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California has spent nearly two decades relying on taxpayers to finance its high-speed rail project. Now it’s looking to private investors.

Whether any step up remains an open question.

The search for private money was always part of the plan. When Californians approved a bond measure to fund the project in 2008, they pictured a system to rival the best in the world. Sleek trains would whisk riders between San Francisco and Los Angeles in just 2 hours and 40 minutes. Using renewable energy would cut emissions by up to 3 million metric tons annually. Voters were willing to put up $10 billion to make this dream a reality.

Everyone knew that wouldn’t be enough.

The bond was never meant to cover the entire cost. State officials envisioned the federal government and private sector contributing equally toward the projected $45 billion budget. But Washington’s support ebbed and flowed with each president. After years of legal battles with the Trump administration, the state said “the federal government is not a reliable, constructive, or trustworthy partner” in advancing the project. Private capital, meanwhile, has largely remained on the sidelines. 

That may soon change. The California High-Speed Rail Authority recently announced a $25 million agreement with a consortium of companies that will explore ways to advance the project. Over the next six months, it will develop funding strategies to expand the project beyond the state’s Central Valley, potentially into San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

“This agreement reflects growing market confidence in that strategy and the long-term potential of California high-speed rail as a transformative investment in California’s future,” Ian Choudri, the agency’s CEO, said in a news release. Choudri said the agency has spent the past year taking steps to “reposition” the project around “a more commercially focused and delivery-oriented strategy.”

Most of the construction is focused in the Central Valley, where the first phase will connect the cities of Merced and Bakersfield. The rail authority chose to start there because it offered the quickest and cheapest path to getting trains running. It is also an opportunity to bring a state-of-the-art transportation system to a region long overlooked by the state. Crews have completed dozens of bridges and viaducts and laid almost 90 miles of guideway. Their efforts will soon shift to laying track.

Linking San Francisco and Los Angeles is expected to cost $126 billion, with service slated to begin in 2040. Even the first phase alone will likely require tens of billions of dollars. Last year, the state committed $1 billion annually to finance the project through 2045. 

Read Next Billions spent, miles to go: The story of California’s failure to build high-speed rail Benton Graham

Genevieve Giuliano, a professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Southern California, said the rail authority’s announcement doesn’t mean an influx of private capital is imminent. It is simply an agreement to explore how that might happen. “Until I see something that says, ‘Company X is going to put up $10 billion under the following conditions,’ I don’t see that as we’re getting private money in here,” she said.

She also doesn’t see the private sector taking on any risk until it has a guaranteed revenue stream and is confident the project will be profitable. 

Others see opportunities for private investment, but not necessarily in financing the railway.

“I do not believe there will be any at-risk private investment in expanding the system,” said Lou Thompson, who chaired the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group from 2012 until 2024. 

Instead, he sees investors finding opportunities in merchandising, such as T-shirts, caps, and model trains, and residential and business development around stations. The rail authority sees that potential, too. It could allow cable companies to install fiber optic lines alongside tracks, for example, or produce surplus energy for utilities. The agency expects to have an agreement in place with power companies later this year to consider opportunities.

Whether those opportunities lead to significant investments remains uncertain. But establishing a business consortium to find out shows California is willing to get creative, said transportation expert Joe Schwieterman.

“They’re not settling for a go-slow approach that pushes key decisions off to the next generation,” said Schwieterman, who leads the Sustainable Urban Development Project at DePaul University. He conceded that “there’s still gigantic financial hurdles ahead,” not the least of which is that the funding needed to finish the project “has yet to be identified.”

Andy Kunz sees reason for optimism. He sees private capital helping the rail system reach the more profitable cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. “Having private sector groups show up just gives us more confidence that it’ll be done more quickly,” said Kunz, head of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association. That’s important, given the meager federal support the project has. 

“Because our public sector is not really leading the charge, this is really exciting,” he said. “We now have a private sector group stepping in to help get these first couple of projects going.”

Choudri has been pursuing that exact strategy since taking the helm at the California High-Speed Rail Authority in 2024. He told Grist the timing is right, given the state’s promise of annual funding and the project now owns all of the land needed to complete the first 119 miles.

