity against those who would tear it apart,” Fenton added.

Five proposals on the table

Governments will discuss five different proposals submitted in advance of next week’s meeting. The most ambitious of these is from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which has proposed a levy on the entirety of a ship’s emissions rather than just those above a certain level, as the NZF envisions.

That had been the original demand of Pacific nations before the NZF was provisionally adopted in April 2025. At the time, Tuvalu’s transport minister Simon Kofe described the NZF as disappointing and not ambitious enough.

For this reason, six Pacific countries abstained in the vote on the NZF. While they supported the original plan for its adoption in October 2025, they have used the delay to push again for more ambition.

John Kautoke, advisor to a group of Pacific nations called 6PAC+, told Climate Home News that the NZF “cannot diminish its already inadequate ambition. If anything, the NZF must increase in ambition if we are going to renegotiate its parameters.”

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Analysis by the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST) suggests that, of the five proposals, only Tuvalu’s would meet the 2030 and 2040 emissions reduction targets for global shipping that were agreed by governments in 2023. Those were for cuts of 20% between 2008 and 2030, 70% by 2040 and then reaching net zero “by or around, i.e. close to 2050”.

Despite this, the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa have formally proposed that governments adopt the NZF, which won support in a 63-13 vote among governments at the April 2025 talks. Trump’s US walked out halfway through.

According to IMarEst’s analysis, while the NZF proposal will not be enough to meet the industry’s targets, it will reduce emissions more cheaply than the Pacific proposal.

A proposal by Brazil – which fought hard for the NZF last October – suggests tweaking the framework to make meeting targets easier in the short term and harder in the long term.

While this compromise will make it more appealing to the owners of polluting ships and countries that support them, IMarEst estimates it would lead to higher cumulative emissions than either the NZF or Pacific proposals.

The NZF stipulates that fees for high-polluting shipowners should be be put into a Net Zero Fund and used to promote clean shipping fuels and a fairer transition. The Brazilian proposal would delay raising and spending these funds by two years, from 2029 to 2031.

Liberia’s proposal weakens emissions cuts

The US and Saudi Arabia are likely to swing behind a new proposal from Liberia, whose government makes millions of dollars a year selling the right for shipowners to register their vessels in the small West African nation via a US-based company.

This proposal would weaken the emissions reduction targets. IMarEst says it would cut the industry’s emissions at most by a half by 2050, falling far short of the target agreed in 2023 for international shipping to reach net zero “close to 2050”.

It would also replace the NZF’s fees for missing targets with a carbon trading system. As a result, there would be no Net Zero Fund and therefore less money available to incentivise green fuels and make the transition more equitable for poorer nations.

Pacific advisor Kautoke said that, as well as preventing shipping from reaching zero emissions by 2050, Liberia’s proposal would mean the Pacific “will not receive any support to deal with the disproportionately negative impacts created by the cost of the transition”.

“We get a double blow if we adopt the Liberian proposal,” he warned. “We get all the cost of a transition without any support, and we have an industry that continues to burn fossil fuels to an unforeseen point.”

Japanese proposal favours shipowners

Japan has submitted a late proposal to amend the NZF so that shipowners have more control over how the fees they would pay for emitting above a set threshold are spent.

University College London professor Tristan Smith has argued that this change means there will be no central mechanism to incentivise investments in clean fuels. He wrote on LinkedIn that under the system put forward by Japan, shipowners would be able to select which green projects their fees would go to. They could choose their own or those of a sister company or other shipowners, rather than funding broader just transition projects that would benefit marine workers or developing countries hit by rising shipping costs.

Despite its flaws, Smith added that Japan’s proposal “could still get taken seriously by some, given how appealing it may seem to shipowners who have consistently demanded control of revenues, and given how the US and other member states have pushed back against the IMO Net Zero Fund and [greenhouse gas] pricing.”

Tacit or explicit approval?

Next week, governments are expected to make statements saying which proposals – or which aspects of proposals – they prefer. Another set of talks will be held from November 23-27 before a potentially final round from November 30-December 4.

A new framework to tackle shipping emissions could be adopted at those talks if two-thirds of countries that are present and signed up to a regulation called Marpol Annex VI – endorsed by just over 100 states – vote in favour of it, as they did in April 2025.

The US and its allies are also trying to change the rules to make the next stage more difficult. Decisions that have been adopted at IMO meetings usually take effect automatically unless a certain number of countries object within a certain time period decided by governments, a system known as tacit approval.

But the US wants that to require explicit approval instead, so that any new emissions standard would not come into force unless enough governments – representing a certain percentage of the world’s shipping fleet – actively indicate support for it.

Critics say this change would give a small number of countries with large shipping registries the power to block implementation. Liberia has the world’s biggest shipping registry, run by an American company, followed by Panama and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Liberia and Panama have supported the US at the talks on the Net-Zero Framework. The Marshall Islands has long been one of the most vocal supporters of climate action in shipping but, with its officials and shipping registry income vulnerable to US retaliation, did not sign on to the recent Pacific proposal vowing to strengthen the NZF if it is re-opened.

Brazilian negotiator Adriana de Medeiros Gabinio warned in April that the NZF’s opponents are trying to change the rules by which it comes into force as a “safety net to block” it.

The post Battle over cleaning up shipping set to resume at London talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

My husband, friends, and I sat huddled at a faux-marble-topped table in the lobby of our Utah hotel, looking down at a Google Maps route pulled up on my iPhone. We pinched and scrolled the screen as the breakfast buffet crowd hummed around us. 

We were less than a week into a Great American Road trip — one that would take us 9,000 miles from coast to coast and border to border. Today’s agenda was to relocate from Moab, the gateway city for Arches and Canyonlands national parks, to our hotel near Bryce Canyon. But there was a problem:

Utah was on fire. 

