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When Trish Leigey’s taps started running brown and foul in late 2019, she had an uneasy suspicion about what was tainting the once-clear mountain water. 

Tests later confirmed her hunch. Bovine DNA had infiltrated drinking water supplies in rural Loganton, Pennsylvania — contamination her lawyers linked to Nicholas Meat and its practice of spreading liquefied animal waste on nearby fields.

That may not have surprised many of Leigey’s neighbors. Most of them were well aware of the desiccated animal parts occasionally strewn across local roads. Not many gave a second thought to trucks spraying a cocktail of blood, urine, water, and other slaughterhouse refuse over local farmland. But few wanted to accuse the company of wrongdoing, given that it employs over 425 people — about as many people in all of Loganton — and by some estimates processes 10 percent of the state’s beef.

Leigey, a single mother who works three jobs, decided she had to speak up, for herself, her family, and her neighbors. “I just want a simple life,” she said. “I don’t feel like I should have to be emotionally, mentally, financially, and physically exhausted because some millionaire wants to dump blood on fields because it’s a cheap way to dispose of it. It’s not right.”

 A crew cleans slaughterhouse waste that spilled along a rural road in central Pennsylvania in 2021. Courtesy of Nidel & Nace P.L.L.C.

A jury agreed and in December held the company liable for causing a nuisance and trespassing on neighboring properties by fouling their air and water. Leigey and three others who joined her in suing Nicholas Meat were awarded $145,000, a surprising victory in a state where lenient right-to-farm laws make such cases difficult to win.

Still, the verdict is not expected to change how operations like Nicholas Meat do business. There’s no compelling reason for them to.

Nicholas Meat is much smaller than giants like Tyson Foods, but it’s a big player in central Pennsylvania. What started in 1987 as a family business handling a couple dozen cattle each day bloomed over the decades into one of the county’s largest private employers. It slaughters about 1,000 cattle each day, according to the lawsuit, and has been the biggest business in a town so small it doesn’t have a traffic light. That makes the case against Nicholas Meat more than a neighborhood dispute. It illustrates how the economic pressures of industrial meat production can push environmental risks onto surrounding communities.

Across the state, waste from slaughterhouses, farms, and the like is routinely spread on fields as fertilizer. Spreading these “food processing residuals,” as the mixture is known, is legal, lightly regulated, and cheaper than transporting and treating the waste elsewhere. At least 900 farms and food-processing operations across the state participate in it. Many farms are eager to receive the waste as a more affordable way of fertilizing fields. “There is a place for it, especially as a replacement for synthetic fertilizers,” said Michael Kovach, president of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union.

The problem is scale. A small butcher, like the one Kovach works with, might kill and package a few dozen animals a day. Slaughterhouses handling hundreds or thousands generate waste at an entirely different level. The lawsuit estimated that Nicholas Meat produces at least 200,000 gallons a day, with the capacity to store 1 million gallons on-site and another 4.3 million elsewhere. Aside from mixing and aerating the slop, there is no treatment before disposal — something the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, said is typical.

An aerial view of Nicholas Meats, as seen in 2005 and 2026, shows the operation’s growth. Google Earth / Grist @media screen and (max-width: 767px) { .topper .topper-headings::before{width:100%;} .juxtapose-wrapper { overflow:hidde, max-width:100%; } } .juxtapose { font-family: "Basis Grotesque Pro", sans-serif !important; margin-top: 1em; } .jx-knightlab { opacity: 0; } .jx-slider { color: #f0f0f0; } .jx-controller { border-radius: 9px; color: #e6ffa0; } .juxtapose-caption { margin-top: 0.5em; font-size: 0.95rem; color: #666; text-align: center; }

Nicholas Meat, which supplies supermarket chains like Giant and fast-food restaurants like Burger King, spreads and injects its waste on fields that Eugene Nicholas and his son, Doug, own or lease in Clinton County and across the county line in places like Antes Fort. Since the state considers it fertilizer, there is little oversight on how food processing residuals are applied.

“There’s nowhere that there’s a law or a regulation involved with the type of farming that we do,” Eugene Nicholas said during the trial. His son, Doug, now largely oversees the Loganton slaughterhouse. The Nicholases and their attorneys did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Pennsylvania does not require a permit to spread food processing residuals, which includes everything from potato skins and dairy waste to slaughterhouse remains. The practice is governed by guidelines published in 1994. They do little more than require farmers to outline details like how much could be used for various crops, and warn people not to dump it near waterways or drinking water sources. 

Regulators investigate complaints of unbearable odors or polluted runoff, but DEP records dating to 2013 show people near the slaughterhouse would often wait days for a response. “There is really no oversight by anyone except residents,” said Angela Harding, a Clinton County commissioner who represents the area. “We don’t necessarily know what the long-term ramifications of this process will be.”

The lawsuit states that Nicholas Meat began spraying its waste on fields after it reopened in 2010 after a fire. It estimated that it sprays 10 million to 13 million gallons of waste over “hundreds” of acres annually. Reports from a Clinton County Conservation District employee presented during the trial revealed that the company was “way over applying blood” to farmland and the practice was “continuous for 8-10 hours a day.” One farmer quoted in a report said he couldn’t drive a tractor on his fields because they were saturated with waste. Evidence presented during the trial showed the company sprayed on barren, wet, and even snowy fields, creating the risk of runoff that could pollute other locations.