“We need to turn this project into a business,” he said. “We need to build this corridor having rail as primary service, but then use it for other economic development and growth in order for us to be self-sustainable.”

Correction – An earlier version of this story misstated the initial projected budget for the project and the amount of guideway that has been laid.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Next stop for California’s high-speed rail: Finding private investors on Jul 28, 2026.

David Matthews shares his pick of the best books upcoming and hot off the press – perfect for holiday and sunny day reads

The post Book previews: summer 2026 appeared first on Red Pepper.

Heatwaves and climate disasters are exposing Europe’s infrastructure crisis, requiring a massive ramp-up in investment. Policymakers are turning to private finance to fill the gap, believing that only small amounts of public resources will be necessary to unleash the capital needed. But this approach entrenches the interests of private capital at the expense of citizens while limiting the influence of the state. Instead, what Europe needs is an evidence-based, state-led infrastructure strategy.

In October 2024, torrential downpours hit Valencia, leading to catastrophic floods with devastating consequences, destroying homes and businesses, wrecking roads and rail lines, and submerging cars. The event was a human tragedy, in which hundreds of people lost their lives, and many others lost their livelihoods. It also revealed a painful truth: Europe’s infrastructure is not fit for the changing climate. The floods caused total direct damages of over 18 billion euros. To put this into context: Spain’s annual infrastructure investment deficit (that is, the difference between current and needed spending) is estimated to be around 19 billion euros per year. This means that a single storm caused damage equivalent to around one year of Spain’s infrastructure investment gap. 

The problem goes beyond climate adaptation. Across Europe, countries are struggling to maintain deteriorating infrastructure and build new projects. Recent high-profile failures, such as the collapse of the Carola Bridge in Dresden in September 2024, should make this crisis impossible to ignore. The bridge collapsed due to corrosion and material fatigue, yet renovations were only scheduled for the following year.  

Governments are also struggling to find money for renovating and building schools, hospitals, and electricity grids.  

Everyone appears to agree on the need for more infrastructure investment, but the prevailing question is: who is going to pay for it? In answering this question, policymakers are falling for the private finance myth: the idea that the market will finance our essential public services. 

This is happening at EU and national levels alike. The Competitiveness Fund proposed by the European Commission as part of the next EU budget, for example, specifically aims to attract private investment, including for infrastructure projects. Similarly, the Germany Fund launched by Berlin in early 2026 aims to mobilise 130 billion euros in private investment for a major expansion of public infrastructure and defence capabilities.  

At first glance, this strategy may sound effective. If the private sector shoulders the bulk of Europe’s infrastructure investment, public resources can be allocated to other essential needs, such as social welfare and education. However, contrary to what policymakers would have us believe, private finance does not come for free. 

Socialising risks, privatising profits 

Private investors expect returns commensurate with the risk they take. When it comes to infrastructure, these returns must come either from the people who use that infrastructure (through energy bills or road tolls, for instance) or from public contracts and subsidies. Whether the upfront investment for the project is financed by the public or private sector, it is always eventually paid for by some combination of billpayers and taxpayers. 

Moreover, many socially beneficial infrastructure projects require huge upfront investment without necessarily delivering high profits. For example, a new metro line requires billions in upfront construction costs, takes decades before it generates any return, and in most European cities never turns a profit at all.  

To get private actors to invest, governments therefore need to provide incentives. This is called derisking. Through deregulation or by providing public funds, for example in the form of a guarantee, public authorities aim to adjust the risk-return profile of investments. The German federal government, for example, is backing the Germany Fund with public funding and guarantees totalling around 30 billion euros. The problem with derisking is that it is often done today without any meaningful conditions in place, as also pointed out by former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta. This leads to socialising the risks while privatising the profits: if an infrastructure project is successful, the private sector collects the profits; if it fails, the public shoulders the costs. 

The Castor underground gas storage plant in Spain is a prime example of derisking gone wrong. The project, built off the Mediterranean coast by the privately owned company Escal UGS, had to be shut down in 2013, before it even entered commercial operations, because it triggered hundreds of earthquakes along the coast of Valencia and in Catalonia’s Ebro Delta. Even though the company was to blame, the Spanish government had to compensate it with a 1.35 billion-euro package. This is because public authorities had derisked the investment, agreeing that the state would compensate shareholders in the event of a shutdown, even if the shutdown was due to negligence or deceit traceable to Escal UGS. The Castor gas project is just one of many in which citizens bear the costs, while private investors are shielded. 