To the west of us, the Cottonwood Fire had burned through 94,000 acres of forest and mountain towns, making it the largest conflagration in the United States. To the east, the Jones Fire had just erupted near the ghost town Cisco, its smoke plume looming on the flat horizon, visible from our hotel room. In total, more than a dozen wildfires were burning across the state, closing roads and turning the skies an ominous orange. We had to find a safe way through.

“If we take Route 89, it takes us straight into the middle of the Cottonwood Fire,” said my childhood friend Jessie, who had joined us with her husband for the Utah leg of our trip.

“There’s Route 72 through Loa, but that isn’t much farther away,” my husband said.

We switched apps from Google Maps to Watch Duty, a real-time wildfire tracker, waiting for it to load our precise location. My kids shifted their attention from their stacks of chocolate chip pancakes to the screen, which was covered in fire symbols. My 12-year-old son looked at me, worried.

“The edge of the Cottonwood Fire is creeping toward Route 72, too,” I noted. We had to make a decision and get going. 

More than a dozen wildfires broke out in Utah in late June, including the Jones Fire (right), visible from the horizon near the town of Moab. Katherine Bagley

We landed on a route that stuck to smaller state highways, even though it would add significant time to our driving. Anything to avoid the rapidly shifting edges of fire.

“You guys go get your bags and check out,” Jessie said. “I’ll go to the pharmacy and grab us some N-95 masks.”

Crisscrossing the United States by car has attained an almost rite-of-passage status in American society over the decades, its allure solidified in everything from On the Road to Thelma & Louise to the #TakeTheScenicRoute Instagram reels of today. It was that craving for wild landscapes and new cultures that had drawn my family out onto the road. My husband had just finished a year of cancer treatments, the kids were on summer break, and I was eligible for a sabbatical from my job as a climate journalist. So despite never having done anything like this before, we packed our hybrid Honda with duffle bags and camping gear and set out with a plan to visit 14 national parks.

I had expected to walk away with a better understanding of our public lands, a renewed sense of awe and adventure, and the opportunity to travel as a family in a way I never got to growing up — and the trip did give us those things in spades. What I hadn’t expected, however, was to also get a stark glimpse into how climate change is rapidly altering our nation. 

Our kids spent the majority of the trip looking out the windows while listening to the full-cast Harry Potter audio books. Katherine Bagley

As a climate journalist, and scientist by training, I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. For 20 years, I have documented the ever-growing impacts of a warming planet — and summer coincides with the annual period during which these impacts are on full display. A drumbeat of floods, fires, drought, and scorching heat put nearly every U.S. state in a vise from May to October. The season has become so synonymous with extreme weather that the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists launched a campaign in 2022 to dub it “danger season.”  

But even knowing that, the scale of devastation underway outside our car windows was alarming. As the miles ticked by, disaster after disaster strung together in an alarming pattern of chaos. Freshly charred landscapes and orange skies in Utah. Bathtub rings on drought-stricken reservoirs in Arizona. Stands of dead trees killed by bark beetles in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Toxic dust blowing off the Great Salt Lake. Emergency alerts for flooding and evacuations in Glacier National Park. Extreme heat warnings in Grand Teton.

It felt like a near-constant assault, one disaster stacked on top of another. Travel a few miles, a few hours, and we’d encounter another mark climate change had made — or was actively making — on the American landscape.

It’s too early to say whether climate change was a factor in every brush fire, heat wave, storm, or flood we encountered. But there is compelling evidence that it’s making many forms of extreme weather more severe or frequent. From 1980 to 1989, the number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States averaged just 3.3 per year. In the decade between 2015 and 2024, that number had more than quintupled, averaging 19 billion-dollar disasters per year. Twenty-three billion-dollar disasters hit American communities in 2025, according to the research group Climate Central. By the time we hit the road in June 2026, 12 events from this year had already met that threshold.

As we left Moab toward Bryce Canyon, heavy-duty particulate masks stashed in the glove box, we got an alert from the National Park Service. It was closing a portion of Canyonlands National Park, where less than 24 hours prior we had peered out over the park’s plummeting red sandstone cliffs into the hollowed landscape where the Colorado and Green rivers converge. Intense wind gusts had blown the hats from our heads and sand into our eyes. 

Overnight, those gusts gave the Babylon Fire power to grow from 300 acres to 16,000 acres. The landscape we had just admired was under siege.

Route 128 in southern Utah winds its way through towering red sandstone cliffs, following the Colorado River. A wildfire broke out near the byway just a day after we passed through. Katherine Bagley

Over the next week on the road, my husband and I became experts at spotting the characteristic plumes of distant wildfires, locating the blazes on the Watch Duty app, and adjusting our driving route. In my travel journal, I jotted down notes: An ominous plume of smoke from the Pocket Fire seen on our way to the Grand Canyon. Feelings of gratitude after days where we encountered clear skies. We kept moving, even as I learned of flood evacuations in campgrounds further down our itinerary. 

“Will our trip be derailed?” I wrote.

After stopping in Las Vegas for July Fourth, we headed farther west, through Bakersfield, California, en route to the Sierra Nevada mountains. We passed the scars of prescribed burns on ranchland, wind turbines, rows and rows of fruit trees, and a seemingly endless stream of oil pumpjacks, their arms turning rhythmically up and down, up and down.

Pumpjacks and drilling pads cover the landscape at the Kern River Oil Field in Bakersfield, California, on July 28, 2015.
Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images

“What are they doing to the ground?” my 9-year-old daughter asked from the backseat.

“Those help to pull oil from underneath our feet to power things like cars and lights,” I replied, staring out at the edges of the Kern River Oil Field.