Food processing residuals from Nicholas Meat’s slaughterhouse are applied to a field near Trish Leigey’s home in Loganton. This photo was used as evidence in her lawsuit against the processor. Courtesy of Nidel & Nace P.L.L.C.

Local geography and geology add to that danger, particularly for those who depend upon wells. Springs and sinkholes are common in central Pennsylvania, and the cracks and channels in the rocky soil make it easier for contaminants to flow into aquifers and wells, said Brandon Fleming, a groundwater specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey Pennsylvania Water Science Center. He was not involved in the trial.

A 2017 U.S. Geological Survey assessment of Clinton County groundwater, conducted to establish baseline conditions ahead of potential fracking, found that more than half of 54 private wells, including Leigey’s, contained fecal bacteria, including E. coli, which appeared in about 25 percent of them. The study did not determine the source of the contamination. But evidence and testimony presented at the trial revealed that Nicholas Meat knew sinkholes dotted the fields where it sprayed and injected waste. That bloody mixture would have flowed into them and could contaminate groundwater, a groundwater expert testified.

Bovine DNA from blood or tissue, along with human fecal markers, also were detected in water samples taken from three homes near disposal sites in Sugar Valley as part of the legal case against Nicholas. Such pollutants can cause gastrointestinal illnesses resembling food poisoning, including diarrhea and severe abdominal cramps.

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Meat processing waste can expose people to viruses, bacteria, parasites, and chemicals associated with health risks ranging from gastrointestinal illness to methemoglobinemia (sometimes called blue baby syndrome) and cancer. The threat can be compounded by cleaning agents and antimicrobial drugs often found in such refuse, said Christopher Heaney, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the trial.

Even exposure to airborne particles can cause or exacerbate respiratory problems like asthma, while persistent noxious odors — which Leanna Rockey, a retired nurse who sued the slaughterhouse alongside Leigey, described as “rotting flesh and blood” — can also lead to high blood pressure, stress, and other psychological impacts.

For those living near one of these sites, those impacts are part of daily life.

Leigey said her youngest daughter, Alaina, who is now 15, suffered debilitating headaches from the stench, something her neighbors described as often inescapable. It could get so bad that they’d seal themselves indoors despite the summer heat. Many neighbors stopped hanging their clothes out to dry years ago. For Rockey, it has meant investing in a water cooler and regularly hauling clothes to the laundromat so they aren’t stained by fouled water.

“We still don’t drink our water,” Rockey said. “I never dreamt in a million years my little piece of heaven would be turned into a dumping ground.”

The two-week trial lasted longer than most cases heard in Clinton County, which has just two judges. Craig P. Miller, who presided over the case, joked about Nicholas’ “team of 950 lawyers” from the high-powered firm of Fox Rothschild descending on the rural area. Leigey skipped work and her daughter missed school, and a handful of neighbors attended the trial to provide moral support. Much of the testimony focused on whether Nicholas Meat had a right to apply the waste. Jurors deliberated for several hours before returning a verdict that Nicholas’ attorneys appealed on May 5.

Even so, the victory may do little to change the underlying system. The $145,000 that jurors awarded will help cover what Leigey and her neighbors spent over the years on bottled water, laundromat visits, and new wells. But the jury did not award punitive damages, and nothing about the verdict requires the slaughterhouse to change how it operates despite the history of environmental violations revealed during the trial.

“There’s no disincentive for him to do this,” said Chris Nidel, Leigey’s lawyer. Based on the volume of waste produced, he estimated the company saves $4,500 an hour spreading it locally rather than hauling it to a wastewater facility. “They can make that money up in less than a week.”

This 2019 image of Trish Leigey’s tap water was introduced as evidence in a trial that found Nicholas Meat guilty of trespassing and creating a nuisance through the land application of slaughterhouse waste. Courtesy of Trish Leigey

But unless state regulators pursue an investigation or adopt new rules, accountability remains elusive. Cases like Leigey’s can be difficult to prove if defendants can create enough doubt by pointing to other possible sources of contamination — another farm, a leaky septic tank, or past agricultural use. These cases are usually “a catch-me-if-you-can situation,” said Dani Replogle, an attorney with Food & Water Watch who was not involved in the lawsuit.

The same pressures play out nationwide in a $161 billion beef industry built on processing vast numbers of animals at low cost to meet high demand. 

“The more animals you have in one location, the worse the environmental problems are going to be,” Replogle said. Stricter regulation is the only way to negate that, she said. “That is just not happening. There’s a really powerful lobby standing in the way of that.”

That pressure is reinforced locally. Nicholas Meat employs a significant share of the region’s population. Neighbors may be employees, relatives, or landowners connected to the operation, leaving communities tied to the facility responsible for the pollution. That leaves few people willing to complain.

Kovach, the president of the farmers’ union, believes the case reflects a broader shift in agriculture: Livestock production and processing have become concentrated in the hands of fewer, larger operators. “What we need is a lot fewer plants that can handle 600 to 1,000 [cattle] a day and more that can handle 100 a day,” he said.