There is no straightforward economic evidence that private finance is better for taxpayers or billpayers. If infrastructure projects can generate revenues for private companies, they can also do so for the public.

Private finance won’t save us  

It is arguably true that some amount of private finance is useful for Europe’s infrastructure investment needs. The problem with the private finance myth is that it claims private finance should be the default option, ignoring its shortcomings and the potential benefits of public or alternative models. 

Our recent research at the New Economics Foundation shows that there is no straightforward economic evidence that private finance is better for taxpayers or billpayers. If infrastructure projects can generate revenues for private companies, they can also do so for the public. Instead of bearing the costs that come with subsidising a privately owned project, by retaining full ownership of the project, the public could ultimately see a long-term fiscal return. The remunicipalisation of Hamburg’s electricity grid is one such example. In 2024, it generated profits of around 109 million euros for the city. 

In terms of cost efficiency, consumer prices, employment conditions, and service delivery, private ownership is often not the better choice. Privatisation has been linked to higher electricity prices, increased job precarity and cuts in the postal industry, and decreased preparedness for the Covid-19 pandemic in hospitals across Europe. While investors profit, workers and citizens bear the costs. 

Private capital, by its very nature, allocates funds to areas where returns are highest, rather than where need is greatest. 

There are at least four structural factors which can explain why the private sector generally charges higher bills, while investing less in job and service provision. 

First, the cost of capital for the private sector is generally much higher. Most EU governments currently borrow at 3.5-5 per cent on a 30-year bond. Private infrastructure funds, by contrast, typically target returns of 12-16 per cent or more. This determines what equity investors demand when committing capital to a project, and what users or taxpayers ultimately have to cover through bills or public subsidies. 

Second, incentive structures differ. Private firms are motivated by profit, whereas public authorities typically pursue broader social objectives, like income redistribution or public health. The Corporate Europe Observatory, for example, found that the privatisation of healthcare across Europe has led private providers to “cherry pick” lower-risk and higher-paying patients over higher-risk and lower-income patients. 

Third, many infrastructure sectors, such as water or electricity grids, are natural monopolies. A natural monopoly exists where a single provider can supply the entire market at a lower cost than any combination of competing firms, typically due to high fixed costs and significant economies of scale. A report by Common Wealth on the UK’s major electricity and gas distribution networks, for example, revealed that, amid the cost-of-living crisis, companies were able to exploit their natural monopolies, paying dividends to shareholders totalling between 2.4 and 3.6 billion pounds from 2017 to 2021. 

Lastly, while effective regulation can mitigate some of the above failings, recent decades have been marked by a lack of regulation. And the trend is moving in the wrong direction as the Commission pursues deregulation across the board, ranging from the energy system to digital technologies and food safety.  

No government policy can fully resolve these structural issues. Private capital, by its very nature, allocates funds to areas where returns are highest, rather than where need is greatest. Societally vital and environmentally necessary investments that do not meet return thresholds are simply not considered. An overreliance on private finance thus does not just risk delivering worse outcomes; it also entrenches a logic in which the boundaries of what is possible are drawn by investors, not citizens. This makes it essential for society to take conscious decisions about where and how private finance should play a role, rather than delegating broad swathes of infrastructure finance and delivery to the private sector by default.  

Evidence-based approach 

Rather than sticking to a misplaced loyalty to private finance, policymakers should apply a systematic approach to determining whether and when public or private delivery better serves societal interests.  

Instead of focusing solely on immediate public spending, policymakers need to consider the full bandwidth of financial considerations: project delivery costs, revenue streams, and financing costs. Additionally, wider economic effects, known as “multiplier effects”, need to be incorporated, as infrastructure projects can raise economic activity and tax revenues in the surrounding area.  

Importantly, non-financial considerations also need to be included. Factors like environmental consequences, the local benefits of community ownership, and strategic motivations, for example public ownership of the energy grid to ensure energy security, must be part of an informed decision. Otherwise, governments will continue to hand over critical infrastructure to private actors, with detrimental long-term effects on society and the environment. 