My kids already had a basic sense of climate change and its causes before we left on this trip. On our way west, we had stopped at a wind turbine-themed rest stop in Iowa celebrating the state’s commitment to renewable energy. We awed at the presence of electric vehicle chargers at the “world’s largest truck stop,” Iowa 80. And we cheered with every solar farm we saw. They were signs of progress, regardless of politics or climate beliefs or geography.

Our driving breaks in Iowa were marked by signs of climate action, from a wind energy-themed rest area to electric vehicle charging at the “world’s largest truck stop.” Katherine Bagley 

That was the lens my kids had on climate change: It was bad, but there were ways to fix it. Then came the fires, and the smoke, and the flooding, and the heat warnings, and the drought. And now, here in Bakersfield, they were seeing for the first time what extracting fossil fuels looks like in practice, what it does to a landscape.

“I can’t believe they’re still working,” my son said quietly. “This place is littered with them.”

We rode the next few hours without speaking to each other, listening to Harry Potter audio books and staring out the windows, hoping to see another wind farm.

My family spent a year planning our five-week trip, from reserving campsites inside the national parks to mapping our route and planning hikes. Katherine Bagley

We stopped overnight in Three Rivers, California, before heading into Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. The road rose from the valley floor, switchbacking and climbing 5,000 feet in just 16 miles. The higher we went, the taller the trees got, towering above us. We opened our sunroof and windows, letting the cool mountain air rush over our outstretched arms. After weeks in the desert, the forest felt like a homecoming for us New Englanders.

We parked at the General Sherman tree, the world’s largest by volume, and set out on foot through what is known as the Giant Forest. Trunks stretched upward for what seemed an impossibly long time, disappearing into rings of thick branches. But despite the scale, the forest felt cozy. Dappled sunlight filtered through the scalelike needles, casting a shadowy, warm glow. As we walked along the Congress Trail, weaving between thousand-year-old sequoias, my kids hugged every tree they could. The red, spongy bark tickled their skin as they stretched their arms and legs around the trunks.

My husband and kids hugged every tree they could in Sequoia National Park, including this giant along the Congress Trail. Katherine Bagley

Along the trail, we came to a cross section of a felled sequoia. More than 2,200 years of growth rings radiated from its center, each a marker of the history the tree had lived through. The rings showed evidence of at least 80 fires strong enough to permanently mark the tree’s bark over its lifetime — averaging one fire every 28 years. 

Even when they leave marks, fires don’t always spell disaster for these giants: Low-intensity blazes can clear the forest of underbrush, scorching the bottom of a tree but leaving its branches untouched, ultimately rejuvenating the forest’s nutrients. But these stands of ancient sequoias have experienced an unprecedented number of wildfires recently, including six large fires in six years. Scattered throughout the parks were large patches of burned-out trees, their blackened trunks like used matchsticks, stripped of all greenery.

According to the National Park Service, “More than 85 percent of all giant sequoia grove acreage across the Sierra Nevada has burned in wildfires between 2015 and 2021, compared to only one quarter in the preceding century.” The fires were so intense that they killed thousands of “large sequoias,” those measuring 4 feet or more in diameter. The KNP Complex and Windy fires in 2021 killed upward of 2,380 large sequoias alone. 

Blazes in the Sierra Nevadas are often the result of lightning strikes, untamped camp fires, or power line sparks, among other causes, but their intensity and scale are fueled by the dry conditions and pest infestations brought on by climate change.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks experienced six large wildfires in six years between 2015 and 2021, killing thousands of large sequoias. Katherine Bagley

As we drove down out of the sequoias, pointing out each new giant, we saw logging trucks and excavators parked on the side of the road. Dead branches sat in piles ready for controlled burns, part of a partnership between scientists, park managers, and environmental groups to reduce the severity of the next wildfire to rip through the region. 

When it does, not if.

After visiting the sequoias and Yosemite, my family and I turned back east. Our days whiplashed between grandeur and crisis. 

We passed the Great Salt Lake at sunset, reds and pinks mirrored in its vast, still waters. But as we drove, we could also see stretches of dry, cracked shoreline — the lake has lost an estimated 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area due to agricultural diversions and worsening drought. A decade ago, I visited Antelope Island with friends to see its iconic free-ranging bison, but the lake’s shrinking shores mean the landmass is no longer an island, but a peninsula.

In Salt Lake City, we visited the Natural History Museum of Utah. One of the first exhibits was an interactive Sim City-esque game where you have to make planning decisions — install solar panels, build an urban farm, tear down a coal plant — to try and stave off the worst impacts of climate change. My kids played it three times. Little did they know that across the museum’s parking lot stood a hillside charred by the Bonneville Fire just two weeks earlier.

We traveled north into Wyoming, greeted by road signs warning of extreme heat. Jackson Hole, outside of Grand Teton National Park, hit 94 degrees Fahrenheit on July 12, 13 degrees warmer than the average daily high for the month. The town of Worland, in central Wyoming, hit 110 degrees F. We drove to String Lake to cool off in its snow-fed waters and watched as a bald eagle dove to catch fish.  

We took a boat ride on Jackson Lake to see the park’s iconic jagged peaks from a different perspective, and learned that the tour operator was shutting down operations weeks earlier than usual. Low water levels caused by the region’s dismally low snowpack were making it hard to navigate wide swaths of the reservoir. Our guide pulled up a photo on his phone from six years ago. “The peaks were covered, just covered, in snow at this time,” he said. “What we’re seeing right now in July, that’s what we would typically see in late August.”

Up near Yellowstone, we took the kids whitewater rafting in the town of Gardiner. They shouted with delight as we crested the rapids and dunked in the spray. But in moments of quiet on the river, our guide pointed to pipes, wires, and decks sticking out from eroded riverbank, all that remained of the houses swept away by a historic flood in 2022.