Michael Kovach, president of the Pennsylvania Farmers Union and a small-scale farmer, takes a selfie with one of his young turkeys. Courtesy of Michael Kovach

Regardless of whether the industry makes that shift, state Representative Paul Friel said the rules need to change. He has introduced legislation to tighten oversight and hold polluters more accountable because some “bad actors” are turning “farm fields into unregulated landfills.”

“There has to be a distinction between normal farming practice and industrial waste disposal,” he said. “There’s not a path forward to manage this without legislation.”

In the months since Leigey won her civil suit, the air around her house has been crisp and fresh. The pungent smell of rotting flesh has waned, but that’s largely because Nicholas Meat is spreading its waste on other fields across the Sugar Valley of central Pennsylvania.

She spent around $10,000 having a deeper well dug in 2021, and although her water now runs clear, she worries how long it’ll stay that way. Her lawyer hopes the lawsuit might inspire others to take a stand and force the industry to change, but Leigey and her neighbors wonder whose well might be the next to run rank.

“Innocent people should not have to suffer for the greed of other people,” she said. “I’m still going to keep an eye on it. Sometimes bad habits are hard to break.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Blood in the well: One town’s fight against the slaughterhouse polluting it on Jun 4, 2026.

Nearly six years ago, during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, the president signed a piece of bipartisan legislation introduced to phase out the rampant use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are potent greenhouse gases commonly used in commercial cooling equipment in grocery stores and air-conditioning systems. 

At the time, he praised the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, created in line with an international agreement to tamp down widespread use of the “super pollutant,” as something that would benefit U.S. manufacturers working to produce alternative and less environmentally harmful refrigerants. The Environmental Protection Agency would then spend the next four years under former President Joe Biden working to implement a series of rules to help enforce the law, which set the goal of phasing out production and use of the pollutants by 85 percent by 2036.

Now, Trump has reversed his position. At a White House press conference last month, he announced the administration would be loosening two of the EPA’s refrigerant rules, delaying the deadline required for grocery stores and air-conditioning companies to begin reducing their use of hydrofluorocarbons, and exempting transport companies from repairing HFC leaks in refrigeration equipment. 

Flanked by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and a handful of the country’s biggest grocery chain executives, the president assailed both the rule and the very law he signed, promising Americans the move would have no environmental consequence and bring down supermarket bills. Trump estimated that U.S. businesses and families will save more than $2.4 billion under the new rule changes, while expressing his desire to get rid of the underlying law altogether.  

“Thanks to today’s reforms, the American people have lower grocery prices, cheaper transportation of goods, lower costs of air conditioning at no detriment to our country,” Trump said.

There’s just one problem — that’s just not true. Economists and former EPA officials say the rollbacks are more likely to raise prices than reduce them. Some industry groups warn the administration’s sudden turnabout would result in ramped up demand for equipment that use the most climate-damaging HFCs, which the sector had been steadily scaling back. Even Trump’s EPA has acknowledged in an internal assessment that the rule change could achieve the opposite of its stated goal — rather than lowering costs, the supply and demand dynamics it may create could elevate them. 

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“It just doesn’t add up. There’s just no plausible way in which relaxing these rules is going to generate any meaningful reduction in the costs of food people purchase,” said Chris Barrett, an economist at Cornell University. 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Dollar data, which is widely considered the best breakdown of costs that go into an American consumer’s grocery bill, food retail, transport, storage, and energy costs together amount to roughly 20 percent. But refrigerants, according to Barrett, are not a meaningful slice of that share. “We’re talking about a maximum reduction of a percentage point in your grocery bill,” said Barrett, who added it’s much more likely to amount to a fraction of a percentage point. “For a consumer who’s spending $200 a week on groceries, maybe it will save you a dollar or two, at the maximum.” 

HFCs are incredibly powerful greenhouse gases that are primarily used as cooling agents in everything from supermarket freezers to slushie machines. Commercial systems using HFCs are prone to leaking, too — the EPA has estimated that U.S. supermarkets alone leak an average of 25 percent of their refrigerants every year. Though the super pollutants don’t stick around in the atmosphere for too long, their global warming potential is hundreds to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

The 2020 law signed by Trump initiated a gradual phaseout of production and use of HFCs in alignment with an international deal known as the Kigali Amendment. The result of years of negotiation by parties to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone pollution, the Kigali Amendment aimed to prevent up to 0.5 degrees Celsius of added warming by the end of the century, which scientists warn will have enormous consequences for agriculture and the global food system. Though Trump did not send the deal to the Senate for approval during his first term, the U.S. formally ratified the amendment in 2022 under Biden. Inside Climate News reported that a recent EPA assessment estimated that loosening the national phaseout deadlines is likely to increase emissions by 68 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050.

Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration, suspects that Trump’s cost-savings messaging around the rollbacks are nothing more than a “gimmick” to appease disgruntled voters struggling with soaring inflation ahead of midterms. Part of what Trump and Zeldin are doing with these changes, he said, is “wanting to create some grocery-price theater.” 

The administration argues that alternative materials to high-global-warming-potential HFCs are not sufficiently available, making the deadlines set by the rules for the phaseout too aggressive and expensive for food companies — costs, they say, that will be passed down to consumers. But critics have countered that U.S. businesses have spent the last several years investing billions into new refrigerants, equipment, production lines, and staffing. Chemours and Honeywell have already developed alternative refrigerants sold domestically and worldwide. Groups like the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute and the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy have also denounced the idea that the market needs more time. 