This requires broader changes to macroeconomic policy to address the underlying causes of underinvestment. Decades of austerity and stringent fiscal rules have created a self-perpetuating cycle. As governments cut public investment and outsource to the private sector, they lose the institutional capacity, expertise, and leverage to deliver infrastructure themselves, becoming increasingly dependent on private actors and less able to dictate their terms. 

The fact that austerity impedes rather than spurs economic prosperity has also been highlighted in a recent publication by the International Monetary Fund. They show that, on average, austerity policies aimed at reducing public deficits can increase debt-to-GDP ratios due to the negative impacts on tax receipts and economic activity. To break this cycle, governments must rethink their approach and design fiscal policy to accommodate public infrastructure investment, where it is deemed in society’s best interest.  

A threat to democracy  

Infrastructure is not just a financial asset – it is foundational to a functioning society. It determines how we move, how we learn, and how we are cared for. These decisions should not be made by the market, but through democratic deliberation.  

As governments cut public investment and outsource to the private sector, they lose the institutional capacity, expertise, and leverage to deliver infrastructure themselves, becoming increasingly dependent on private actors and less able to dictate their terms. 

The state not being able to provide the infrastructure its citizens need is a threat to democracy. This has also been pointed out by the German conservative minister of transport, Patrick Schnieder, in connection with the dire state of the country’s railway network. We also see this unravelling in Valencia, where the far-right party Vox used the floods as a springboard for both anti-government and anti-climate rhetoric.  

Valencians will be heading to the polls next year. Recent projections place Vox in the lead with 24.4 per cent – a doubling of what they currently have. At the same time, experts warn that infrastructure improvements following the floods have been lagging behind, meaning that there is no guarantee that the same could not happen again. Rather than outsourcing our collective future to actors with no democratic mandate to shape it, the public must be given back control. 

Rapid decline in Arctic sea ice Channel News brendan 28th July 2026 Teaser Media

As negotiations among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico continue over the review and renewal of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), U.S. President Donald Trump has ratcheted up his aggressive tariff threats against Canada and other countries. This follows his usual ‘Art of the Deal’ strategy, which is to create chaos, threaten harm, extract concessions (often marginal), and then claim historic victory.

Two sets of new tariffs have been announced in the last week:

• Under Section 388 of U.S. trade law, Trump announced punitive 50% tariffs against over 500 different products from Canada, supposedly in response to ‘discriminatory’ treatment of U.S.-made autos, liquor, and dairy products. His complaints about discriminatory treatment are laughable, since these so-called ‘irritants’ were counter-measures imposed against Trump’s unilateral escalation of tariffs against Canada last year. The tariffs will come into effect August 19, unless some new trade deal between the two countries is reached by then. The products covered by these tariffs constitute about 4-5% of Canada’s exports to the U.S., and there will be no exemption for products qualifying under the existing CUSMA. This will cause an incremental increase in overall weighted-average tariffs on Canadian products. The regional impact of the tariffs is quite diverse: exports from B.C., Ontario,, and Quebec are hit hardest, while exports from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland & Labrador (concentrated in energy and potash, two products which the U.S. desperately needs). Given U.S. interference in the debate over Alberta separatism, many analysts suspect this regional differentiation is quite deliberate, intended to further inflame tensions between the provinces in how to respond to the U.S. attacks.
• Days later, under Section 301 of U.S. trade law, Trump announced new across-the-board tariffs against some 80 countries, including Canada and all other top U.S. trading partners, supposedly to combat the use of forced labour in production of traded products. The affected countries supposedly have not taken adequate measures to prevent use of products made with forced labour in their own supply chains, thus indirectly facilitating the continuation of forced labour. Coming from the country which has by far the weakest protections for labour standards (including the use of prison labour in for-profit companies), this is not believable. In reality, Trump seized on this measure to justify reimposition of the across-the-board ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs that were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.