Katherine Bagley

Katherine Bagley

Iconic scenes from Yellowstone National Park. Katherine Bagley

Katherine Bagley

Park after park, the kids’ junior ranger books wove climate change and its impacts into their pages. Staff told us about the plight of the pikas, adorable mouselike mammals that are moving farther up mountains in search of cooler climes. We watched videos and read placards about how warming temperatures are making more areas suitable for white pine bark rust and destructive beetles. 

I listened as my kids took their junior ranger pledge in every park we went to. Each oath differed slightly — some adding silly rhymes, others more serious — but they all included some variation of, “I promise to appreciate, respect, and protect all national park places.”

Our kids taking their junior ranger oath in Zion National Park. By the end of our trip, they had achieved ranger status in 14 national parks. Katherine Bagley

After taking their junior ranger oath in Glacier National Park, my kids walked through the exhibits at the St. Mary Visitor Center on the east side of the park, bordering the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. In the center was a 3D rendering of the park. They hit a button and watched as tiny bulbs lit up the mountaintops, signifying the location of the 150 glaciers that existed back in 1850.

As the timeline moved from 1900 to 1950 to 1980 to 2000, the lights disappeared faster and faster. Today, the park is home to only 26 ice bodies. My children pressed the buttons over and over, as if trying to restore the glaciers, remembered only by the carved-out hillsides they left behind.

A national Gallup poll recently found that nearly 4 in 10 Americans say their community was damaged by extreme weather within the past year, but that they “feel powerless to shape their own future.” The impacts of climate change can feel overwhelming, but my family’s road trip made clear this is an issue that affects us all. Climate change is no longer a collection of isolated disasters, separated by headlines or distances. It touches everything, its imprints lasting and deep and inescapable.

After more than a month on the road, it was time to go home.

The evening sky at our lodging outside of Zion National Park. Katherine Bagley

I wondered whether my kids will ever be able to take this same trip with their own families. If so, their experiences will likely be drastically different. Will they be able to explore the arches and sandstone cliffs of Utah? Will they be able to walk through the towering sequoias? Will they be able to see the ice? 

I hoped so. There is so much to cherish, so much beauty, and still so much to fight for. We just need to rally to face a new foe. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The great American road trip is in peril on Aug 26, 2026.

Heatwaves intensify data centre crisis Channel News brendan 25th August 2026 Teaser Media

Fishers operating off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, are detonating more than 8,000 underwater explosives each year, researchers estimate. The practice is turning picturesque coral reefs to “rubble.”

Read more on E360 →

The United States has never been one of the most ambitious countries when it comes to tackling climate change, but it has long maintained a program that funds innovative clean energy technology. This program is known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E, and over the past 15 years it has doled out more than $4 billion to universities and startups that are trying to change the way we produce energy.

It’s very hard to raise money for this kind of moon shot technology, which can take years or even decades to scale up large enough to generate a profit. A huge number of emergent technologies never attract the funding to cross this “valley of death” between experiment and big business. The purpose of the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, which was modeled on a similar program run by the U.S. military, was to help energy inventors span this gap and develop the climate technologies of the future.

A landmark report from the National Academies of Science, requested by Congress and released last week, has found that this high-risk, high-reward program is working: ARPA-E’s $4 billion investment has led to more than $20 billion in additional funding and more than 1,400 patents. Projects that received ARPA-E money were much more likely to get patents and additional investment than projects that were denied. The report also found that around 40 percent of ARPA-E grants led to a “crowding in” effect: After a startup proves that a new technology is feasible, other companies jump in and try to replicate it. 

“We’re trying to enable very talented people who could be doing other things to spend their lives trying to do incredibly risky things that, probabilistically speaking, will not deliver a profit in time to benefit them,” said Chris Bataille, a fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy and an expert on the development of clean energy technology who was not involved in the report.

The report committee, which consisted of more than a dozen scientists and energy experts, recommended that Congress significantly expand ARPA-E’s funding. It also found that the program should shift its focus from renewables and electric vehicles toward a harder set of energy problems — a shift for which the Trump administration has signaled its partial support.

ARPA-E began in 2009, and many of its early grants focused on improving solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, which weren’t yet ready to compete with traditional energy sources on a large scale. (A different Department of Energy program offered early support to Tesla.) The technologies have since gotten hundreds of times cheaper thanks to China’s massive investment in manufacturing overcapacity. Among the report’s most notable findings is that ARPA-E doesn’t need to focus on this renewable tech anymore. This finding echoes some climate experts’ claim that solar no longer needs tax subsidies like those in the Inflation Reduction Act passed during Joe Biden’s presidency. 

But solar and wind only work when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and most of the country’s grid still relies on coal and gas plants that can run at all hours of the day. This is especially true for factories and data centers, which need large and constant infusions of electricity in order to stay online. It’s here that ARPA-E’s investments are really starting to bear fruit.

Many of the program’s more recent grantees have been companies trying to solve the problem of “clean firm” power available around the clock. The most notable is Fervo, a company that uses super-deep wells to convert the ambient geothermal heat of the Earth into electricity. The company received ARPA-E support as early as 2019 and went public this year on the heels of a few successful demonstration projects. It’s now inking deals with Google to power data centers in Nevada. Other success stories include Form Energy, which develops iron-air batteries that can store large amounts of clean energy for multiple days at a time, and X-energy, which builds small-scale nuclear reactors.

Read Next China’s solar industry is losing money. The country is doubling down anyway. Austin Corona

Given this success, the report authors argue that ARPA-E should now shift its investment to the hardest climate problems, the ones where solutions could still be decades away. Potential opportunity areas include nuclear fusion, which in theory would provide almost limitless clean energy if it ever panned out. There’s also “seasonal energy storage,” or batteries that could store solar and wind energy for long winter months when those resources aren’t as available in a given location. Perhaps most significant for the climate would be carbon-free methods for producing steel and cement, which each account for around 8 percent of global emissions.

