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PJM’s mismanagement of the grid has worsened reliability, raised energy prices, and increased pollution, enriching the for-profit companies who comprise the majority of its voting members

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Lawmakers and advocates from several states gathered today outside the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to call for needed reforms in the governance of PJM Interconnection (PJM), the organization that manages the power grid for 13 states and Washington, D.C.

Inside, FERC was meeting to consider PJM’s governance and stakeholder processes, with a particular focus on identifying and evaluating concrete, actionable reforms to improve PJM’s ability to address “operational and market needs in a timely and efficient manner,” according to the FERC website.

Advocates and lawmakers argue that PJM’s current governance structure gives disproportionate voting power to market participants with financial interests in the outcomes of its decisions. As it stands, PJM’s conflicts of interest and self-dealing have caused it to mismanage the grid, leading directly to surging energy prices. 

In addition, PJM’s policies are delaying lower-cost clean energy projects while keeping more expensive power sources on the system – contributing to higher electricity bills across the region. A recent analysis found that if PJM were to allow more clean energy to connect to the grid, it would save each of its customers $500 a year through lower energy bills. Meanwhile, PJM is forcing ratepayers to pay coal plants just south of Baltimore hundreds of millions of dollars to stay open, when cleaner alternatives would be less expensive. 

“PJM’s decisions affect every household and business across our region. However, the elected officials accountable to those ratepayers – the families and businesses who ultimately pay the bills – do not have a meaningful voice in the process,” said Maryland Senator Katie Fry Hester (Howard and Montgomery counties). “The PJM Legislators’ Collaborative, made up of legislators across the PJM states, is calling for a new governance framework that (1) clearly defines PJM’s public-interest mission, (2) gives states a meaningful institutional role, (3) strengthens Board independence and accountability, (4) modernizes decision-making, and (5) improves transparency and oversight. This will lead to better decisions, greater accountability, and ultimately more affordable rates for the millions of people we represent.” 

“Back in Jersey, people are having to choose between groceries or their energy bill – this is what happens when monopolies at the top put profits over people without any effective oversight,” said United States Senator Andy Kim (New Jersey). “We need transparency, accountability, and real solutions from PJM about how they plan to bring costs down for millions of people and stop price gouging those who simply should not have to live like this.”  

“The latest capacity auction has again highlighted PJM’s total failure to properly manage our electric grid and keep costs down for Pennsylvania’s families and local businesses,” said Molly Parzen, executive director, Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania. “We can no longer trust PJM to police itself. The public deserves real transparency that lifts the veil on its secretive operations. We need PJM to remove artificial obstacles that are keeping clean energy projects from coming online and lowering energy prices for families who are struggling.”

“As state lawmakers, we are responsible for ensuring an affordable, reliable, and clean grid. Yet, our policies are consistently thwarted by policies established by PJM,” said Maryland Delegate Lorig Charkoudian (Montgomery County). “PJM’s policies are developed through a stakeholder process in which the market participants have the strongest voices. This means that the generators and transmission owners, those who stand to gain the most financially from the policies, are driving the PJM policies. It’s time to shift PJM away from serving industry to serving the public interest. This means putting state policies front and center and including state policymakers in the decision-making process.”

“When the electricity sector was deregulated in the early 2000s, PJM was founded by FERC to have independent authority over the for-profit companies that would be operating as monopolies in the electric energy sector,” said Pennsylvania Representative Joe Webster (Montgomery County). “Today, PJM is subject to those industries, for lack of governance. That sector has failed to innovate. It makes record profits, and our ratepayers in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey and Maryland, and across the region are paying higher and higher electric bills. So, I really can’t say this enough times:  It is time to push PJM back into its original role, to support new energy sources and innovation, and to do that to favor ratepayers, to lower electric costs for every household in the region.” 

“Too often consumers and state policymakers are left on the sidelines when PJM is making critical decisions, resulting in families and small businesses paying the price for expensive coal plants while delaying lower-cost clean energy projects,” said Quentin Scott, Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) Federal Policy Director. “FERC has both the authority and the responsibility to ensure that PJM’s governance is transparent and accountable to the public interest. It’s time to reform PJM’s stakeholder process so that the people who pay the bills—and the state regulators charged with protecting the public interest—have a meaningful voice in shaping the future of our electric grid.” 

“Years of PJM’s slow-moving process failures are now landing on kitchen tables across New Jersey. This conference is a chance to build a record for real change, giving states and ratepayers a genuine voice, unclogging the interconnection queue so ready projects can connect, and ending preferential treatment that keeps costs high. We’ll be watching closely for FERC to move from listening to acting,” said Anjuli Ramos-Busot, Director for the New Jersey Sierra Club.

“We are here to ask PJM to put ratepayers’ interests first,” said Rebecca Rehr, director of Climate Policy and Justice, Maryland League of Conservation Voters. “A fundamental flaw in PJM’s governance structure is that it is not designed to prioritize ratepayer or affordability needs. We’re seeing mismanagement at PJM and the resulting electricity cost spikes in part because states and ratepayer advocates lack an adequate voice at the table.” 

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The post Lawmakers and Advocates Call for PJM Governance Reforms to Serve the Public, Not Private Profit appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

The UC Berkeley analysis should be welcome news for a manufacturing industry that is heavily reliant on natural gas, with its volatile prices, said Jose Dominguez, one of the report’s authors.

GE Vernova is taking reservations for 2031 deliveries now, said CEO Scott Strazik. He spoke of an increasingly diverse customer base, including data centers.

EWG names former California pesticide regulator Emily Bryson senior policy director Anthony Lacey July 23, 2026

SACRAMENTO – The Environmental Working Group today announced that Emily Bryson, a veteran environmental scientist and former senior leader at the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, has joined the organization as senior policy director for California.

At EWG, Bryson will help lead the organization’s California regulatory agenda, with a particular focus on pesticides, public health and advancement of stronger protections for farmworkers, consumers and communities.

Bryson brings to EWG nearly a decade of experience at the nation’s leading pesticide regulatory agency. In that role she helped develop science-based policies to reduce pesticide exposure, strengthen protections for agricultural workers and guide the state’s response to emerging technologies.

“Emily’s experience is exactly what EWG needs as we continue to push for stronger protections from harmful chemicals across California,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, EWG’s senior vice president for California. 

“She understands the science, regulatory process and real-world impacts toxic chemicals have on workers, communities and consumers. Emily’s expertise strengthens an already strong EWG team, particularly as California continues to lead the nation on public health policy.”

Protecting agricultural workers

Bryson most recently served as a supervising senior environmental scientist in the DPR’s Worker Health and Safety Branch. While there, she managed a team of scientists conducting pesticide exposure studies and developing regulations to better protect agricultural workers. 

During her tenure, she led initiatives to modernize pesticide mitigation efforts, supervised scientific research measuring occupational pesticide exposure, and worked with stakeholders across government, academia, agriculture, labor organizations and public health.

She also founded and chaired DPR’s Emerging Technologies Workgroup and represented the department on numerous state and federal advisory committees addressing pesticide safety, agricultural innovation and worker protections.

Earlier in her career, Bryson authored studies evaluating pesticide exposure among agricultural workers, helped develop worker safety regulations and conducted outreach to farmworkers and agricultural communities throughout California. Her public health research has also examined links between environmental pesticide exposure and autoimmune diseases in children.

Safeguards against harmful pesticides

“I've spent my career working to ensure pesticide policies are grounded in sound science and protect the people most at risk from exposure,” said Bryson. “EWG has been a leading voice for healthier food, safer farming and stronger protections from harmful chemicals for decades. 

“I'm excited to join such an outstanding team and help advance policies that better protect workers, families and the environment,” she added.

Bryson earned a master’s degree of public health in environmental health from San Diego State University and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from California State University, Long Beach.

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The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action. Visit www.ewg.org for more information.

Areas of Focus California Veteran scientist brings nearly a decade of experience protecting farmworkers and advancing pesticide safeguards Press Contact Alex Formuzis alex@ewg.org (202) 667-6982 July 23, 2026

With so much riding on America's AI ambitions, utility workforce strategy must have a place alongside generation, transmission and capital planning, writes Stefan Hirniak, president of Specialist Staffing Group US.

The past 30-40 years have been hard on people and their relationships with neighbors and communities. Powerful interests have driven a wedge between people and divided us by promoting self-centeredness and antisocial beliefs. But there are many smart ways we can push this anti-community thinking with grace and empowerment — including the promotion of green spaces.

Dear Dr. Green,

My town has been pretty good about preserving green spaces, but lately the more MAGA-influenced people in town object (strongly!) to spending any tax dollars on things that don’t benefit them directly. Isn’t there evidence that green space psychologically benefits a community? Lower crime, less stress, better health, etc.?

 

Hello Friend,

If only more people would be as caring about their communities. Many people reading this might feel the same frustration and puzzlement over community members who don’t seem to care about community resources.

Yes, there’s strong evidence that green spaces and environmentally sound civil engineering in towns and cities create more wholesome places to live for everyone.

Sadly, cash-strapped municipal governments often see funding for green spaces as the easiest thing to cut from annual budgets. That’s why so many local parks (not to mention national public lands) are in disrepair or unsafe. But an analysis published this May by the Trust for Public Land found every dollar invested in local parks and recreation generates at least $3 in economic benefits, including several ways they help people psychologically.