In online commentary, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford highlighted the hypocrisy of the U.S. invoking fake concern over labour freedoms to justify these new Section 301 trade attacks:

“The U.S. uses prison labour (incl. for private firms) more than any other country, hasn’t raised its min. wage ($7.25/hr) since 2009, and violates dozens of international labour standards every day. So Trump’s new Section 301 tariffs have nothing to do with concern for labour. They are a laughably transparent effort to replace the Liberation Day tariffs struck down by his own (stacked ) Supreme Court. They apply to all of the U.S.’s top trading partners–INCLUDING those who signed ‘deals’ with him, and those with whom the U.S. runs trade SURPLUSES. So if misery loves company, Canada should feel better. These new tariffs will hurt other U.S. trading partners as badly as the new Section 338 tariffs he announced this week will hurt Canada. But the biggest loser from this entire clown show is the U.S. Inflation, manufacturing job loss, declining real incomes, and general uncertainty will get worse. His war in the Persian Gulf is still going badly. And his mid-term prospects are grimmer than ever (hence his trying to rekindle trade wars).”

Stanford also appeared on CBC News Network’s show Ian Hanomansing Tonight to discuss the new tariffs, and how Canada should respond. He pointed out that at least 80 of the products targeted by Trump’s new Section 388 tariffs against Canada are items that Canada does not export to the U.S. They are thus ‘tariffs on nothing’, reinforcing that the threats are mostly about the theatre of negotiations more than any genuine economic goals. These ‘tariffs on nothing’ are the equivalent for Canada of the ridiculous ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs that Trump imposed in April 2025 on over 100 countries around the world – including uninhabited Antarctic islands!

Stanford also warned that even if Canada reaches a new trade deal with the U.S., we can have no confidence that he would live up to its terms. After all, many of the so-called ‘deals’ which Trump reached with various countries in the last year have been reneged on, or superseded by his new tariffs (such as the new Section 301 tariffs, which apply to all top trading partners of the U.S. – including those, like Australia, with which the U.S. runs trade surpluses). The CUSMA itself we negotiated by Trump himself during his first term, and lauded by him at the time as the greatest trade deal in history, yet he has violated its terms without hesitation in his second term. And U.S. demands to rewrite the contractual terms of the Gordie Howe Bridge (paid for my Canada under an agreement with the U.S. signed ) is further proof that any ‘deal’ with the U.S. is very fragile.

Given the unreliability of U.S. commitments on any trade issue, therefore, it is all the more important for Canadian negotiators to proceed with caution in negotiations around a revised trade deal. Complaints that Canada has not reached a quick deal with the U.S. are misplaced. Other countries which hoped they could avoid the impacts of Trump’s tariffs by giving up concessions in a ‘deal’ (like the EU, Japan, the UK, or India) have been victimized by subsequent U.S. trade actions as badly (or worse) than Canada. As our Centre argued a year ago (in the research paper, A Bad Deal with Trump is Worse then No Deal at All), Canada’s negotiators need to hold firm on the requirement that U.S. tariffs (especially the targeted sectoral tariffs that are traumatizing key industries like auto, steel, and forestry) are removed as part of any comprehensive deal.

 

The post Trump Hits Canada and Others With Still More Tariffs appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

The Centre for Future Work has co-published new research quantifying the economic and fiscal benefits being generated in Ontario from the new Canada Wide Early Learning and Child Care program.

The expansion of affordable child care services in Ontario resulting from that new program has delivered a substantial economic boost to the province. That boost would have been even stronger, if the provincial government had not lagged behind other provinces in implementing the new national program.

The report finds that Ontario’s GDP in 2024 was $13.6 Billion higher than it would have been without the expansion of child care since 2019.

That growth in GDP generated approximately $2.25 Billion in extra provincial revenue in 2024 alone. This amount slightly exceeded the provincial funding to child care that year, indicating the program effectively pays for itself through increased economic activity.

Job Creation: Over 17,000 new jobs have been created in Ontario’s child care sector since 2019, with total sector compensation expected to exceed $3 Billion in 2026.

Empowering Women in the Workforce: Core-age (25-54) female labour force participation in Ontario increased by two full percentage points between 2019 and 2026—outpacing the national trend. This shift, combined with more women moving from part-time to full-time work, added 81,500 full-time-equivalent workers to the provincial economy.