“You need this sort of constant innovation to move us off the fossil fuel pathway, right? Because we’re very firmly entrenched on it,” said Bataille. “We’re talking about projects that will likely be profitable, but they’re just not valued unless the government values them. There’s probably one-one-hundredth of the necessary money going into those.”  

President Donald Trump tried to defund ARPA-E in his first term by withholding funds appropriated by Congress. So far, during his second term, the administration has attempted to wipe billions of dollars in Biden-era climate grants. Trump’s budget request to Congress this year called for shrinking ARPA-E by almost 50 percent, but the Department of Energy is still handing out new grants for experimental tech like long-duration energy storage, fusion reactors, and mining for critical minerals like lithium.

In a statement to Grist, the department said that ARPA-E is “advancing President Trump’s agenda to restore American energy dominance” by “backing breakthrough, high-risk technologies.” The proposed funding cut, on the other hand, “demonstrates fiscal discipline and a commitment to an efficient and effective federal government.”

Even though Trump hasn’t destroyed the program itself, his policies have hindered the growth of the clean tech field that ARPA-E helped to advance. A case in point is Natron Energy, a company that received ARPA-E grant funding to develop experimental sodium-ion batteries. The company announced in 2024 that it would build a $1.4 billion plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, but Trump’s reelection dampened private sector interest in electric vehicles, and the company failed to secure investors for its factory. The company shut down last year.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US companies are on the cusp of big climate solutions. Thank the government. on Aug 25, 2026.

With congested, aging power lines and a densely developed landscape, the East Coast has few options for building large-scale renewable power. Meanwhile, the region’s electricity prices are rising, and states are falling behind their emissions goals. 

Offshore wind offered a unique opportunity to meet those challenges, experts say, but the industry is barely surviving under economic headwinds and an openly hostile federal government. Offshore wind isn’t dead, but advocates agree that the technology is fading just when the region needs it most.

Offshore wind developers, who had already struggled with high construction costs, hit a minefield when the Trump administration took office in 2025. The administration has subjected offshore wind projects to questionable Pentagon reviews, permit revocations, and stop-work orders, some of which survived only briefly before being blocked by courts. The administration’s most consequential move may have been its decision to pay developers to surrender their rights to develop in federally managed waters. By mid-August, it had committed to roughly $4 billion in payouts, wiping an estimated 21 gigawatts of potential wind power capacity off U.S. coasts, or enough energy to power over 15 million average-sized U.S. homes. Experts say more deals could follow.

As they wait for conditions to improve, the industry must push through what offshore wind experts describe as an irked malaise. 

“Companies are trying to be upbeat, but I think if you kind of peel back the layers a bit, there’s a number of emotions out there; anger, sadness,” said Mark Repsher, an energy and sustainability expert at PA Consulting. “These people like what they do … sometimes it’s been their whole career, and it’s been put on pause now.”

At least nine companies are still holding onto their offshore wind development rights, most of them European energy giants like Shell, and at least some appear unlikely to strike a deal. Denmark-based Orsted, the world’s largest developer of offshore wind energy, and the Spanish company Avangrid are the largest remaining leaseholders, with five and six undeveloped leases, respectively.

The projects are dropping at a time when the three major interstate grids in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic are all facing growing demand from data centers, electrification, and new manufacturing, while some of the region’s cleanest power is generated far from its biggest cities. New York is a case in point. Half of the state’s electricity demand is concentrated around New York City and Long Island, but much of its renewable power is generated upstate, where aging transmission lines are already a bottleneck. Meanwhile, for PJM, the grid operator covering most of the mid-Atlantic, power demand is projected to grow 7.8 gigawatts higher than available supply by 2033.

“If you had additional wind, it could be filling those gaps, reducing any of those challenges at a time the grid really, really needs that,” said Hillary Bright, executive director of Turn Forward, a nonprofit supporting offshore wind.

Offshore wind can send clean power straight to demand centers and ease grid pressure. The Empire Wind project, expected to enter operation in 2027, will send power directly to New York City through undersea cables, while the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project already delivers power to the data center cluster in northern Virginia that has become one of PJM’s fastest-growing energy consumers. 

Read Next Trump destroyed offshore wind. The Northeast can’t live without it. Jake Bittle

Former President Joe Biden saw offshore wind as a central pillar of his federal climate strategy, largely because of its geographic strengths. His administration permitted the first commercial-scale U.S. offshore wind project, Vineyard Wind, in 2021, then leased 1.9 million acres of coastal waters to developers — more than had been awarded during the previous three presidential terms combined.

States built the technology into their climate plans accordingly. Massachusetts has called offshore wind a “cornerstone” of its clean energy strategy; New York called it “critical”; and Maryland described it as its “greatest opportunity” to reach its emissions goals. 

Without offshore wind, Eastern states don’t have a clear alternative for abundant, clean energy, experts say. Some solar power might help, but the East’s tightly packed geography just isn’t well-suited for the kind of land-based renewables deployments that have revolutionized grids in California and Texas.

“The wind resource, and even the solar resource, in the Eastern U.S. is not nearly as good as it is in the West,” Repsher said. Miles from his office in Denver, he said, eastern Colorado’s wide open, sparsely populated prairie lands have bloomed with a profusion of rotating white blades and glossy black panels. 

Most Eastern states have yet to adjust their climate plans for less offshore wind. New York extended its emissions goal deadlines and loosened greenhouse gas accounting regulations in March, but offshore wind remains a large part of its plan. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, local officials have given up trying to build substations that would receive power from planned offshore wind projects after those projects were canceled or delayed beyond expected connection timelines, even as the technology remains integral to its emissions plans. In both states, planned projects have been frozen or canceled from a mix of pre-Trump economic pressures and current Trump policy pressures, including lease buyouts.