Let’s look at some science-based arguments for green spaces as a community benefit and help make a case for spending community resources.

The evidence that green space psychologically benefits communities — and the scientific evidence that supports community funding:

Green spaces  can be defined as public places where open areas are dedicated to community benefit. These can include parks, designated trails, playgrounds, shade trees, dog parks, and outdoor seating. Productive green spaces improve air and water quality and support local pollinators and other wildlife.

Image by Christel from Pixabay

 

 

A widely cited study published in 2018 detailed the community benefits of green spaces on mental and physical health. Further scientific studies clearly show that daily exposure to green spaces has been linked to improved physical and mental well-being, reduced levels of stress, enhanced brain function, and increased physical activity. Green spaces also reduce violent crime, anxieties, and fears by creating a place for communities to get together and feel safe while outdoors. The effect has been documented worldwide. See our resource list below for more information.

Parks and forests get the most attention when it comes to green spaces, but here are some other ideas for green spaces to offer to your town or city council support, some of which may not even require funding from local governments:

• Community Gardens are shared parcels of land cultivated by a group of people rather than a single individual. These spaces allow participants to grow fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers, while promoting food security, social interaction, and environmental sustainability.

Image by Tharushi Jayawardana from Pixabay

• Individual Plots are parcels of land subdivided into smaller sections and each gardener or a family is responsible for managing their own plot and keeps the harvest it yields.
• Collective/Cooperative Gardens are land parcels that are tended by a community group. All participants share the labor, and the harvest belongs to everyone.
• Youth Gardens can provide education for youth and are maintained by schools, universities, or nonprofits specifically to teach children about nature, nutrition, and agriculture in a social setting.

Image by Fabien from Pixabay

 

• Green Roofs and Walls involves planting vegetation on top of buildings or vertically on facades and lining streets with trees to encourage walking and cool down summer heat that rises at night from cement and asphalt.

Image by Fabien from Pixabay

• Protected Nature Preserves can be designed to conserve native and local flora and fauna plus provide education about them.

These kinds of green spaces are important for creating a pleasant living space for the whole community and improving the environment in your locale. Green spaces also provide community connection by gathering people together, reducing isolation, and fostering a sense of shared civic pride. The health and well-being of entire communities is boosted through promotion of outdoor physical activity, stress reduction, education, and enhanced mental health.

Coming up:

Shortly after submitting their original question, this week’s reader followed up and asked:

I guess my secondary question is, can sharing this science help persuade these anti-tax activists?

We’ll address that question in our next column, where we’ll learn about how to make a strong case for the mutually beneficial science behind local green spaces (and just about any other environmental initiative). We’ll explore how to win hearts and minds of anti-tax opposition through engaging, positive public speaking, and presentations at town council meetings to justify the need for community green spaces.

Looking forward to it,

Dr. Green

What are you struggling with as a dedicated environmentalist? Use the form below to send your questions and success stories.

All participants are anonymous. Even Dr. Green has no idea who you are.

Send Dr. Green your questions and stories below:

All questions are anonymous and considered intended for publication. Individual replies are not possible.

Disclaimer: This column is not a replacement for therapy, and the advice given is educational in nature, not a replacement for professional psychological or psychiatric therapy. This is a peer-driven support effort by The Revelator to inform and build community with environmental and wildlife defenders.

If you are feeling critically depressed and suicidal, it’s time to immediately find professional help. Go to your closest emergency room or call the following numbers to get immediate help in your area:

SUICIDE HOTLINES

Worldwide: http://www.befrienders.org/support/

United Kingdom: http://www.samaritans.org

USA: http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org

1-800-273-TALK

Resources:

“The Importance of Greenspace for Mental Health.” Barton J, Rogerson M. The importance of greenspace for mental health. BJPsych Int. 2017 Nov 1;14(4):79-81. doi: 10.1192/s2056474000002051. PMID: 29093955; PMCID: PMC5663018.

“Who Heals the Earth’s Healers? Ways to Avert Burnout for Environmental Advocates,” The Revelator, May 2025

“Dr. Green: Why Some People and Groups Become Resistant to Science”

“A comparative study of the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku) on working age people with and without depressive tendencies.” Akemi Furuyashiki, et al., Environmental Health and Preventative Medicine, The Japanese Society for Hygiene.2019 Jun 22

Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness by Dr. Qing Li

Forest Bath  by Jen Barton and Felishia Henditirto, Magination Press — American Psychological Association. A children’s (5-9 years) picture book.

Environmental Psychology: An Introduction 2nd Edition

“The Effects of Forest Therapy on Immune Function” by Youngran Chae, Sunhee Lee, Youngmi Jo, Soyean Kang, Suyoun Park, and Hyoyoung Kang

“The Case for Green Space: A Cost-Effective Mental Health Resource” by Elizabeth Hoge, M.D. and Charlotte Wulf

 

The post Dr. Green: The Psychological and Social Benefits of Green Community Spaces appeared first on The Revelator.

“Any export of power ... necessarily makes that power unavailable to domestic customers,” potentially contributing to inadequate supplies for a region, Public Citizen said. 

Event Facilitator – Second Congo Basin Convening 2026

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) invites qualified consultants to submit Expressions of Interest for the position of Event Facilitator for the Second Congo Basin Convening, to be held from 25–27 August 2026 in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

The facilitator will support the planning and delivery of a high-level regional convening by designing participatory sessions, coordinating speakers and moderators, facilitating discussions, and guiding participants towards the adoption of the Yaoundé 2026 Declaration and the regional action roadmap.

We are seeking professionals with:

• A minimum of five years’ experience facilitating high-level multi-stakeholder events.
• Strong facilitation, communication and moderation skills.
• Fluency in both English and French.
• Knowledge of agroecology, food systems, biodiversity, climate justice, advocacy or sustainable development.
• Experience working with governments, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, farmers’ organisations, women and youth networks.

Application Requirements

Applicants should submit:

• A technical and financial proposal (maximum five pages).
• A current CV.
• Two references from similar assignments.

Submission Deadline: 3 August 2026

Applications should be submitted electronically to afsa@afsafrica.org.

Interested applicants are encouraged to consult the attached Terms of Reference (TOR) for the full description of the assignment, required qualifications, deliverables and application instructions.

You can’t tell when you’re passing one on the highway, but an electric vehicle may well have a superpower. It charges by plugging into the electric grid, of course, but it might also be able to send energy back into it. For a growing number of EVs, this vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G, creates a revenue stream for drivers, who utilities pay to tap into their batteries when demand on the grid spikes. 

Utilities across the country are pursuing pilot projects for the tech, figuring out how to coordinate hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of EVs. To that end, today a coalition of companies — Eversource, National Grid, EnergyHub, Sunrun, and the Mobility House — is launching an early test of the technology in Massachusetts so utility customers can give it a try. Lessons learned here and elsewhere could drive the technique into the mainstream, making the grid more reliable, and electricity cheaper, even if you don’t own an EV. “It’s great to have Massachusetts stepping into the lead here and doing this because these learnings are what’s going to allow this technology to scale,” said Chip Silverman, director of grid services at Sunrun, a solar and battery company.

In the new system, participants hook into an existing program called ConnectedSolutions, which allows homes to run off their residential batteries, among other things. Then when there’s a “demand response” event, like during a heat wave, EV batteries can help the grid keep up. Participants are compensated for this, just like some homeowners who provide energy from their solar panels. 

“It’s really kind of a small number of hours per year that you’re discharging the battery,” said Russell Vare, vice president of vehicle-grid integration at the Mobility House North America, a provider of charging infrastructure. “It’s not necessarily like a daily discharge. It’s just during those peak times the events are called.”

Utilities like V2G because they’re dealing with escalating, overlapping challenges. For one, the demand for electricity is growing as more power-hungry data centers come online and people switch from internal combustion cars to EVs and from gas furnaces to heat pumps. At the same time, utilities are trying to ditch gas and coal in favor of renewables like wind and solar. These clean technologies, though, are intermittent, in that the wind isn’t always blowing and the sun isn’t always shining. Utilities need ways to bank energy for later use, which is why they’re building storage facilities and even using the Earth itself as a giant battery.

Already, Americans are struggling with skyrocketing energy prices for a variety of reasons. Utility shareholders are reaping profits, for instance, and customers are footing the bill for improvements, like burying power lines so they don’t spark wildfires or come down in a storm. Building battery facilities and stringing transmission lines will add still more costs — the inevitable price to pay for a cleaner, more reliable grid.

Read Next The US may be hitting a tipping point for heat pumps Matt Simon

Except some of that spending may indeed be avoidable: The promise of V2G is that it can make electricity cheaper. While participants need a bidirectional charger to send energy back to the grid, a utility doesn’t need to reinvent the system as a whole. EV batteries are an existing, widespread, and reliable source of backup energy to tap into in times of high demand, like during the summer when everyone is running their air conditioning. “It’s the cheapest cost of flexible energy storage that will be available for the grid,” Vare said.