Improved Job Quality: Average weekly earnings for child care workers rose by 39% since 2019, while average weekly hours increased from 26 to 31.

“Affordable, quality child care services are a vital precondition for economic progress,” says Jim Stanford, author of the report and Director of the Centre for Future Work.

“The data confirm that even Ontario’s partial and inconsistent rollout of the national program has been an economic boon. However, the province is leaving billions of dollars in potential growth on the table by failing to meet its targets for new spaces and lower fees”.

The report comes as the Ford and Carney governments continue to negotiate a new child care agreement.

Despite economic gains, the report highlights significant concerns regarding the Ontario government’s commitment to the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program. Ontario’s current child care agreement is set to expire in March 2027, and Ontario remains 25% behind its target for creating new spaces for children under six. Furthermore, while the national goal is $10aDay, daily CWELCC fees in Ontario currently average $19 with a cap of $22. The report also criticizes the province’s heavy reliance on for-profit providers—accounting for 44% of full-day spaces—which research associates with lower quality of care and higher staff turnover.

The report was co-published with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care and the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario.

The report concludes with urgent recommendations for the Ontario government, including securing long-term funding through 2031, eliminating “child care deserts,” and fulfilling the $10aDay affordability promise.

“If Ontario fails to fully commit to a universal system, these historic economic gains will be squandered,” added Stanford.

Please see the full report here, and a one-page summary of its key findings.

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A few summers ago, a community garden in Detroit – just three lots wide, wedged between a laundromat and an abandoned storefront – recorded visits from 74 distinct bee species in a single season. That number stunned even the entomologists who ran the survey. For context, some nature preserves twice the size log fewer species in a year.

It’s a pattern researchers keep finding: city gardens, however small, are pulling outsized weight for pollinators. Not just honeybees, but native bumblebees, sweat bees, hoverflies, moths, beetles, and butterflies that together pollinate roughly 75% of flowering plants and about 35% of global food crops. Understanding exactly how these urban patches work – and what makes some far more effective than others – matters for anyone with even a windowbox and a bit of curiosity.

Why cities aren’t the wastelands pollinators were expected to face

There’s an old assumption that pollinators need sweeping meadows and pristine wilderness. But the reality in much of rural America has shifted dramatically. Industrial-scale monoculture means vast fields of a single crop – corn, soy, wheat – that bloom for a few weeks and then offer nothing. Neonicotinoid insecticides compound the problem. By comparison, a patchwork of urban gardens, parks, green roofs, and even weedy vacant lots can offer something rural landscapes increasingly lack: continuous, diverse bloom.

Research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology found that private gardens in cities contributed a disproportionately high share of nectar sugar per unit area compared to farmland. The diversity of plants that urban gardeners choose – flowering herbs, ornamental shrubs, vegetable blossoms, heritage roses – creates a mosaic of overlapping bloom periods. A bee foraging in a city neighborhood can find food from March crocuses through November asters. In a soybean field, that window shrinks to roughly two weeks.

This doesn’t mean cities are ideal habitats. Heat islands, light pollution, fragmented green space, and soil contamination all create real challenges. But the net effect, in study after study, is that urban areas often support surprisingly robust pollinator communities – sometimes more diverse than their surrounding countryside.

What makes a garden actually useful to pollinators (and what doesn’t)

Not every garden patch helps equally. A perfectly manicured lawn with a single bed of petunias is, from a pollinator’s perspective, mostly empty space. Here’s what the evidence says separates a genuinely supportive urban garden from a decorative one:

Floral richness over floral prettiness

A 2024 study in Urban Ecosystems tracked flower-visitor interactions across private gardens and found that the single strongest predictor of pollinator activity was the number of different plant species in bloom at any given time – not total flower count, not garden size, not even proximity to parks. Ten species flowering simultaneously attracted more pollinator diversity than 500 blooms of a single species.

This has a practical takeaway: stagger your plantings. Early-season options like willow, crocus, and lungwort matter enormously because they feed queens emerging from hibernation when almost nothing else is available. Late-season goldenrod, sedum, and native asters are equally critical – they fuel the generation of bees that must build fat reserves to survive winter.