“We heard that argument, I would say, three years ago,” said Goffman. “It’s almost, by definition, arbitrary for the Trump EPA to say, ‘We’ll come along and make these changes,’ as if the EPA hadn’t already received a lot of information and worked through these issues.”

While several major supermarket chains and grocery trade groups have spoken out in support of the rule changes, the administration’s claim that savings will flow through to grocery consumers remains unsubstantiated. As they stand, the EPA’s rule amendments carry no mandates for grocers to lower their prices, and it is unclear whether companies would voluntarily use any presumed savings from the rollbacks to lower their prices, rather than relieving pressure on their own bottom lines.

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Food prices are shaped by many dynamics, but the dominant forces are demand and supply. Over the last few decades, food demand has only continued to grow, fueled by rising global populations, higher incomes, and urbanization. Supply has struggled to keep pace, and food prices have been climbing steadily as a result, punctuated by sharp spikes from recent shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. 

But Barrett says the overwhelming persistent stressors behind steadily rising food inflation for most of the last six years has been extreme weather and climate-related shocks coupled with lagging productivity growth in food production. Americans are actively seeing this play out with skyrocketing beef prices nationwide, largely driven by persistent and prolonged droughts and heat waves that have decimated cattle herds and created severe supply shortages. “The evidence is very clear,” said Barrett. “Climate change is predictably driving the growth of supply down, and therefore driving prices up in due time.” 

By that logic, the administration’s rollback of the refrigerant rules, intended to mitigate planet-warming emissions, won’t, then, abate rising food inflation but stoke it.   

“So, if relaxing these rules aggravates climate change, and gives us more severe and more frequent episodes of extreme weather that hurts productivity in agriculture, we’re actually going to increase grocery prices down the road,” he said. “It just seems very hard to see how this administration is doing much to help relieve consumer food price inflation concerns.” 

“Who’s really benefiting from these empty promises?” he said. “We all need to start asking that question.” 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline No, rolling back these environmental rules won’t lower your grocery bill on Jun 4, 2026.

This chapter from r3.0's latest Seeds Series explores how societies can move beyond extractive economic systems by embracing systems thinking, place-based resilience and regenerative approaches to food, energy and community development.

Rising energy and fertiliser prices linked to the conflict in the Middle East are increasing the risk of global food insecurity, prompting renewed questions about how to strengthen food security and reduce dependence on fragile global supply chains.

This is a guest blog by Yu Sun Chin, Senior Regional Researcher at Zero Carbon Analytics (ZCA).  ZCA is an international research group that provides insights and analysis on climate change and the energy transition.

In the Philippines, families have been seeing their power bills rise over the past few months, especially since the Iran war. 

“When we got our energy bill after the Iran war broke out, we were very shocked. It was wow. It was a significant increase,” Jaime Quemado, who had just bought rooftop solar in Manila, said in a recent AP story about the price shocks. 

The Philippines already has one of the highest power prices in Asia, second only to Singapore, which is a much wealthier country. Low-income households can spend up to 10% of their annual income on electricity, making electricity affordability a big issue.

Imported fossil fuels are pushing up electricity bills

There are many reasons why the country’s power prices are so high, including inefficient coal plants, how expensive it is to transmit power over the country’s 7,600 islands, and the fact that the government doesn’t subsidise electricity costs for consumers, unlike in other Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. 

But a big reason is that the Philippines generates just over three-quarters of its electricity from burning coal and gas in power plants, and a lot of this fuel is imported from other countries.

Importing coal and gas is expensive, and becomes even more so when conflicts like the Iran war squeeze global supply and push up prices. Currently, LNG (liquefied natural gas, a gas cooled into liquid to travel long distances) prices in Asia are more than 70% higher than on February 27, the day before the Iran war began, and coal prices in Asia have risen around 20% over the same time period. A similar thing happened in 2022, when LNG prices hit historical highs in Asia after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Price of fossil fuels in Asia have increased since the war in Iran. Credit: Zero Carbon Analytics

As the fuels used for power get pricier, electricity becomes more expensive to produce, and increases in global coal, oil and gas prices are felt in consumers’ pockets – especially in countries that rely on imported fossil fuels for power. In the Philippines, households literally see an increasing “generation charge” in their monthly electricity bills, which refers to how much it costs to produce electricity. 

Poorer families will be hit hardest by rising energy prices – research shows that poorer Filipinos will lose a higher percentage of their income from energy price shocks than richer Filipinos, because, in addition to paying more for fuel and power, rising energy prices also raise food prices.

But the Philippines isn’t the only country that imports a lot of fossil fuels. Many countries across the world meet the majority of their energy needs with fossil fuel imports, including Japan, Korea, Türkiye and Germany, according to think tank Ember. 

Other countries in South and Southeast Asia, like Thailand and Pakistan, import substantial amounts of gas, which they use to generate power. Thailand relies on gas to generate about two-thirds of its electricity, and Pakistan relies on it for around one-third. As a result, power bills are also going up in many of these countries, including Türkiye and Pakistan.   