It’s questionable, Repsher said, whether there are any realistic changes states could make if they wanted to: “If you have these fairly aggressive carbon reduction targets within these states, it’s borderline impossible to meet them without having offshore wind.”

Still, some wind advocates say there are reasons for optimism: Electricity prices have risen, improving the economics of new wind projects, and the Trump administration has only two and a half years left in its term. 

Kris Ohleth, executive director of Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a pro-offshore wind nonprofit research group, said some advocates have already started planning for a post-Trump world by compiling what they’ve dubbed “Project 2029” — a policy roadmap that a future administration could adopt to support offshore wind. 

“Offshore wind is still such an exciting opportunity. It’s such a cool technology,” Ohleth said. “There’s something on the horizon, and that gives me hope.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Empire Wind’s operational status.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Offshore wind power projects are flailing, just when the East Coast needs them most on Aug 25, 2026.

Multiple global supply shocks have made the strongest case yet for reducing dependencies by phasing out fossil fuels. But on clean energy too, Europe has grown dependent on China, the uncontested global leader. As trade tensions with Beijing intensify, Greens in particular face a difficult balancing act: How to boost the green transition without repeating past mistakes? And can they reconcile realpolitik with human rights?

When the European Union committed to cutting emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, it opened up an uncomfortable question: could it hit those targets without leaning too heavily on China, its trading partner with whom relations are increasingly tense, but who now stands as the undisputed global leader in global green tech?

Today China makes up more than 80 per cent of global solar panel manufacturing capacity, but it has also established control over the supply of materials for panels: Beijing holds 70 per cent of the global supply of graphite and rare earth elements, as well as a near-monopoly on the processing of critical minerals. By contrast, the EU is almost entirely reliant on imports for critical materials.

However, recent events, such as the intensification by Beijing last year of restrictions on rare earth exports as part of a trade war initiated by the US, exposed the risks borne by an over-reliance on China in these sectors. And despite being the global leader in renewable energies, China remains the world’s largest polluter, responsible for 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Europe is now walking a thin line between trying to reduce its dependence on China in sensitive sectors while striving to meet its climate and energy transition targets. This challenge cuts across the political spectrum, but it poses a particular test for European Greens, given their commitment to ambitious climate policies and an efficient green transition. So how do Greens approach China? How do they perceive Beijing’s role when it comes to Europe’s green transition? And are they even aligned?

Common threads

Green foreign policy remains a spectrum of ideas rather than a clearly defined approach to the world’s varied issues. When the Heinrich-Böll Foundation attempted to map the foreign policies of green parties worldwide in 2022, it found common threads. Parties displayed a strong commitment to a values-based foreign policy with elements of interventionism, and emphasised the promotion of democracy, human rights, and feminism. Yet behind these lay differences on peace and security that reflect regional histories and sensibilities.

Although Greens found common ground with the left on Palestine, they often diverge on China.

Much like wider foreign policy, Green party approaches to China share broad characteristics that impact how they mobilise on human rights violations there.

“Human rights have always been a pillar [of Green foreign policy],” says Reinhard Bütikofer, a retired German Green politician who was a leading voice on China in the European Parliament (EP) between 2009 and 2024. “I recall that many Greens were appalled by the Tiananmen massacre. And the German Greens took an active role after that in upholding the arms embargo [to China]. When our coalition partner SPD [Social Democrat Party of Germany] in Berlin proposed that we should lift the arms embargo, we blocked it.”

Over the last decade, Greens have denounced the internment of ethnic minority Uyghur in political “re-education camps” in Xinjiang, and in 2019 pushed for the first resolution in the EP condemning it. The German Greens’ mobilisation on this issue resulted in their denial of entry to China.

Besides human rights, the fast adoption of renewable energy resources is a key concern. As Green MEPs fight to prevent the watering down of the Green Deal, its implementation comes with a problem: overreliance on China. Chinese imports to support Europe’s green transition have emerged as a hot potato for European Green parties.

Buy European?

Solar panels are a particular sore point. In 2023, Beijing controlled 98 per cent of global production of solar wafers – the semiconductor material critical to photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. This quasi-monopoly places a stranglehold on the rest of the global solar supply chain. Although approaches vary slightly on how Europe should shun China’s affordable solar panels while keeping the green transition going, Greens are generally wary of a new dependency on China.

“The current position of the Greens/EFA Group is that limiting purchases from China and buying more expensive European green technologies is an investment into the future,” said Markéta Gregorová, a Czech MEP elected with the Pirates who sits in the Greens/EFA Group and serves as co-chair of the EU delegation to the People’s Republic of China.

Beyond the economic logic, Chinese-made solar panel inverters – the devices that convert the current generated by solar panels to usable electricity – represent a documented cyber threat, which some Greens are particularly aware of. “As a negotiator for the revision of the EU Cybersecurity Act, I wake up at night thinking about the inverters in solar panels from China,” adds Gregorová. The worry is that through rogue communication devices recently found in Chinese-made solar inverters, Beijing could remotely access (and switch off) the solar grid. Exploiting this could destabilise national power grids. Indeed, Beijing’s hold on the kill switch was already flagged last year by intelligence agencies as dangerous.

On national stages, the issue is linked to political debates about energy sovereignty that have been reignited by external shocks. The risks of depending on Russian fossil fuels became apparent during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more recently the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is exposing more vulnerabilities in our energy supply. Samuel Cogolati, the former co-president of Ecolo, the francophone Green party in Belgium, calls for an energy transition “coherent” with the lessons from these external shocks.