The hotter the planet gets, the more enticing V2G looks for utilities. People need additional AC to stay healthy, but the appliances require lots of power to run. If that energy isn’t coming from renewables, it’s causing even more warming and increasing demand for AC, and on and on. In a V2G system, vehicles that follow predictable schedules, like school buses and municipal fleets, will be especially useful, in addition to their batteries being enormous stores of energy. Even a typical EV battery, though, has around six times the capacity as a backup unit mounted outside a house. 

While not all EVs have the hardware needed to tap into V2G, more models are, like the Nissan Leaf, coming equipped to do so. And as with any technology, bidirectional chargers will get cheaper over time. “As hardware costs come down, installation becomes simpler, and standards continue to mature, we expect vehicle-to-grid to become dramatically more accessible over the next several years,” said Seth Frader-Thompson, president of EnergyHub, in a statement.

With EVs sitting idle all across a city, that adds up to some serious power. So much so, in fact, that only a fraction of owners would need to participate for a program to adequately support the grid. But the more people who opt in, the better, as that gives a utility a broader base to draw from. “If you have a higher number of batteries out there in a virtual power plant, you can actually use less energy from each individual battery,” Silverman said. “But collectively, when you patch them all together and aggregate them, it comes out to a very large resource. And that’s really where the magic is.”

These early projects are figuring out how best to coordinate this, like with apps that let people specify when they typically use their vehicle to, say, get to work. (Participants in the new Massachusetts program are able to do this.) The overall idea is for EVs to send power back to the grid when demand is highest, like when people return home from work and switch on appliances. Then, as the night goes on, the vehicles can charge. This would be paired with another technique, known as active managed charging, which staggers when EVs juice up through the evening and early morning hours — that is, they’re not all doing so at 10 p.m., which would suddenly and dramatically increase demand on the grid.

All told, V2G promises to turn consumers of electricity into more active participants in the grid, with power flowing both ways. Far from straining the grid to the point of collapse, EVs will instead help save it. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The secret to a better grid? Electric vehicles. on Jul 23, 2026.

Interpretation Services – Second Congo Basin Convening 2026

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) invites qualified interpretation service providers to submit Expressions of Interest for the provision of professional interpretation services during the Second Congo Basin Convening, which will take place from 25–27 August 2026 in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

The assignment includes simultaneous and consecutive interpretation in French, English and Portuguese, together with the provision, installation and technical management of all required interpretation equipment. The selected provider will support a high-level regional convening bringing together approximately 140 participants from across the Congo Basin and neighbouring countries.

We are looking for service providers with:

• At least five years of proven experience delivering interpretation services for international conferences.
• Qualified conference interpreters working in French, English and Portuguese.
• Experience providing interpretation equipment and on-site technical support.
• Familiarity with agroecology, food systems, biodiversity, climate justice or related development sectors.
• Demonstrated experience supporting multilingual, multi-stakeholder events.

Application Requirements

Interested firms should submit:

• A technical proposal.
• A financial proposal.
• Evidence of similar assignments.
• Two references from comparable events.

Submission Deadline: 3 August 2026

Applications should be submitted electronically to afsa@afsafrica.org.

Applicants are encouraged to carefully review the attached Terms of Reference (TOR) for the complete scope of work, qualifications, deliverables and submission requirements before preparing their proposals.

Data centers, competition in the transmission sector and PJM Interconnection governance reform were other key topics at the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.

Law Will Impose Undue Burdens on Voters and Disproportionately Suppress the Democratic Rights of Communities Already Facing Environmental Harms 

Contact: kayla@unbendablemedia.com

Washington, D.C. – In response to the passage of the Save America Act through the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in the House of Representatives yesterday afternoon, which imposes undue burdens on voters by requiring them to show citizenship papers (like passports and birth certificates) when registering to vote and restricts mail-in voter registration, Climate Justice Alliance’s Executive Director KD Chavez issued the following statement:

“Undermining our voting rights and reducing access to the polls by attempting to strongarm states is an attack on democracy. Whether the Senate ultimately approves this remains to be seen, but Congress focusing on undemocratic measures like this right now is unacceptable.

At a time when our constitutional rights are rapidly being eroded, environmental and public health regulations are being undone, and scientific certainties like greenhouse gases exacerbating climate change are being denied, voting is a crucial tool in so many communities’ ability to participate in our democracy and choose representation that will address their concerns and issues. 

Many communities–including those on the frontlines–who face environmental racism and climate change often don’t have the identification cards required by the SAVE America Act. Less than half of American citizens have passports and nearly 9% of eligible voters don’t or would not have access to the necessary identification the SAVE America Act would require to vote. And for rural communities that will have to travel farther, trans individuals who have changed their names, and working class communities, the SAVE America Act’s impact is clear: significant barriers to voter registration and participation in the voting process. 

Rather than focusing where the real needs are: protecting public health, ensuring environmental protection, or bringing down costs of living for every-day families, the Republican Majority is using budgetary processes to shove through hateful policies that align with hate-mongerers and big business while imposing undue burdens on the very families and communities whose ancestors built this country. 

Congress must protect, rather than erode, the integrity of the voting process and not create undue and additional burdens on those who exercise their democratic and constitutional rights to participate in it.”

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The post CJA Condemns Congress’ Latest Attack on Democracy with the passage of anti-voting rights legislation in the House appeared first on Climate Justice Alliance.

Warming has brought extreme rain to the parched Sahel, which is seeing aquifers refill as monsoons grow stronger. But heavier downpours alone cannot explain the groundwater revival, say hydrologists, who believe efforts to harvest rainfall may also be paying dividends.

Read more on E360 →

Headline News:

• “Global Oil Prices Rise To Highest Level In A Month Amid Iran War Escalation” • Oil prices climbed to their highest level in more than a month as fighting in the Middle East escalated and a top US official voiced pessimism about peace talks. Brent crude futures, the benchmark index for worldwide trading, rose to $94.10 a barrel. [ABC News]

Pumpjack (David Thielen, Unsplash, cropped)

• “US Says It Reaches Nuclear Power Deal With Saudi Arabia” • The US and Saudi Arabia have reached an agreement on civil nuclear power, the US DOE said, a deal that allows the kingdom to build nuclear reactors using American technology and to enrich uranium. A civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia has been in the works for years. [MSN]
• “Heat Rather Than Lack Of Rain Is To Blame For Europe’s Droughts” • France expects its worst maize harvest in 50 years. The EU’s rivers are so low that shipping is disrupted. Scientists say Europe’s droughts are increasingly driven more by heat than a lack of rain, and soil moisture is vanishing “faster than it would in a world without climate change.” [Euronews]
• “Europe Can Unlock 25 GW of Clean Power By Using Existing Grid Connections” • Europe could add 25 GW of wind and solar to existing hydropower sites across seven EU countries without needing extra grid capacity, according to a new Ember report. In Europe, hydropower plants are particularly well suited for hybridisation. [CleanTechnica]
• “Florida Researchers Bring Endangered Elkhorn Coral Ashore To Protect Them” • Scientists working to save a coral species from extinction transported thirty pieces from nurseries off the Florida coast to a hatchery on land, fearing that warming waters could trigger a mass bleaching event this summer that could wipe them out. [ABC News]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

Kawahiva Rio Pardo territory demarcated on the ground. All that remains is President Lula's signature. #

When Min left the hot, dusty plains of central Myanmar for its mountainous eastern border with China earlier this year, he had few options. A 2021 military coup had devastated the formal economy of the Southeast Asian country, and jobs were scarce. Min’s native Sagaing Region was at the epicenter of an armed uprising, making it a target of airstrikes and other retaliatory attacks. And the military introduced mandatory conscription in 2024, accelerating the exodus of young people from areas under its control. 

As many of his peers fled Myanmar, Min paid a broker 2,000 Chinese yuan ($290) to arrange jobs for him and his younger brother at a rare earth mining site in an autonomous region controlled by a powerful ethnic army. 

Assigned to build roads, Min and his brother each earned around 3,000 yuan ($430) a month. It was far more than they could earn in most industries, but the work came with risks. They were digging on steep slopes and Min’s brother had little experience operating heavy machinery.

Weeks after arriving, Min’s brother died in a landslide. Min’s account of the incident could not be independently verified, but local media have documented at least five fatal landslides at rare earth mining sites in Myanmar in recent years, in one case burying more than a dozen workers.

His family held religious rites without his brother’s body, which could not be transported. Min did not go home either. “Despite the risks, I continue working,” he said. “There are not many other job options.” (Editor’s note: Like other workers interviewed, Min has been given a pseudonym.)

A rare earth mining site, seen here in January 2026, near the town of Hpare in territory controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization near the border with China. Machya

Min is part of an expanding workforce enduring hazardous conditions and handling toxic chemicals to extract some of the world’s most coveted raw materials. Used in the manufacture of wind turbines and electric vehicles, the 17 elements known as rare earths are often framed as essential to fighting climate change. But they are also used in advanced weapons, elevating their geostrategic value.

Many countries consider rare earths to be ‘critical minerals’ — vital to economic and security interests but vulnerable to supply chain disruption. As competition for control over supply chains intensifies, rare earth extraction has left a wake of destruction in source countries. Myanmar, the world’s largest supplier of a particularly sought-after subset known as heavy rare earths, is now enduring a disproportionate burden.