Native plants are essential, but non-natives aren’t useless

The “plant natives only” message is everywhere, and it’s grounded in good science: native bees co-evolved with native flora and often depend on specific species for pollen. Specialist bees – like the squash bee (Peponapis pruinosa), which visits only cucurbit flowers – literally cannot survive without their host plants.

But recent research adds nuance. Studies from Glasgow and Chicago alike show that well-chosen non-native plants can extend bloom seasons and fill gaps that native species alone may not cover, especially in heavily urbanized areas where native plant availability is limited. Lavender, borage, and single-flowered dahlias, for example, consistently rank among the most visited plants in urban pollinator surveys. The key is avoiding double-flowered cultivars – those densely petaled ornamental varieties that look lush but produce little or no accessible nectar and pollen.

A balanced approach works best: build the backbone of your garden with regional natives, then supplement with proven non-native pollinator magnets.

Nesting habitat – the overlooked half of the equation

Most articles about pollinator gardens focus on food. Fewer talk about housing. Yet roughly 70% of native bee species in North America nest in the ground. They need patches of bare, undisturbed, well-drained soil – something immaculate gardens and mulch-covered beds actively eliminate.

Other species nest in hollow stems, dead wood, or small cavities. Leaving a few plant stalks standing through winter, keeping a small brush pile in a corner, or simply not tidying every square inch of your yard can make the difference between a garden that feeds pollinators and one that actually sustains a breeding population.

Bee hotels – those popular bundles of drilled wood or bamboo tubes – can help cavity-nesting species like mason bees and leafcutter bees. But there’s a caveat worth knowing: poorly maintained bee hotels can become breeding grounds for parasites and disease. If you install one, replace the nesting tubes annually and position the hotel facing south or southeast for morning warmth.

The corridor effect: why your garden doesn’t work alone

Individual gardens matter, but connected gardens matter far more. Pollinators – especially smaller native bees with limited flight ranges of just a few hundred meters – need stepping stones of habitat across urban landscapes. A single garden surrounded by asphalt is an island. A chain of gardens, green roofs, planted medians, and community plots creates a corridor that allows gene flow, population stability, and resilience against local disturbances.

This is where city-level planning makes a difference. Programs like Boulder’s Pollinator Pathway, Minneapolis’s Bee Boulevard, and various community-driven urban ecology initiatives aim to link habitat fragments into functional networks. The concept is borrowed from wildlife corridor science, scaled down to insect dimensions.

Even informal coordination helps. If you and three neighbors each plant a different suite of species that bloom in different months, your block suddenly offers continuous forage from spring through fall – something none of your individual gardens could provide alone.

What the research still doesn’t tell us

It’s worth being honest about the gaps. Most urban pollinator studies are short-term – one to three seasons – and focus on abundance (how many insects show up) rather than reproductive success (how many actually produce viable offspring). A garden can attract plenty of bees and still be an ecological trap if pesticide residues in soil or plants cause sublethal harm: reduced navigation ability, lower sperm viability, weakened immune function.

We also know surprisingly little about nocturnal pollinators in cities. Moths, which are responsible for pollinating a significant but poorly quantified portion of plants, are affected by artificial light at night in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Preliminary studies suggest that street lights and garden spotlights can reduce moth pollination activity by up to 62% in illuminated areas. If you’re serious about supporting the full spectrum of pollinators, consider reducing or redirecting outdoor lighting near garden beds.

Another underexplored area: the role of soil microbiomes. Healthy soil fungi form networks that help plants produce more nectar and more nutritious pollen. Urban soils compacted by construction or contaminated by legacy lead and heavy metals may produce flowers that look fine but offer diminished nutritional value to visiting insects. Amending soil with compost and avoiding synthetic fertilizers isn’t just good gardening practice – it may directly affect how well your flowers feed their visitors.

A practical starting point for any yard or balcony

You don’t need acreage. You don’t need expertise. Here’s a stripped-down, evidence-based starting checklist:

• Aim for at least 3 species in bloom in every season – early spring, late spring, summer, and fall.
• Include at least 5–7 native species suited to your USDA hardiness zone. Your state’s native plant society website is the most reliable source for region-specific lists.
• Leave some bare ground – even a 2-by-2-foot patch of exposed, south-facing soil can serve as a nesting site.
• Skip the pesticides entirely – including “organic” ones like pyrethrin, which is non-selective and kills beneficial insects on contact.
• Let things be a little messy – dead stems, leaf litter, and fallen logs are habitat, not waste.
• Provide shallow water – a dish with pebbles and a thin layer of water gives bees and butterflies a safe drinking spot.