“We have to hold the same line when we speak about China – I don’t think it would be in the interest of the Europeans to let supply chains concentrate in China. A very pragmatic discourse and a strategic vision [for how to restart industry] in Europe must belong to the ecologists, if we want to stay credible.”

Building consensus

In the European Parliament, trade tensions between Beijing and Brussels have stolen the limelight from issues such as human rights and the green transition. Gregorová admits that the Greens “need to speak realpolitik too, because if we [the EU] are weakened by the trade war, we can’t help anyone else.”

Yet the Greens/EFA continue to hold on to their founding commitments. “I think that we are still probably the most credible voice with regards to human rights,” said Chiara Miglioli, policy advisor to the Greens/EFA on international trade and China since 2012. When she accompanied the EP’s China delegation to Beijing in May, “everybody had the expectation that [the Greens] would raise the human rights issue. And indeed we did.”

But when it comes to playing a leadership role on China policy, it seems the Greens’ heyday is over. Past policy is embodied in the figure of Bütikofer, who in 2021 led the Greens in requesting and negotiating the EP vote to freeze the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), a deal that supporters hoped would further open China’s internal market to EU companies. Discussions on the CAI were promptly halted in March 2021 after Beijing sanctioned five MEPs in retaliation for European sanctions against four Chinese officials believed to be linked to human rights violations in Xinjiang.

Bütikofer, the former chair of the EP’s Delegation for Relations with the People’s Republic of China (D-CN), is largely thought of as the founder of the European Greens’ China policy. “Still nowadays, many of our current positions on China have been very much shaped by him,” adds Miglioli, who advised Bütikofer on several China-related legislation and resolutions

Part of his legacy was to make Greens think of themselves as consensus builders. Bütikofer explains that building a wide majority consensus on China in the EP was his main goal. “My understanding has been that foreign policy is a realm that the member states jealously protect against European institutions. So the European Parliament could only play a role if it would stand together.”

In line with that way of thinking, today the Greens support the hard line of the Commission on China, and, says Gregorová, “are glad [it] has finally awoken to the security issues which Greens have been pointing out for a long time.” The European Parliament is now quite consensual when it votes on China, so the Greens’ role is not about forming winning majorities. “We raise the ambition of any compromise,” says Miglioli. “We have always been the ones pushing for the most ambitious option, to make sure that there are no loopholes. I believe we have succeeded.”

But a unified European China policy is still lacking. This year, the European Parliament has organised official visits to China. For Gregorová, “[they] have started going to China as kittens that have just fallen out of the basket. It has been very uncoordinated. We need to project more unity as China takes notice.”

However, merely focusing on building consensus might hinder the development of a stronger Green political line on China. Other parties have been less shy on that front. For instance, the current chair of the D-CN, German Renew Europe MEP Engin Eroglu, promotes the EU’s deregulation agenda and advocates for further deregulation measures to make European companies more competitive as a way to reduce imbalances with China. Facing such arguments, the Greens could take a clearer and stronger opposing stance, according to Miglioli. The policy advisor argues that “[Eroglu’s] focus on deregulation is a simplification and the wrong recipe because it is impossible to compete with China on production costs.”

She sees an opportunity for Greens to strengthen their voice. “Greens as a whole are not prioritising China enough as an economic issue. An anti-capitalist angle, critical of multinationals, corporate power, and vocal on labour rights and labour standards, could be an interesting idea to pursue.” She adds that “big multinationals have benefited from access to the huge Chinese market and they have really pursued profit maximisation by delocalising production to China. And now we have these huge dependencies.”

Principles versus pragmatism

However, the dependencies described by Miglioli also make it harder for Greens to build coalitions to support their policies. Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, where Greens went from opposition to government in 2021.

Bündnis 90/Die Grünen’s Annalena Baerbock served as foreign minister until 2025. Critical of the German foreign policy consensus, Baerbock called Xi Jinping a dictator, openly criticised China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea for having no legal basis, and condemned its cooperation with Russia. In an attempt to break away from Merkel’s “quiet diplomacy”, Die Grünen tried to bring a new China strategy, defining China as “partner, competitor, and rival” while emphasising the “systemic rivalry” aspect. This sat uncomfortably with their senior coalition partner, the Social Democrats, who have traditionally been more appeasing towards both China and Russia in the name of economic pragmatism. It also upset German industry, which had grown increasingly reliant on China for exports.

These constraints pushed the Greens to evolve and water down some of their initial policy ambitions in an effort to win over Germany’s powerful industrial sector. Back in 2021, a German automotive start-up CEO described this change to the Financial Times as “a transition from a hardline environmental party to ‘a party of the bourgeoisie’.” Still, in 2024, the German Greens favoured the adoption of EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

Now back in the opposition, Die Grünen continues to actively bring attention to China-related issues in the Bundestag. Based on Bundestag records, the party has been among the most vocal in presenting China-sceptic questions to the government this year. The Greens have scrutinised Chinese investment in Germany’s critical infrastructure and European car manufacturing, imports of Russian and Belarusian wood through China, and cybersecurity.

Left and right approaches

Greens can serve as an alternative leftist voice on China, pointing out the incoherences of leftist figures who uncritically marry anti-imperialism with a pro-Beijing stance.

“We were not trying to have a left approach to China; we wanted to have the correct approach to China”, said Bütikofer when asked if he perceived the Green position as part of a wider left-wing approach to China policy. Being Green doesn’t mean going left in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe. The German Greens are closer to the liberal centre, and the Austrian Greens even formed a coalition government with the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) in 2020.

Meanwhile, western and southern European Green parties tend to lean more towards the left. When it comes to their foreign policy, this translates into different levels of alignment with left-wing parties, whose foreign policy is often defined by a commitment to anti-imperialism and defiance of US hegemony. And although Greens found common ground with the left on Palestine, they often diverge on China.