Myanmar’s rare earth mining industry operates in secret, with no public records of active permits or companies involved. Worksites are heavily guarded, and only a handful of journalists have reported on the ground over the past decade. 

Still, news has trickled out — of poisoned rivers, forests devoid of wildlife, and farmland so toxic that growers cannot sell their crops. In May, a local human rights group reported that a Chinese rare earth mining company in Myanmar’s eastern Shan State was using prisoners and human trafficking victims for “slave labor.” It found that both the Myanmar military and United Wa State Army, an ethnic army that maintains a ceasefire with the military, were complicit.

A rare earth mining site, seen here in September 2025, in the Mong Pawk area of Shan State, Myanmar, in territory controlled by the United Wa State Army.
Gawng Loe Mu

The businesses carrying out this extraction face few consequences in Myanmar — in part because the industry operates in a legal grey area. Chinese companies extract rare earths in autonomous, militarized regions controlled by local ethnic armies, which protect mining operations while taking a cut of the profits. The mined material is then trucked across the border into China, where it is mixed and essentially laundered with rare earths from other sources and processed for use in global products.

The conflict monitoring organization Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, or ACLED, has ranked Myanmar’s war as the second-most extreme on the planet, and also the world’s most fragmented, with more than 1,200 distinct armed groups. Corruption and weak rule of law have further contributed to an explosion of criminal activity of all kinds. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Myanmar has the highest levels of organized crime of any country in the world.

“External influence, such as global demand and China, play a major role in Myanmar’s rare earth extraction,” said Thaw Htoo, a pseudonym for a political ecologist from Myanmar who conducts her research anonymously for safety reasons. “Armed groups and lawlessness allow this to happen while the international community turns a blind eye. … These actors are all involved in these harmful and irresponsible practices, and ideas like responsible sourcing or a just energy transition do not reflect the reality on the ground.”

As the world’s superpowers seek control over rare earth supply chains as a means to advance their national interests, from weapons to renewable energy, their demand is indirectly funding conflict actors in Myanmar during a time of war, incentivizing rapid extraction with minimal safeguards.

Debris surrounds a damaged statue of Buddha in February 2024 following fighting between Myanmar’s military and the Kachin Independence Army in Nam Hpat Kar, Kutkai township in Myanmar’s northern Shan State. STR / AFP via Getty Images

Rare earths are common in the Earth’s crust, but their low concentration, combined with the fact that they occur in complex clays and minerals, makes them costly and difficult to mine. Researchers have found that their extraction tends to occur at the margins of state and corporate power, with those profiting from extraction often using narratives of untapped wealth and critical strategic needs to justify their expansion.

Rare earth exploration has reached Indigenous territories in the Amazon, the deep sea, and even the moon. As the United States seeks ways to reduce its dependence on China, it has made deals involving rare earths in geopolitical hotspots including Ukraine and contested regions of Pakistan, while working to extend its influence over rare earth-rich countries including Venezuela and Greenland.

Within Myanmar, these patterns are repeated along its eastern border. “The question we need to ask about rare earths is why these same regions keep getting remade as extractive sacrifice zones,” said Jasnea Sarma, an ethnographer and geographer at the University of Zurich. 

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Myanmar’s borderlands have been contested since shortly after the country, formerly known as Burma, gained independence from Britain in 1948. Ethnic groups like the Kachins that had relative autonomy under the British rose up against direct central rule by the Burman majority. The Burmese military has sought to quell these rebellions with a brutal tactic known as “four cuts” — starving opponents of food, funds, intelligence, and recruits by targeting entire communities. Now in its eighth decade, Myanmar’s civil war is considered the world’s longest.

The central military and ethnic armies holding territory along the country’s borders take taxes from resources including jade, timber, and gold. Their affiliated companies profit directly from these industries. Armed groups that agreed not to fight against the military have been rewarded with a higher degree of autonomy to do business, giving them an added layer of impunity. Their territories have become hubs for more overtly criminal industries including drug production and online scams.

Because rare earth mining in Myanmar is so secretive, data on the industry is scarce. But China’s customs reports show that from 2017 to 2024, it imported more than 320,000 tons (290,000 metric tons) of rare earths from Myanmar, or roughly two-thirds of its total imports. According to the environmental nonprofit Global Witness, Myanmar surpassed China as the world’s largest source of heavy rare earths in 2021. It is a particularly vital source of dysprosium and terbium, components of heat-resistant permanent magnets — known as neodymium-iron-boron, or NdFeB magnets — used in a range of technologies with military and civilian applications.

There is limited publicly available data on the uses of dysprosium and terbium by volume, but research by the U.S. Department of Energy found that consumer electronics and industrial motors accounted for nearly 60 percent of global NdFeB magnet demand as of 2020, while offshore wind turbines and electric vehicles accounted for an additional 20 percent. If the world speeds up its shift away from fossil fuels as predicted in a high-growth scenario, offshore wind turbines and electric vehicles would account for nearly two-thirds of global demand for NdFeB magnets by 2030, according to the Energy Department.

China, which holds more than 90 percent of the world’s rare earth processing capacity, began restricting its exports of heavy rare earths last year in response to U.S. tariffs. The shutoff left global economies scrambling to find new ways to procure them, and prompted new deals and partnerships. 

Samples of rare-earth minerals from the Bayan Obo mining district are on display at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in May 2025 in Beijing, China.
VCG / VCG via Getty Images

The highly sanctioned Myanmar military has meanwhile stepped up efforts to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration. In April, its Ministry of Information hired Roger Stone, one of America’s most notorious lobbyists, to help build ties with the U.S.

Some Americans have already lobbied for the U.S. to pursue access to Myanmar’s rare earths. Such a pursuit would most likely involve collaboration with India, Myanmar’s western neighbor and China’s rival in the region; analysts warn it would face immense logistical and geopolitical hurdles. 

Whether these hurdles will stop the U.S. from trying remains unclear. In May 2026, the Trump administration signed a deal with India to cooperate in securing supplies. Days later, Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing visited India and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, discussing “ways to deepen cooperation” in rare earths among other topics, even though extraction areas are outside the military’s control.

A recent report by Forest Trends, a conservation-focused nonprofit, found that nature crimes — the illegal extraction and trade of natural resources — are “deeply embedded within broader illicit economies” across Southeast Asia’s Mekong Region, and that global demand for rare earths may intensify not only extraction in Myanmar, but associated conflict and crime. 

Although legality in Myanmar is complicated by the military’s illegitimate claim to power and its involvement in criminal enterprises, Myanmar’s role as a hub for environmental exploitation is undisputed. According to Forest Trends, this activity provides military and criminal groups with revenue outside formal banking systems that can fund other illicit operations.

These extractive industries are highly lucrative, in some cases generating billions of dollars annually. The military claims the profits benefit the public, though many of the military’s conglomerates are sanctioned by the U.S. and other Western countries for funding human rights abuses. Groups fighting against the military, meanwhile, use narratives of revolutionary struggles and ethno-territorial rights to justify claims to land and resources, without taking responsibility for the harmful impacts. 

“Everyone’s talking about rare earths now, and understandably so. But the story didn’t start there, and it won’t end there either,” said Sarma of the University of Zurich. “People are finally paying attention to the slow, perpetual violence that’s been unfolding here for decades beneath layers of extraction.”

An unexploded projectile sits on the roof of a house in February 2024 following fighting between Myanmar’s military and the Kachin Independence Army in Nam Hpat Kar, Kutkai township in Myanmar’s northern Shan State.
STR / AFP via Getty Images

China once mined most of the world’s supply of rare earths domestically. In the Bayan Obo district of Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of northern China, open-pit mining in the 1990s and early 2000s scarred the landscape with massive tailings ponds and poisoned the air and water. 

Bayan Obo is mainly a source of light and medium rare earths. Heavy rare earths are scarcer and more difficult to extract, and are typically mined in Myanmar through a process called in-situ leaching. It involves dispersing acid and chemical solvents through mountains, leaching out the rare earths in chemical pools, and burning them in furnaces.

The method carries substantial environmental and public health risks, according to Regan Kwan, a research analyst at the Stimson Center who studies the impacts of rare earth mining in Southeast Asia — particularly when pollution makes its way into water. “Chemical leaks and wastewater discharge can turn rivers toxic, reduce biodiversity, and expose communities to elevated levels of rare earth elements and heavy metals in crops,” he said. “On a human level, chronic exposure can affect the brain, liver, bones, and immune systems, and can be extremely detrimental during childhood development.”

China initially endured the consequences of in-situ leaching in its southeastern provinces, but eventually, the harms reached a tipping point. In 2012, the government found that rare earth mining had caused “great damage” to public safety, health, and the environment, and vowed to overhaul the industry. It has since drastically tightened regulations, driving the shift into Myanmar. 

“Regulations were looser,” said Ryan Castilloux, the founder and managing director of the critical minerals strategy firm Adamas Intelligence. “Chinese companies or interests could take their expertise and get production going quickly.”

Thai activists gathered outside the embassy of The People’s Republic of China in Bangkok in July 2026 to demand China address pollution affecting the Kok, Sai, Ruak, and Mekong rivers due to cross-border pollution linked to mining in Myanmar.
Peerapon Boonyakiat / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

The origin story of rare earth mining in Myanmar is difficult to pinpoint, but satellite images and Chinese import data show that it reached an industrial scale around 2017. 