Governments in Asia are rushing to get renewables online

These high electricity bills aren’t inevitable – they are a result of power systems that are built to rely on turbulent fossil fuel markets. A system that uses renewable energy sources, like wind or solar PV, can help lower power prices. Once they are up and running, wind and solar power don’t require fuel – apart from sun and wind, which are free – so there are no fuel costs to fluctuate. Solar can produce stable power for up to 30 years.

Research has shown that it is already cheaper to produce electricity from solar than from gas in the Philippines. The same is true in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, like Vietnam and Malaysia. 

In the Philippines, the government is taking note and rushing solar power online. On March 30, the government said it had activated 250 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity – equivalent to 8% of the county’s 2024 solar capacity – and 450 megawatt-hour (MWh) of battery storage. It has also said it would fast-track the completion of 22 power projects to bring an additional 1.47 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy and storage online by the end of April. 

Many are turning to solar panels to generate electricity as they are cheaper than oil and gas. Image credit: ulleo, Pixabay

Filipino homeowners are also hurrying to install solar panels, with rooftop solar becoming increasingly popular. A survey of 20 local solar companies saw a 70% rise in weekly installations and a six-fold increase in customer inquiries since the Iran war began, according to the AP.

Thailand is also seeing a surge in inquiries about installing new solar since the start of the Iran war, according to media reports. In April, the Thai government also approved THB 5 billion (about USD 156 million) in loans for people to install rooftop solar and buy EVs.

In fact, our recent research found that 15 Asian countries have announced clean energy measures in response to the Iran war.

Many asian countries have announced clean energy measures in response to the war in Iran. Credit: Zero Carbon Analytics

More renewable energy is good for energy bills and the planet

All of this new solar is good news for consumers’ pockets. If the Philippines continues to expand solar and use it to replace imported coal and gas in the power mix, it will help to lower electricity bills. The same is true for Thailand – we calculated that Thai households with solar could have saved 77% on their power bills compared to households without solar in 2024, saving an average THB 8340 (about USD 260).

New solar is also good news for the planet. More renewable energy means fewer emissions from coal and gas plants, which will help to slow global warming and lessen the chances of climate impacts and extreme weather. This is especially important in Southeast Asia, which is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate disasters. 

The Iran war has reminded us that imported coal and gas are an expensive and risky way to generate power, just four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed the same. Choosing to replace fossil fuel generation with renewable energy will help to protect families from paying the price of such global crises.

 

The post Out of pocket: The real cost of importing fossil fuels on electricity bills appeared first on 350.

The biggest data centre in Australia will be built in its only 100 pct net renewables grid. And it could have a major impact, including eliminating negative demand.

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State commits nearly $18 million to the establishment of collection, transport and processing pathways for end-of-life solar panels and batteries.

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In an exclusive interview, Tesla Energy's Asia Pacific boss Josef Tadich discusses energy abundance (read solar), the role of batteries big and small, hybrids, the EV surge and the arrival of V2G.

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Critical policies that could unlock funding for cycling and pedestrian infrastructure across America have cleared the first hurdle in Congress — and the advocates who fought for them are launching a national nonprofit to promote a model that they hope can get the bill across the finish line and achieve similar wins.

Last month, advocates for the bipartisan Sarah Debbink Langenkamp Safety Act celebrated after legislators folded several key provisions of the bill into the House’s latest major transportation law, the BUILD America 250 Act.

That bill passed out of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on May 22, and will now make its way through a months-long legislative gauntlet known as the federal “reauthorization” process. If the Langenkamp provisions survive those negotiations on Capitol Hill, though, they will explicitly encourage communities across America to spend their guaranteed Highway Safety Improvement Program dollars on filling gaps in their active transportation networks for the first time.

Even better, these provisions will allow communities to fortify their bike lanes and greenways with federal money alone. In years past, the same process required an onerous local match that many governments pointed to as an excuse to neglect people outside of cars in their HSIP plans.

“There is tremendous bipartisan support in the country for making our roadways far more pedestrian and cyclist friendly,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), who introduced the legislation, in an interview with Streetsblog. “And this is especially true at a time of soaring gasoline prices. The pressure has been on for us to make sure that our tax dollars go to help people who are using every conceivable kind of transportation — including walking and bicycling.”

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They might sound wonky, but the measures outlined in the Langenkamp Act have topped many advocates’ policy wishlists for years. Proponents say they could unlock millions of dollars and catalyze countless active transportation projects that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

But they’ve been particularly urgent since the 2022 death of the mother, diplomat and cycling advocate for whom the bill is named — and the advocacy rides her family have organized in her memory every year since.

Known as the Ride For Your Life, these rolling protests have flooded D.C. streets with thousands of cyclists who turned out to demonstrate their support for Langenkamp’s namesake law and other measures to end traffic violence.

Langenkamp’s family recently established a nonprofit that will fight for similar legislation across the country. With each campaign, they’ll organize similar advocacy rides, which the family described as the cornerstone of their efforts. Raskin said these rides were essential to “mobilize focus and attention” around his legislation.

“People keep getting killed on our roads, and almost everywhere that happens, there’s a huge community of people who want to do something about it,” said Dan Langenkamp, Sarah’s husband. “I hope that we can work with those people to help channel their grief and anger into advocacy.”