This is particularly striking in France, where Les Écologistes prove that a Green party can be both anchored in the Left and maintain a coherent critical stance on China. Under the leadership of Marine Tondelier, the party established a clear distinction between their position and that of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI).

Following LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s call for the development of “privileged relations” between Paris and Beijing, and his downplaying of human rights violations and Beijing’s threats against Taiwan, Tondelier signed a steadfast response on her blog titled “Moving beyond the fascination for China.”

“When will we learn, us the people of the left, that anti-imperialist criticism cannot compromise itself by promoting autocracies?” asks Tondelier. “How can the Left be persuasive beyond our activist circles if we are incapable of maintaining a minimum level of consistency regarding our values?”

The post sketches out a progressive approach to China, re-affirming strong positions on human rights and democratic values, and defending a pragmatic and united policy of European engagement with Beijing. This involves cooperating with China on “segments of mutual interest”, including on the energy transition, and rejecting a simple alignment with “Washington’s crusade” against Beijing. However, the French MP is clear that the “industrialisation and electrification of Europe should be driven by European companies”, and that Chinese investment should be “limited, controlled, and contingent upon sustainable concessions” on technology transfers. Breaking with an economically liberal approach, Tondelier urges investments and planning to support a green transition.

The French case shows that Greens can serve as an alternative leftist voice on China, pointing out the incoherences of leftist figures who uncritically marry anti-imperialism with a pro-Beijing stance.

Security policy: Where Greens diverge

Security and defence remain a point of serious divergence between European Green parties. The parties, members, and voters are torn between radical pacifism and realpolitik. This translates into differences in China policy.

It seems that Green parties closer to both the geographical and political centre of Europe tend to have a more realist approach to the issue, putting emphasis on security. For the Central and Eastern European parties, this probably relates to their closer historical experience with Russia and ongoing security threats from Moscow.

In recent years, China’s impact on European security has become more palpable. Beijing maintains an official neutrality on the war in Ukraine, yet has increased its support for Russia’s war effort despite Western sanctions. Beijing continues to provide large volumes of dual-use technologies (goods, software or materials that have both civilian and military applications) vital to Russia’s military-industrial base. Further instances of transnational repression and spying operations have made Beijing a tangible security concern.

Green parties do notice and respond. The Czech Green MP Gabriela Svárovská asserts that a combined focus on “human rights, values, security, and competitiveness” is what distinguishes her party’s China policy. The Finnish ​​Vihreät’s 2025 Foreign and Security Policy Program mentions China eight times, noting its interests in the Arctic, its growing influence in Central Asia, and its threats to Taiwan.

Governing or opposing

Yet many European Green Parties still don’t have a clear China policy.

The British Greens, who made historic electoral gains under the leadership of Zack Polanski, have so far given little thought to their China approach beyond human rights concerns. Their 2024 foreign policy paper made no mention of China. Yet Chinese state threat activities on UK soil – including recognised risks of espionage, spying, and shadow policing operations, as well as cyber attacks – increasingly came under the public eye during former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration. As the latter also attempted to reset diplomatic relations with the PRC, this seems like a missed opportunity for the Greens.

A similar thing can be said of the Danish Socialistisk Folkeparti (Green Left1), who have been part of the government coalition since June 2026. While they criticised the former government’s involvement with China in 2021 and later voiced criticism of China’s support for Russia, in recent years they have gone relatively silent. Denmark is seen as one of the more China-friendly countries in the EU and signed a strategic climate partnership with Beijing in 2023. We have yet to see how the Greens will deal with dependencies on China once they are in the governing seat. (We approached both Danish and UK Greens to elaborate on their positions on China, but did not receive a response.)

By contrast, the Hungarian Green Party LMP used to be quite vocal about the country’s ties with China, as Viktor Orbán made Budapest Beijing’s closest EU ally, as well as the Union’s top recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment. Home to numerous projects linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, including in critical infrastructure, Orbán’s Hungary openly opposed the European “derisking strategy” aimed at reducing critical vulnerabilities and dependencies. Not only did the former prime minister dismiss EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports as an “economic cold war”, he also undermined them by welcoming Chinese industrial giants to establish EV battery factories in the country.

Before it was dissolved following its failure to meet the electoral threshold in the 2024 local elections, LMP accused Orbán’s Fidesz government of “offering Hungary on a platter to Chinese investors”, compromising “the country’s natural assets, environmental treasures, and dwindling human resources”, and voiced concern about CEE becoming “an industrial backyard and dumping ground for Western countries and China”.

Opposing the government’s China policy has been crucial to the Serbian Green-left Front (Zeleno-levi Front), born from grassroots anti-corruption protests and established in its current form during the 2023 protests in Serbia. “As an opposition party, we are not trying to criticise China as much as we are trying to criticise our regime’s ties to China,” says the party’s international secretary Marko Vujačić.

In the Serbian context, Green China criticism stems not from trade imbalances, but mainly from the negative environmental impact of Chinese investment in copper and gold mining and the exploitative working conditions of workers in Chinese factories.

“Although the party does not have a clear constructive China policy, it exercises a clear line of caution towards China,” adds Vujačić, while confirming that the party has also avoided alliance with, or admiration for, the Chinese Communist Party, which is often the case with Serbian left-wing movements. “While Green parties in Serbia have historically been co-opted by the regime, the Zeleno-levi front is an exception,” said Petr Čermák, an analyst at the Association for International Affairs.

A new approach

The former dominant approach to China in Europe, led by global free trade devotees, has been “naive, depoliticised and solely centred around profit,” Tondelier wrote in her blog. As China’s activities and influence in Europe raise more political, social, environmental and security concerns, a new approach is emerging, and Green parties could seize the momentum to voice a bolder political position rooted in Green principles.

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