By 2022, satellite images showed hundreds of rare earth mining sites in Myanmar’s northernmost Kachin State. Most of these sites spread out from the border town of Pangwa, which served as the headquarters for a warlord named Zahkung Ting Ying. 

A former member of the Kachin Independence Army, or KIA, one of Myanmar’s oldest and strongest ethnic armed forces, he established his own rival army in 1989. He signed a ceasefire with the military the same year; in return, it designated his territory as a Special Region, an administrative status conferring a high degree of autonomy.

Ting Ying’s army is one of several to benefit from this arrangement. According to Kevin Woods, a political ecologist and research associate at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, the military and ethnic armies on Myanmar’s border with China have used ceasefires as a deliberate means of generating wealth from natural resources while asserting control over land and people — part of a strategy he calls ceasefire capitalism.

In Ting Ying’s territory, the strategy was a success. Over three decades, he cultivated relationships with the military and Chinese investors while opening his territory for business. It became a hub for logging, poppy cultivation, banana plantations, and various types of mining. When China began looking for new places to source rare earths, his territory was a natural fit. 

Zahkung Ting Ying, center, leader of the New Democratic Army-Kachin, attends the Kachin State Special Region 1 People’s Conference on March 20, 2006 in Panwa, Kachin State Special Region 1 of Kachin State, Myanmar. China Photos / Getty Images

Kachin’s rare earth mining boom coincided with a political transition in Myanmar. In 2011, the military began handing over power to a civilian government following a half-century of direct rule. Five years later, it took a back seat to the elected democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

Although her party initiated reforms seeking to strengthen natural resource governance and curb corruption during its five-year term, it ultimately faced criticism for its limited achievements. While activists accused it of suppressing independent voices and walking back protections for customary land ownership, the civilian government also lacked independent access to Myanmar’s Special Regions like the one set up for Ting Ying, hindering its ability to monitor some of the worst environmental offenses.

Still, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party was easily reelected in November of 2020. The military refused to accept the results, however, and on February 1, 2021, it arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of her party and took power in a coup. Widespread nonviolent protests followed; when the military cracked down with lethal force, many protesters turned to armed resistance.

Hundreds of new armies emerged with a shared aim of overthrowing the military and establishing a democracy, but their goals went further. They also sought a federal political system that granted autonomy to ethnic states — a goal that brought them in step with some of the country’s most powerful ethnic armies. The Kachin Independence Army is one of several that sided with the resistance, hedging its bets that victory would bring it closer to the self-determination it had been seeking since the 1960s.

Armed and trained by the KIA and other established forces, Myanmar’s anti-junta resistance has made significant gains. The military, backed by Russia and China, has retaliated with a heavy hand, killing thousands of civilians and displacing millions. United Nations investigators have accused it of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 2025, the U.N. found that Myanmar was facing a polycrisis that had pushed millions into poverty and “reshaped every aspect of life.”

An anti-coup protester holds a banner during a peaceful protest in Yangon, Myanmar in March 2021.
Hkun Lat / Getty Images

A scramble for resources followed the coup, offering armed actors and their business partners new opportunities to make money. “There has been less rule of law since the coup, and a much stronger demand for revenue generation among a proliferation of armed groups,” said Woods, the political ecologist. “That has created a context, especially along the China border, that has little remaining accountability.”

In Kachin, Ting Ying initially experienced a windfall. As war raged across the country, his territory remained peaceful, and rare earth mining expanded. Chinese customs data shows that China imported $3.6 billion worth of rare earths from Myanmar from 2021 to 2024, out of a total of around $4.3 billion since 2017. The vast majority of rare earth mining sites in Myanmar were in Ting Ying’s territory at the time.

Then in late 2024, the KIA defeated Ting Ying’s army. Ting Ying was initially rumored to have fled to China, but has since been cozying up to Myanmar military officials and Chinese diplomats. In his former territory, now controlled by the KIA, rare earth mining has been slow to resume. Some reports indicate the KIA has faced pressure from China, which typically prioritizes its own business interests in the country. Since the coup, China has repeatedly pushed ethnic armies supporting the pro-democracy movement to cease fighting the military or withdraw from territory they control.

To keep business flowing amid the volatility in Kachin, Chinese companies expanded rare earth mining southward into Myanmar’s Shan State — particularly areas bordering China, controlled by ethnic armies that signed ceasefires with the military. 

“China’s rising demand, coupled with uncertainty in Kachin, has shifted investment,” said Xu Peng, a political scientist at the University of Manchester. “With high margins and reliable tax take, rare earths have become a key, competing extractive resource for ethnic armed organizations, reinforcing today’s rapid growth.”

A drone shot taken in September 2025 of a rare earth mining site near the town of Hpare in territory controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization near the China border.
Machya

Five rare earth mining workers based in areas controlled by the KIA and United Wa State Army in Shan State described exploitative and risky conditions. All of them have been given pseudonyms.

Kaung worked his way up from a laborer to a supervisory role over five years, but quit his job earlier this year due to feelings of discrimination by his Chinese employers. He said they underpaid him, and walked back their offer of a commission based on mining output. “Because there were no written contracts, they claimed they had no obligation to pay,” he said.

He and other workers from Myanmar said that Chinese nationals held almost all senior positions, and that even when workers from Myanmar were promoted, they were still under Chinese bosses. “There were many structural challenges,” said Kaung. “Working under Chinese management meant that all work depended on their decisions and authority.”

Without written contracts, workers had little recourse from dismissal. Women faced particular risks. “Some Chinese supervisors sought second wives, and if female workers refused their advances, they were dismissed from their jobs,” said Kaung.

He added that even the value set for a worker’s life differed by nationality. “If a Myanmar worker dies, compensation is limited to between 80,000 and 100,000 yuan,” he said. “If a Chinese national dies, compensation can exceed 1 or even 2 million yuan.”

Pann Ei fled her village in Shan State as fighting escalated in 2023. Now a cook at a rare earth mining site, she typically works 10 hours a day, with only two rest days a month. “Most workers don’t stay long because of problems like not receiving salaries regularly or having deductions,” she said. “Even though the jobs are dangerous, salaries are still uncertain.”

Si Thu, a laborer at another site, works similar hours for daily wages. “When I arrived here, I found that the work is not done under a formal contract,” he said. “There are no fixed rest days. We can take leave if we request it, but the missed days are deducted from our pay.”

His job is to dig boreholes and install pipes for dispersing chemicals through the mountains. “It’s like injecting medicine into a patient’s vein,” he said. “We drill holes into the mountain and inject liquid acid through the pipes so that it seeps into the ground.”

Mi Mi, who works as a cook, said her company provided protective gear for laborers, but that people would sometimes take off their gloves and boots due to the heat. She witnessed the consequences for a Chinese worker who handled acid without wearing gloves. “It caused burns on his hands, leaving red, blister-like marks,” she said.

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Research by Tanapon Phenrat of Thailand's Naresuan University found that water samples taken from areas of extraction in Kachin State were severely contaminated with radioactive elements, toxic heavy metals and other harmful substances, representing levels that would “substantially exceed” regulatory thresholds in China.

Kaung, the site supervisor, said he had little choice about the water he used in daily life. “Drinking water is taken from mountain sources through pipelines connected to areas where there are no rare earth mines. We boil the water before drinking it, and the same water is used for bathing,” he said. “Even though the water is sourced from non-mining areas, I believe it may still be contaminated.” 

While he has not identified any discernible consequences on workers’ health, he said that supervisors of rare earth-burning furnaces had heard of infertility problems among both male and female workers — an impact of rare earth exposure that has been identified in some laboratory research and studies of other contexts. 

Workers in Myanmar also described severe environmental destruction. “The water is lifeless, and the mountains have been badly damaged,” said Kaung. “Plants and trees can no longer grow. … Wild animals have lost their habitats due to extensive drilling and the digging of boreholes.”

According to Mi Mi, companies abandon mining sites after depleting their resources. “No one takes responsibility for what happens to the land,” she said. “Despite this, we have no choice but to rely on this work for our livelihoods.”

Nyi Tun, a man in his 50s who has also been given a pseudonym, described major impacts in his village. His family has survived generationally through hill cultivation and raising livestock, but this way of life is now under threat. “In the past, this area was very pleasant to live in,” he said. “It is not good to live in anymore. There is a lot of mining across the mountains, including rare earth mining.”

People stand next to debris in the aftermath of a landslide in a mining area in Pangwa in Myanmar’s northern Kachin State in June 2024.
STR / AFP via Getty Images

The problems started around six years ago, when Chinese businessmen and local officials informed village leaders that they would soon begin mining rare earths just a few miles away. “No one asked for the villagers’ opinions,” said Nyi Tun.

Destruction followed. “The soil color has changed; it used to be rich and reddish, but now the environment is dry, like the soil from the desert, and it looks pale and yellowish,” he said. “Dirty water, polluted water, and waste from rare earth mining in the mountains flow into our streams and creeks.”

In the dry season, trucks transporting rare earths to China blow up dust and damage the roads. The hot season feels hotter than in the past, while the rainy season brings deadly landslides and floods. “Crop yields are lower now,” said Nyi Tun. “We can only farm enough for our own consumption; the yield isn’t good enough to produce a surplus to sell.”