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Of course, Ride For Your Life isn’t the first or only organization to adopt the humble group ride as a tool for policy change.

Cyclists who participated in Amsterdam’s Stop De Kindermoord protests in the 70s, for instance, helped transform the Netherlands into the biking capital of the world by laying down alongside their bikes in the street — long before the word “die-in” was common parlance.

More recently, the Magnus White Cycling Safety Act gained significant momentum after the Ride for Magnus: Ride For Your Life turned out more than 4,300 cyclists across 48 states. The provisions of that bill, which would require new cars to carry automatic braking systems capable of detecting cyclists and pedestrians, also appear in the current draft of BUILD America 250.

But Langenkamp says that other bike advocates still struggle to identify the kind of hyper-specific demands that could truly save lives on the road — or to meaningfully engage the powerful people who can fulfill those demands. And even well-intentioned organizes sometimes struggle to successfully tie “awareness” rides to their cause, he said.

With support from an organization that’s done all three, though, he hopes Ride for Your Life can help organizers conduct advocacy rides with real impact — and pass laws with real teeth.

“What we’re trying to do is affect real change on the ground by pairing our rides with legislation or policy asks,” Langenkamp stressed. “We bring in not only the families or people impacted by traffic violence, but also sympathetic legislators, the general public, and advocates to this effort. It actually works in getting things done.”

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Both Langenkamp and Rep. Raskin acknowledged that their bill alone won’t end the epidemic of cyclist deaths in America, and that group rides alone aren’t always enough to get good legislation off the ground. Even with much of the Langenkamp act included, the larger bill to which their legislation belongs drastically overfunds highways at the expense of other modes, and it will take all kinds of organizing to change that, including flipping seats in Congress itself.

“That’s really what elections need to be about,” added Raskin. “We need to have a rigorous public conversation about whether or not we are doing enough to invest in our transportation infrastructure in a way that benefits everybody in the country — and not just motorists.”

With Ride For Your Life events planned in Madison, Boston, and D.C. this autumn, Langenkamp hopes his group will continually refine their recipe for demanding change through more rides and smart organizing — and, in the process, potentially create a powerful new community of advocates on wheels.

“We all know that there are more than 100 people killed a day on U.S. roads — and it’s not just cyclists and pedestrians, it’s everybody,” said Langenkamp. “There’s no reason why there should not be more people interested in this subject … I think that we can actually help change the narrative and make this a higher priority issue, if we organize better.”

Construction of the LTESA-winning battery is set to start this year after the federal government gave the project the environmental green light.

The post Contested big battery with up to 10 hours of storage gets final green light appeared first on Renew Economy.

• A chemical in tires that’s already known to kill spawning salmon when it runs off into rivers may be harmful to humans as well, according to Yale researchers. (E360)
• If the future of transportation is privately owned autonomous vehicles and not fleets of robotaxis, traffic could grind to a complete halt. (City Lab; paywall)
• Buses and trains are a cheaper and more efficient way to move people around than cars, but transit agencies need to figure out how to compete with the fact that a car can take you exactly where you want to go. (Pedestrian Observations)
• The Vision Zero Network recommends addressing inequities in traffic stops by focusing on serious, potentially deadly offenses like speeding and drunk driving, rather than minor equipment infractions like broken taillights.
• Drivers kill thousands of people a year in places like parking lots and driveways that don’t count as roads. (Jalopnik)
• Uber is capping the amount of money employees can spend on AI after the company blew through its AI budget for the year in four months (Tech Crunch), but insists that announcement of layoffs is unrelated (CNBC).
• Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson proposed increasing bus frequency by doubling a 0.15 percent sales tax for King County Transit. (The Urbanist)
• The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority delayed the unveiling of new train cars, and it’s unclear whether they’ll be ready in time for the World Cup. (11 Alive)
• The redevelopment of Baltimore’s Penn Station is on hold. (Banner)
• Pittsburgh transit advocates rallied in the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg demanding more funding for paratransit to help disabled residents. (WTAE)
• Contrary to the advice of experts like Donald Shoup, Cleveland is lowering the cost of on-street parking. (19 News)
• Drivers keep blocking an East Nashville bike lane. (WKRN)
• The head of Milwaukee County’s government authorized deputies to impound vehicles for owners’ reckless driving. (Urban Milwaukee)
• A California authority signed a contract to electrify 119 miles of high-speed rail. (Railway Age)
• Honolulu’s bikeshare is down to less than 500 bikes from 1,300, partly due to vandalism. (Civil Beat)
• Seattle train service was disrupted when a 70-year-old driver followed her car’s GPS onto elevated tracks. (KIRO)
• Santa Clara prosecutors issued a warrant for 49ers star Brandon Aiyuk’s arrest after he posted a video of himself speeding. (ESPN)
• Bogota, which has the largest bus rapid transit system in the world, is finally getting its metro. (High Speed)
• The UK nationalized the country’s largest private passenger train operator. (LBC)
• London cyclists are being forced to swerve around a billboard in the middle of a new bike path. (Telegraph)

China’s carbon emissions bounced back up in early 2026 as “inflexible” grid management caused the country to waste vast quantities of clean power and burn more fossil fuels instead, new analysis shows.