As the conditions worsen, young people are migrating to cities and towns in search of work. “I am not educated, but I know and understand how this village began and the current situation,” said Nyi Tun. “Some people call this development, but I don’t see it that way. I feel sad seeing our ancestral lands and farms damaged.”

These impacts point to a double standard. While China now mandates that companies mining rare earths within its borders adhere to strict environmental regulations, it doesn’t require the same compliance abroad, according to Xu Peng of the University of Manchester. “The regulatory framework governing overseas extraction, including in Myanmar, remains comparatively vague,” she said. “There does not appear to be a clear, directly enforceable Chinese legal restriction specifically prohibiting environmental harm from rare earth mining overseas, including in Myanmar.”

Once these rare earths cross into China, processing is highly centralized. Castilloux of Adamas Intelligence compared China’s rare earth processing industry to a coffee grinder, so thoroughly blending together material from different sources that the individual components are nearly impossible to trace to their origin countries. “Unless you’re on the floor and you can kind of track the molecules down the separation line and then follow it to a metals plant, it becomes really, really tricky,” he said.

Still, he asserted that based on proportionality, companies using heavy rare earths in their products could be sure that their supply chain, at least a portion of it, is tied to Myanmar. “If you’re buying magnets from China, or let’s say Japan with inputs from China, there is some portion of that material in those magnets … that has certainly come from Myanmar, in every case,” he said.

According to Ben Hardman, Mekong legal director at the environmental nonprofit EarthRights International, companies are aware of the problem but are skirting responsibility. “I think companies are consistently using Myanmar as a sacrifice zone,” he said.

He called on companies that rely on heavy rare earths in their supply chains to both reduce this dependence and engage with local civil society groups and ethnic armed organizations controlling rare earth mines in Myanmar, in order to mitigate and remedy the harms. “It’s not acceptable for companies to say, ‘We are going to keep sourcing magnets that include these heavy rare earths but we can’t do anything about it because it’s complex,’” he said.

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Julie Michelle Klinger, a geographer and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison warned that rare earths’ other applications — including their use in petrochemical refining, nuclear, and hydropower, as well as weapons — are often overlooked. “There are currently no measures in place to track, much less ensure, that mines opened ostensibly to meet the growing demand for renewable energy technologies actually serve that purpose,” she said. “In the context of global rearmament, it is reasonable to guess that an even smaller share of global rare earth output is actually going toward technologies that might be used in an energy transition.”

While accountability remains near-absent in Myanmar, the problems continue, and are spreading to other countries. In neighboring Thailand, water testing over the past year has revealed toxic contamination of rivers from rare earth extraction and other forms of mining in Myanmar. Local advocates in Thailand are calling on the Thai government to take action, even though it does not formally engage with the ethnic armies controlling areas of Shan State where the rivers originate, and where civic space is minimal.

In Kachin, a sliver of hope has emerged since the KIA took over rare earth mining areas in 2024. The Kachin Independence Organization, or KIO, which oversees the KIA, has a history of engagement with civil society, but has long struggled to balance its dependence on resources with its accountability to the public. Since the coup, it has come under renewed pressure to reform its approach to resource governance, but its response has been mixed.

In a landmark case in 2023, it canceled plans to mine rare earths at one site following widespread protests, only to later allow mining in the same area. In another case, it dispersed protests at a planned site and detained more than 20 people, effectively silencing local activism. With independent media unable to visit the area, it is unclear whether the mining proceeded. 

A civilian living in Kachin, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that locals were being paid to allow rare earth mining on their land, but lacked the conditions enabling them to make free and informed decisions. “There is no formal consultation, information sharing, or public announcement process with communities,” he said. At the same time, he remained fearful of expressing this or other concerns directly to the KIO. “Raising the topic of rare earth mining is still very sensitive,” he said.

Lahkyen Roi, a Kachin scholar-activist, is speaking out using a pseudonym. “Even if these mines are providing vital revenue for the war against the military, the KIO should place a moratorium on these extractive activities for now, considering short- and long-term implications on the local communities, local economy, and environment,” she said. “With rare earth exploration expanding across many ethnic territories to exploit the current sociopolitical instability, the industry is headed toward a ‘race to the bottom.’”

Whether in Kachin or Shan, workers face pressure to keep their heads down. “If information related to rare earth mining is posted online, monitoring becomes stricter and more vigilant,” said Min. 

After his brother’s death, his employers urged him to refrain from posting about the incident on social media, while offering him compensation amounting to around a year’s worth of wages. Ultimately, he accepted the offer, sent the money home to his family, and continued his work. “There is no freedom to speak openly about rare earth mining,” he said. “Workers simply work, rest when their shifts end, and receive their salaries when the time comes.”

Additional reporting by Gawng Loe Mu

toolTips('.classtoolTips2','A group of 17 soft gray metals including lanthanides, scandium, and yttrium, so-called rare earths form key parts of the magnets in wind turbines and are used in high-tech products ranging from consumer electronics to defense satellites.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips8','A lightweight, silvery-white alkali metal with properties that allow it to store large amounts of energy. Lithium is a key component of many batteries, including those that store renewable energy and power electric vehicles.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips10','A conductive and heat-resistant metal that forms a key part of many battery cathodes, which allow electric charges to flow. It is used in the lithium-ion batteries that power many EVs as well as solar energy systems and wind turbine components.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips11','A scarce blue metal that helps battery cathodes store large amounts of energy without overheating or collapsing. It is a key component of lithium-ion batteries. ');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How war in Myanmar is driving a deadly rare earth mining boom on Jul 23, 2026.

After more than a decade of nurturing, it had come time to infect this 28-acre grove of American elms with a disease that would almost certainly kill them. Dressed in hunter-green muck boots, grey pants, and a brown Nature Conservancy T-shirt, Gus Goodwin knelt down to give the first tree its shot. Using a bamboo stake marked at 12 inches as a gauge, he measured that far off the ground, held his drill at a slight downward angle, and pulled the trigger. 

“We need to create a wound,” Goodwin, the conservancy’s director of science and technology advancement in Vermont, said as the tool began to whir. He bore an inch-deep hole into the tree, the bit sending shavings spiraling out behind it. Putting the drill aside, he took a blue pipette from his tool box and injected 2 teaspoons of a clear solution containing roughly 100,000 spores of the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease. 

“That’s it,” he said. “Pretty simple.”

One by one, row by row, the plan was to stick nearly all of the 5,300 or so elms at the sprawling site in southern Vermont, save the few that received a squirt of water as a control. In the coming weeks, most of the trees would doubtlessly succumb to the pathogen that has already killed tens of millions of their ancestors and made Ulmus americana an endangered species. The ones that live, however, could help save the species.

A research specialist with the University of Vermont records information young elm trees that have been inoculated with Dutch elm disease on May 19, 2026. Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

This project is the most promising attempt yet in the decades-long effort to restore a crumbling pillar of American forests. If successful, it could spawn the largest, healthiest, most genetically diverse population of disease-tolerant elms North America has seen in more than a century. Those trees would provide shade and elegance wherever they cast shadows and support the creatures, like double-toothed prominent moths, specifically adapted to them. “Their life is so tightly tied to the species that they evolve to look like the edge of the leaf,” Goodwin said, explaining how the caterpillar camouflages neatly with the stegosaurus-like ridges along the edge of an elm leaf. “If you substitute another species in, you kind of pull the rug out from under that.”

American elms also help mitigate flooding, which climate change is making more frequent, intense, and devastating. It’s a threat that Vermont knows well, having experienced two 100-year deluges since 2023. According to one study, bolstering the state’s floodplains could avoid as much as $1 billion in property damage over the next century. Similar logic applies across New England and beyond. “There’s no other floodplain tree that’s shade tolerant, flood tolerant, and long-lived,” said Goodwin. The hope is to bring that buffer against climate disasters back. 

If, of course, any of the trees here survive.

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After Goodwin injected his first sapling, he marked it with a dab of orange paint to show that it had been jabbed. He then opened an app detailing this research plot, and looked up the tree. Elm number 439 is the offspring of Valley Forge, a nursery strain bred to be disease-tolerant, and an individual called Damon from the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. Survivor tree 31, as the latter is known, measures more than 7 feet around and is one of about 50 potentially hearty parents represented in this research plot. Those with the most resistant and genetically diverse progeny will be cloned and moved to the new seed orchard of “super trees.”  

Goodwin also recorded where sprouts, called epicormic shoots, had popped out of number 439. Knowing this was important because, if more of them appeared later, it could be an indicator of stress. With that done, he moved to the next elm, then the next, a trail of orange paint in his wake. In the coming days, as many as six crews would descend on the grove to finish the task. After each tree-tap was registered in the app, the icon went from red to green.

“I get the satisfaction of watching that dot turn color,” said Goodwin, who was eager to see which trees would start to die. In a few weeks, trees without resistance would begin to develop symptoms — wilting, discolored leaves, or an outburst of epicormic shoots. Only then would the researchers know if their plan for a reinvigorated army of elms might work. “We’re at a really exciting milestone in the project.”

Researchers inject experimental elms with Dutch elm disease at a test site in Benson Vermont. The Nature Conservancy

The American elm is remarkable. Its branches arch upward and outward, forming a cathedral-like canopy of green that can stretch more than 100 feet above the forest floor. Each autumn, the leaves turn a vibrant golden-yellow. “The elm is a tree which can be distinguished farther off perhaps than any other,” 19th-century naturalist Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal. “It is beautiful alike by sunlight and moonlight.” 

These fecund specimens achieve their mature height and vase-like shape in as little as 15 years and, unencumbered, can live as long as 300. With their expansive native range and a love of moist, fertile soil, the trees used to dominate river valleys and floodplains from the Canadian maritimes to East Texas. For Indigenous populations, they were meeting places, signposts and council trees around which important gatherings revolved. As the New World became America, settlers began clearcutting across New England, with forests giving way to sheep pastures. Elms, however, have a tendency to warp that makes them nearly worthless as lumber. This spared the trees from the worst of the denuding.

Instead, elms were often celebrated as shade givers, with particularly stately examples known by name: the Washington Elm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, under which George Washington is said to have assumed control of the Continental Army in 1775. The Deerfield, Pittsfield, Wethersfield, and Concord elms were after the New England towns where they once stood.

An 1853 colored engraving of the Washington Elm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bettmann / Getty Images

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century, though, that the elm grew into a cultural icon. Spurred by a twin push to uplift native tree species and beautify neighborhoods, the fast-growing and vast trees become a go-to for arborists. “They’re kind of like junkyard dogs. They can grow in really tough locations and be perfectly fine,” said Stephanie Adams, a tree pathologist at Texas A&M University. “That’s why you see pictures of Main Street, USA back in those times and all the streets are just lined with American elms.” Thousands of roadways still bear the tree’s name, and what else would Wes Craven call his 80’s slasher classic but A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

“The American elm is a symbol for American history,” said Doug Still, an arborist and host of the podcast “This Old Tree.” “Until, of course, Dutch elm disease wiped them out.”

The aptly abbreviated DED kills with incredible efficiency. While it likely originated in Asia, Ophiostoma ulmi was first observed in northern Europe around 1910 and Dutch scientists officially described it in 1922. The fungus that causes it soon arrived in North America, reportedly on logs imported to make veneer, and native elm bark beetles carried it on their backs as they burrowed into their hosts. The afflicted tree mounts an aggressive immune response, trying to stop the invader by deploying balloon-like plugs called tyloses that prevent transmission through the xylem, which shuttles water and nutrients from its roots to its leaves. These arteries eventually clog, and the tree essentially starves. Death can come in as little as a year.

Rings are pictured in the trunk of an elm tree in Boston in 2017. Planted in the 1880s, the tree was taken down after succumbing to Dutch elm disease.
David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The impact on the American landscape was immediate. Trees suspected of having the disease were quickly felled to curb the plague, and, by 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had allotted $2.5 million to the effort. Culling intensified, but instead of stemming DED it may have hastened its expansion. “The only tool we had in our toolbox at the time was a chainsaw, and when that’s the case, everything looks like a removal,” said Adams, explaining that, once introduced, the disease can move from one elm to another through their interconnected roots. “We didn’t know that removing before severing the root grafts actually exacerbated and sped up the spread.” 

The 1940s brought more setbacks. America’s entry into World War II diverted attention and resources away from the elm war. Then a far more aggressive strain — Ophiostoma novo-ulmi — arrived, turning the epidemic into what one researcher, in 2017, deemed “arguably the most significant event in the history of urban forestry.” This potent variant raced through the country, killing as many as 100 million trees.

Though the percentage of elms lost is murky, the impact is unmistakable. Trees came down by the thousands in cities and towns nationwide. New Haven, Connecticut, once known as “Elm City,” was almost entirely stripped of its namesake. The population on the University of Illinois campus tumbled from 1,850 to 92 in a little over a decade. By the 1970s, Minneapolis was taking down more than 20,000 of its roughly 400,000 elms each year, estimated Ryan Murphy, who leads the elm selection program at the University of Minnesota. A mere 35,000 remain in the city, and statewide the devastation is even worse, with the plague claiming 95 percent of the elm population. “In some communities in Minnesota there are just a few American elm left in the entire city,” he said. “And the disease is still killing trees.”

The easiest way to find the plot of dying elms in Benson, Vermont is to put “Preserving God’s Creation Taxidermy” into a GPS, and cross the street when you get there. The business is in some ways emblematic of what scientists are doing in the field below — ensuring that people can continue enjoying a species. And like taxidermy, it requires that individuals die. “I feel like we should warn them and apologize to them because we’re torturing them,” said Leila Wilson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, as she set out to start injecting another young elm. She cringes each time, knowing the consequences. “I don’t like that part. But they’re serving the greater good.” 

In an era of high-tech fixes, Wilson, Goodwin, and their colleagues are doing little more with their elms than Gregor Mendel did with his peas: crossbreeding them. The idea isn’t new; such efforts began almost as soon as scientists learned of the disease, but no one has had much success. Between 1937 and 1965, scientists at Cornell University and the Boyce Thompson Institute grew, infected, and tested 21,000 seedlings. Only 16 survived, and many of those couldn’t pass along their genetic resistance. None made it to nurseries for distribution. That failure, among others, dampened the appetite to fund such costly, long-term research. “So many false hopes have been raised that there is apathy in some quarters about the outcome of our battle against this disease,” the author of a 1975 scientific paper on the subject wrote. But, he added, “surely it is worth the trouble.”

“Trouble” implies inconvenience and feels insufficient for the toils of restoring elms. By one estimate, only about 1 in 100,000 elms are truly tolerant to DED rather than simply lucky. But just what makes those survivor trees special remains a bit of a puzzle. Unlike the American chestnut, which was similarly ravaged by a blight, there isn’t a clear genetic marker that points to exactly what allows some elms to stave off DED more effectively than others. That makes gene editing moot and breeding the only option.  

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After earning his doctorate in forest genetics and plant breeding in 1969, Alden “Denny” Townsend found a job at the U.S. National Arboretum’s Agricultural Research Service in Ohio. The young scientist’s work spanned a range of species and projects, including an American elm program that had lain mostly dormant for years. The assignment came as DED rampaged, and pessimism about the species was nearly as pervasive. “American elms were dying everywhere,” said Townsend. “I thought there was hope.” 

Townsend, though, inherited something of a mess. His predecessors had, fortunately, planted around 70,000 American elms at the Ohio research station that had grown to 40 or 50 feet and were available for testing. But with no proper accounting of where the trees came from, Townsend started infecting them en masse to see what would happen. Slowly, he identified tolerant elms, then cloned or bred them to generate versions with even greater resistance. After more than two decades, he eventually ended up with one variant — dubbed “Valley Forge,” after George Washington’s Revolutionary War encampment — that was fit enough to send to nurseries. He identified another survivor along a road in Ohio that also proved exceptional and the arboretum eventually released it too, as New Harmony.

A conservation information manager for The Nature Conservancy injects a young elm with Dutch elm disease on May 19, 2026.
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Since those breeds went on sale in the late 1990s, others have joined the fray. The Jefferson elm, for instance, is essentially a copy of a tree that grows on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., which boasts one of the largest remaining stands of mature American elms in the country. But there are still only a handful of cultivars available, and they have quirks. Some, for instance, have weaker crotches and snap more easily during storms. “They are probably better suited in parks or country clubs or where there’s lots of land,” said Townsend. “If these trees do get Dutch elm disease, they’re gonna be a real hazard.” 

They have another drawback too: limited genetics. There simply aren’t enough reliably tolerant strains to provide the genetic diversity needed for the widespread floodplain repopulation that Goodwin envisions. “It’d be like starting a population over again with six individuals,” he said. But Townsend said previous efforts like his should be considered building blocks rather than failures. “Mistakes were made,” he acknowledged with a chuckle. But he’s optimistic that the funding and scientific rigor being applied to the problem this time around will drastically improve the odds. “I’m glad to hear the Forest Service is continuing to work on it,” he said. “Diversity is the key.”

Christian Marks started working at The Nature Conservancy in 2007 as an ecologist studying floodplains along the Connecticut River. He knew the dwindling ecosystems act as vital sponges when the water runs high, absorbing the torrent and preventing inundation downstream. The more he learned, the more he realized the peril these New England bulwarks were in. Because they rely on just a handful of species to function, the loss of even one could be devastating — and most of them are faltering.

Like Townsend, Marks thought elms stood the best chance of recovery, as long as their tolerance could be boosted. While he said the roughly 90 percent survival rate often seen among cultivars might look impressive, floodplain elms should ideally live for well over a century, during which they will probably be exposed to the DED pathogen repeatedly. “You have to be able to survive many times,” said Marks. That requires trees that survive closer to 97 out of 100 times, a standard that could mean the difference between a tree living 50 years or 150 years. “It’s a much more rigorous test,” Marks said.

An old-growth elm trees that survived Dutch Elm Disease grows in Castine, Maine, as seen in February 2022.
Tristan Spinski for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Ironically, earlier failures to stop DED were one reason Marks was confident he could do better. In the decades since Townsend’s work, millions more elms had died, making it far more likely that those left standing were actually DED-tolerant rather than lucky. “You need to have enough trees die for the ones with resistance to become apparent,” said Marks.  