After recording a first full-year decline in 2025, China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy and industry grew by 2% in the first quarter of 2026, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief.

China burned more coal and gas to generate electricity than in the same period a year earlier, despite building record wind and solar capacity. Instead of being integrated into the network and used, clean power equivalent to more than France’s entire electricity output for the quarter was discarded.

Coal power plants protected

Lauri Myllyvirta, CREA’s lead analyst, said the paradox was primarily caused by China’s inflexible operation of coal and gas power plants, which supply electricity through long-term contracts that remove any incentive to reduce output when cheaper solar and wind power is available.

Electricity trading between Chinese provinces, also based on annual contracts, prevents surplus renewable energy from flowing to other areas in real time, the analysis found.

Santa Marta process can confront trade protection for fossil fuels, experts say

Myllyvirta said all operators should be required to sell electricity in real time so that coal power plants would face competition from very low prices during hours of strong renewables output and have an economic incentive to cut down generation. “But that has not made a lot of progress in China,” he added.

Curtailment rates rising

The intentional reduction of renewable energy generation, a process known as curtailment, saw a significant increase in China at the start of 2026, reaching 9.2% for solar and 8.5% for wind respectively, according to Bloomberg.

Myllyvirta noted that real curtailment rates are likely to be even higher than those reported in official statistics. He added that, until tracking improves, there won’t be enough political pressure to fix the issue.

The findings highlight Beijing’s failure to make full use of its record renewables build-out to accelerate the country’s transition away from fossil fuels.

If curtailments had not risen, increased capacity means wind and solar could have generated an extra 170 terawatt hours of electricity (TWh) in the first quarter, more than satisfying the growth in power demand, CREA’s analysis found. But, instead, clean power generation rose by just 60 TWh, with wind showing almost no growth.

Electricity generation from solar (left) and wind power (right) in China, terawatt hours per 12-month period. Red: Electricity actually fed into the grid. Yellow: Generation before reported levels of “curtailment”, where some electricity is discarded due to grid congestion. Blue: Generation if the rate of curtailment had stayed constant. Source: China Electricity Council monthly data on installed capacity and utilisation; National New Energy Consumption Monitoring and Early Warning Center data on curtailment Electricity generation from solar (left) and wind power (right) in China, terawatt hours per 12-month period. Red: Electricity actually fed into the grid. Yellow: Generation before reported levels of “curtailment”, where some electricity is discarded due to grid congestion. Blue: Generation if the rate of curtailment had stayed constant. Source: China Electricity Council monthly data on installed capacity and utilisation; National New Energy Consumption Monitoring and Early Warning Center data on curtailment Global problem

China is not alone in under-utilising its full renewable energy potential. Curtailments have risen in countries including the UK, Australia, India, Chile and Brazil, primarily as a result of bottlenecks in national transmission systems unable to accommodate additional clean power output.

After failing to keep up with the installation of renewable generation capacity, annual investments in updating grids need to increase by around 50% by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. The watchdog said that, if power networks fail to prevent high levels of curtailments, clean energy operators risk facing significant revenue losses, threatening the investment case for renewables.

One of South America’s largest clean power generators said on Wednesday that it was putting plans for $1 billion in new renewables investment in Brazil on hold as the country’s grid operator rejected up to 25% of the power its existing projects could produce, Reuters reported.

The post China’s carbon emissions rise again as more clean power is wasted appeared first on Climate Home News.

Snowy has commissioned a report saying how important its Snowy 2.0 project is for the grid. Actually, we just want to know the size of the bill.

The post Snowy preps market for very big blowout in Snowy 2.0 costs, with response to a question no one is asking appeared first on Renew Economy.

Price floors and supply management programs seem common sense to policymakers when it comes to oil and minerals, but what about US farmers and our overall food system? By: Patti Naylor, FFD president, George Naylor, FFD board member, and Laurel … Continue reading →

Claims that climate scientists have abandoned their most dire scenario have been widely misunderstood. While the highest emissions pathway is now considered unlikely, evidence suggests the climate system may still be tracking toward dangerously high levels of warming.

by David Spratt, first published at Pearls&Irritations

Figure 1: RCPs and SSPsOccasionally, climate science is big news. On 26 May, the New York Times headlined: “Why scientists retired the dire climate scenario used for over a decade”. A good story!

The Australian, true to form, went with “Climate doomsday scenarios just got a major rewrite”, and in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post it was  “The climate apocalypse? Don’t count on it”. There were a host of similar headlines.

Climate deniers and Donald Trump used an old playbook to claim scientific fraud (surprise!), but were called out, with ‘Trump twisted a climate debate beyond recognition’ and ‘Factcheck: Trump’s false claims about the IPCC and ‘RCP8.5’ climate scenario’.

So what’s the real story? Did scientists get it wrong, and is warming now likely to be less severe than previously thought?

As in engineering and business and government, scenarios are used by climate scientists to think about plausible alternative futures and their risks. The commonly-used climate scenarios are based on different possible trajectories for human greenhouse gas emissions and the social path humanity takes, and the consequences. And remember, scenarios in the end are simply a product of the minds that imagined them.