But, although well-versed in floodplain elms, he had no experience breeding them and reached out to Jim Slavicek, a research biologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in Ohio. The latest federal elm project had started in 2003 and Slavicek had helped set up a handful of test sites across the Midwest. The two scientists went about trying to establish one in New England too.

The first thing they needed was more survivor trees, and Marks knew where to find them. Starting around 2010, he went around New England, clipping samples and sending them to Slavicek. One of the first he collected was the Rainbow Beach elm in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is over 3 feet in diameter and, he recalled, “magnificent.” Eventually they amassed enough cuttings to raise 53 elms, and the Forest Service began crossbreeding them. By 2018, their offspring were rising from soil at test sites in Ohio and Vermont. Within a decade the trees stood about 8 feet tall, then 12, and soon they were ready for testing. Although Marks recently left The Nature Conservancy, he remains invested in the results. “This is the playoffs,” he said. “What you’ve been preparing for.”

The Benson test site is surrounded by a 10-foot wire fence intended to keep the deer from making a buffet of the elms inside. Chris Hansen and John Butnor had parked their white Dodge Ram with U.S. Forest Service logos on the doors and government plates on the bumpers right outside the gate. It was early July, and the first time they’d come since helping with the inoculation in May. “This guy right here is completely gone. It’s not got a living branch,” Hansen, a researcher at the University of Vermont, said, standing beside a tree with shriveled brown leaves. Then he pointed to a perky green specimen. “This tree right next to it seemingly has nothing going on, which is pretty cool.”

Butnor, a plant physiologist with the Forest Service, checked the tag at the bottom. “Thirty-eight,” he announced, reading the survivor elm’s parent aloud. Goodwin joined him, and the trio walked among the saplings. Each time Butnor saw a healthy-looking tree, he excitedly called out the identity of its parent. Thirty-six. Twenty-five. Three. Another 38 — suggesting it may be a particularly strong donor. “You hear us throw around the words resistance and tolerance, and I think most of the time we should actually be saying tolerance,” said Hansen. “There’s plenty, as you’re seeing.” 

An initial accounting of the plot revealed a range of responses to injection, including about 800 trees that aren’t yet showing signs of DED. “It’s too early to make predictions about individual trees,” stressed Goodwin, who, along with his colleagues, will monitor the elms for another two years before deciding which of their parents are most suitable for planting in the new superseed orchard. From there it’ll take another 10 to 15 years before the new trees bear seed. So far, though, the results are promising.

A land management fellow with Thee Nature Conservancy walks down a row of young elms as she works to inoculate each one with Dutch elm disease on May 19, 2026.
Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Any campaign to make elms great again will, and should, run into limits. No one particularly wants to completely revive the species, which in some cities dominated the urban canopy. “One lesson we learned from Dutch elm disease devastating the urban tree canopy was not to plant a monoculture of trees,” said Doug Still, the arborist, citing the more recent plight of emerald ash as another example of why overreliance can be a problem. Today, urban planners tend to be much more restrained, said Ryan Murphy, the elm expert in Minneapolis. “Diversifying your tree population is a sort of a safeguard or hedging your bets against future pests or disease coming through,” he said. “We’ve learned the hard way.”

Some people ask whether the quest to save the American elm is worth decades of effort and millions of dollars in funding, especially when Asian elms are naturally much more tolerant to DED. But Hansen emphasized that such inquiries are rare, and come primarily from journalists and scientists, not the public, which is generally excited about the prospect. “Even people who aren’t necessarily interested in trees know that elm shape,” he said. Goodwin sees a philosophical element to the work too. “There’s kind of like a moral injury of extinction,” he said. “This is a way to try to repair that.” 

The price of not doing this work is evident on the hills surrounding the grove, which are spotted with dead and dying elms. Many look like they’re choking on epicormic shoots. “They’re probably not healthy,” said Hansen. Although no one has tested them, Dutch elm disease is likely the culprit. As he walked back toward the truck, he stopped in a patch of shade and looked up at least 50 feet into the canopy of a middle-aged elm. 

“It’s called the Benson tree,” he said. It’s imperfect — the limbs are haphazard and, as Butnor described them, “a little unruly.” But the vase-like shape is unmistakably an elm and, at somewhere between 50 and 100 years old, one that has long outlived its peers. Hansen isn’t sure if it’s a survivor or simply lucky. There’s a chance Dutch elm hasn’t reached it, though now that the field it abuts is infected, that probably won’t last.

Like the younger elms, the Benson tree awaits its fate. In the meantime, it stands watch over the scientists trying so hard to save its kind.

Correction: This story originally misstated the century in which Henry David Thoreau lived.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The deadly experiment that could save the American elm on Jul 23, 2026.

Tadej Pogačar is expected to ride to victory on the Champs-Élysées in Paris when the Tour de France ends Sunday. While his commanding performance has left little doubt about the outcome, the journey to the finale has been remarkable for another reason: climate change. 

The grueling 23-day trek through France has seen a barrage of emissions-driven extremes, from wildfires to blistering heat. It was so dry at one point that organizers banned TV crews from a French pastime, smoking. Pogačar even suggested that the race, which has almost always spanned late June and early July, no longer occur during the summer. 

“If I had the power,” he said, “I would change all the calendar and not race in July and August in hot places.” 

The trouble started earlier this month when wildfires threatened the Pyrénées-Orientales region during the third stage, as each day’s race is called. Organizers considered cancelling it, but decided it would continue. Still, they limited the caravan that typically follows it to essential vehicles. They also asked fans, a fixture along every route, to stay away from the last 27 miles of the day’s 121-mile race.

“We invite the public not to come to the edge of the race or to the finish site,” race director Christian Prudhomme told France TV. “With exceptional fires, exceptional measures on the Tour, the first thing is the protection of the people.”

The more persistent problem has been a record-breaking European heatwave. According to ProCyclingStats.com, the first two weeks of the Tour brought the highest average temperature of the past two decades: 87 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to 79 degrees in 2022. 

Paul Seixas and his teammates wear vests dotted with ice packs to cool down at the start of the ninth stage of the race. Ann-Christine Poujoulat / AFP via Getty Images

“I’ve never seen weather conditions this hot every single day,” said XDS-Astana Team sports director Yvon Ledanois. “It isn’t a case of having one extremely hot day and then returning to normal conditions the next.”

Enduring such heat for one race would be rough, but each of the 21 stages is effectively a race of its own. Competitors ride an average of about 100 miles daily for the better part of three weeks, and it isn’t unusual to see them maintain speeds around 30 mph for hours at a time. Much of the Tour crosses the Alps and Pyrenees, with treacherous climbs. Through it all, riders get just two days of rest.

That kind of prolonged exertion during extreme heat can be dangerous, even for athletes with the specialized training required to complete the Tour. Pogačar reported having a “full headache” at the start of Stage 4 as temperatures topped 100 degrees. Officials relaxed their rules around food and hydration, and one team said each of its riders was drinking around 28 bottles of water every day, which is several times the norm. Many also wore “ice vests” before the start of each day’s ride, and “ice socks” during it. Things got so bad that race organizers shortened one leg for the first time in Tour history when they cut 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from Stage 9. The government told regional officials they could cancel them entirely in the event of a red heatwave alert. 

Even when the sun went down, the respite was minimal. Temperatures didn’t ease much, and many European hotels do not have air conditioning. “When we have these high nighttime temperatures, the body isn’t able to recover sufficiently,” Kurt Shickman, who works on heat issues at the World Resources Institute, told Grist when asked about early July’s heatwave. “They’re going into the next hot day with a couple strikes against you from a health perspective.”  

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Recent research has shown these hazards are growing more frequent and intense. “My co-authors and I have been following the heat during this Tour with horror,” Ivana Cvijanovic, a climate scientist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development and the paper’s lead author, told TIME. “This summer is clearly extreme — there was simply no opportunity to be lucky as France and Spain have been under heat wave warnings for weeks.”

The brutal conditions have sparked a discussion about the Tour’s support from fossil fuel companies. French oil giant TotalEnergies sponsors a team and has signed a three-year deal to underwrite the race. Australian energy company Santos has long backed the Tour Down Under. While their funding helps finance riders and events, these companies are driving climate change, which threatens the viability of cycling and other sports, including the World Cup — where Saudi oil giant Aramco was a major advertiser. 

“It’s almost impossible to avoid becoming a billboard for them,” one anonymous rider told Cycling Weekly. “I’d go further and say that, concerning the climate crisis, and professional cycling’s addiction to sponsorship from oil companies, airlines, and car manufacturers, there is a rule of silence, as deeply rooted in cycling culture as the old omertà about doping.”

Whether and how the Tour adjusts to climate change remains to be seen. Pogačar’s suggestion that the race be held at a different time of year would upset the traditional order of the sport’s three grand tours. A number of other solutions have been proposed, including altering start times. But even small changes can be a big problem given the complex logistics and broadcast schedules involved. 

In the meantime, the Tour is racing toward its inevitably sweaty conclusion.

Correction: The average temperature for the first two weeks of the Tour de France has been changed. It was 87 degrees Fahrenheit, not 90 degrees F.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The year climate change came for the Tour de France on Jul 23, 2026.

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