Fifteen years ago, four scenarios called representative concentration pathways (RCPs) were developed for the fifth IPCC assessment report in 2014, with RCP2.6 the lowest and RCP8.5 the highest. The numbers are radiative forcing (RF) values in 2100 for each scenario, where RF is the difference between the incoming radiation energy and the outgoing radiation energy in a given climate system, which is an indicator of total expected warming.

In conventional climate science terms, each one unit of RF (in watts per square metre) would in the long run be expected to result in around 0.75°C of warming. This relationship between change in radiative forcing and change in temperature is known as climate sensitivity.

RCP8.5 was sometimes called a ‘business as usual’ scenario, but this was a misnomer, and it was based on an assumption of little or no curbing of  greenhouse gases. Modellers estimated it would result in the end of warming of 5 to 6°C, with a range of 3.0 to 12.6°C.

The sixth IPCC report in 2022 focused on a modified system called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), where the scenarios more explicitly considered social, economic, and technological trends. The SSPs were again expressed as RF values. Figure 1 illustrates both the RCP and SSP scenarios as they relate to total emissions.

Now, in preparation for the modelling project for the next IPCC report due in 2029, known as ScenarioMIP,  scientists have suggested that the highest, ‘worse-case’ RCP8.5 scenario be dropped, because emissions were tracking more in line with one of the middle scenarios, RCP4.5. Hence all those headlines.

So, the ‘worse-case’ global warming case is no longer realistic. Big sighs of relief!

Not so quick. The big question in the end is not the amount of emissions but how hot it gets: the temperature. The focus on emissions in RCPs/SSPs is a bit to one side.

And on the future temperature, here’s the bomb. In a recent post, Ryan Katz-Rosene showed CERES data where the effective radiative forcing (ERF) at the moment is tracking above RCP8.5:

Effective radiative forcing and SSP scenarios.

 CERES is a NASA project that uses satellite and other data to measure the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth and the amount of infrared energy emitted to space. As Katz says “current forcing observations from CERES really do appear to show a high current ERF value, which (at least at this point in time) does seem to be above the mean ERF expected in RCP8.5.”

[Technically, RF measures the immediate change in energy balance at the top of the atmosphere due to an external driver, while ERF accounts for adjustments in temperature and other factors after the initial change. ERF gives a more comprehensive understanding of the climate response to these changes.]

With the actual radiative forcing higher than the worst-case scenario, all those headlines about things getting better look like a lot of hot air.

So how can actual and future warming, indicated by RF, be tracking the worst case when the emissions trajectory is a middle-of-the-road scenario? The RCP/SSP scenarios were built around greenhouse gas emissions, not around the full suite of forcings and climate feedbacks that determine what the climate system actually does in terms of heating.

The assumptions about the relationship between emissions and temperatures have been too conservative. For example, what is not getting said is that the best estimate of the climate sensitivity has been rising, with perhaps the world’s most eminent climate scientist, Jim Hansen, taking it beyond the IPCC upper-range estimate. In fact, even the current range of modelling, known as CMIP6, produces a higher climate sensitivity than previously thought.

Other factors include reduced aerosol masking, ice-reflection loss, the release of permafrost carbon, and weakening ocean sinks that are not adequately captured by the IPCC or in model assumptions about future warming. Yet they’re showing up in the real-world numbers right now.

What is happening is way beyond IPCC projections. The rate of warming has accelerated by half over the last two decades, driven by reduced aerosols emissions and diminishing cloud cover. Warming has reached 1.5°C, and with an approaching strong El Nino, 2026-27 is likely to be around 1.7°C. Earth’s Energy Imbalance, an indicator of future warming, has doubled in the last 15 years and continues to increase, suggesting a warming trend of 2°C by 2040 is likely. Even global warming of 1°C, a threshold already passed, risks triggering some tipping points. At 1.5°C, six out of 10 studied climate subsystems already show large-scale abrupt shifts across multiple models.

Katz says: “We have such large uncertainty by end of century on climate sensitivity and carbon feedbacks, such that we can’t preclude mean warming of up to 4°C by 2100 even if we successfully pursue an emissions pathway resembling that in RCP4.5. So, again, if sensitivity or carbon feedbacks are not in our favour, there are plenty of scientific findings based on RCP8.5 which could turn out to be right on the mark in meteorological terms later this century, despite being way off on anthropogenic fossil emissions assumptions.”

Any reputable climate scientist over a drink at the bar will tell you that by far the majority of the human population would likely not survive 4°C. And that sounds like a worst case to me.

Birmingham researchers’ novel way of producing hydrogen fuel has a lower cost than existing methods.

In mid-April 2026, Super Typhoon Sinlaku churned across the North Pacific Ocean and brought heavy rain and flooding to the Mariana Islands. 

From late May into early June 2026, a broad, slow-spinning storm churned north-northwest over the Philippine Sea toward southern Japan. 

On Facebook, western Victoria is nothing but a hotbed of anti-renewables activism, but there are new efforts to unite farmers and developers to a single cause.

The post From wool, to cropping, to solar: How renewable energy can “grow the agricultural pie” appeared first on Renew Economy.

Plans to build a massive new big battery with up to four hours of storage has secured development approval from state government authorities.

The post Huge gigawatt-scale, four-hour battery secures state development approval for coal country appeared first on Renew Economy.