Small spaces, real impact

The cumulative area of private gardens in U.S. cities is staggering. In many metropolitan areas, residential yards collectively cover more ground than all public parks and nature reserves combined. That means the decisions individual gardeners make – what to plant, what to spray, what to leave standing – have landscape-scale consequences for pollinator conservation.

This isn’t a feel-good narrative. It’s a measurable ecological phenomenon backed by field data from dozens of cities. Every garden that trades a patch of lawn for a cluster of native wildflowers shifts the math slightly in favor of the insects that keep food systems and ecosystems functioning.

If you’re curious about how environmental and ecological topics intersect with broader policy discussions, exploring resources like Counterview can offer wider perspectives worth considering. In the meantime, the most useful thing any of us can do is step outside, look at what’s actually blooming in our own patch of ground, and ask: could this space be doing more?

Usually, the answer is yes – and the changes needed are smaller than you’d think.

Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org and David Hillman is director of Stamp Out Poverty.

This coming week, as record-breaking heat has morphed into killer wildfires, major oil and gas companies will report their second-quarter earnings and are widely expected to announce profits that have doubled or even quadrupled in the last three months. The obscenity of that contradiction is impossible to ignore. 

Oxfam analysis, released as the Q2 earnings season gets underway, shows that the world’s six largest fossil fuel corporations – BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – are on course to nearly double their combined net income compared with the first quarter of the year, from $23 billion to around $45 billion.

• Jul 22, 2026 Politics Will new UK PM’s green measures at home cause climate finance pain overseas? Andy Burnham cuts bus fares and household electricity tax in a boost for climate action – some of it paid for by switching the UK’s contribution to a new global forest fund from a grant to a loan Read more
• Jul 21, 2026 Comment Energy transition policymaking must evolve to fit an age of rupture Economic competitiveness, energy security and green industrialisation are driving real-world change – but will this damage our collective mission for a fair green shift? Read more

Their projected full-year profits of $147 billion would exceed everything the six firms made combined over the previous 21 months. Chevron’s profits alone are expected to have quadrupled to $1,200 a second over the last three months; ExxonMobil’s have roughly tripled to $1,800 a second. The juxtaposition of profit on that scale, arriving in the same weeks that communities are counting the cost of deadly heatwaves, forest fires and high energy bills, is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Covering the cost of climate damage

Not long ago, the idea that fossil fuel companies should contribute directly towards the cost of climate damage was dismissed as activist rhetoric. Today it is reflected in legislation, litigation and mainstream policy debate.

Several US states have passed “Climate Superfund” laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help fund climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Courts are hearing cases seeking compensation for climate harms, while governments across Europe continue to debate the future of windfall taxes on outsized energy profits.

Comment: Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

These developments may appear disconnected, but they reflect a broader shift in public thinking: if societies are paying an ever higher price as our climate warms, should the excessively profitable fossil fuel companies whose products have substantially caused those costs not bear more of the burden of paying for them?

Europe’s heatwaves fuelled by emissions

The events of this summer have only sharpened that question. Europe has experienced repeated heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding 40°C across parts of Spain, Portugal, France and Germany. England recorded its hottest June on record, while wildfires have affected communities across southern Europe and, increasingly, parts of the UK.

According to researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, more than 2,300 heat-related deaths occurred across twelve European cities during one recent ten-day heatwave alone, with climate change estimated to have roughly tripled the number of deaths.

Separate Oxfam analysis of academic data published in Nature goes further, finding that the emissions of just five of these corporations – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – were sufficient to cause around one in four of the heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023: heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change. 

WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in

Nor is Europe unique. There is looming famine in Uganda and India endured prolonged pre-monsoon temperatures above 48°C earlier this year. North America has faced successive heat domes, while smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires has periodically produced some of the world’s worst urban air quality, affecting millions of people across Canada and the United States.

Scientists have become increasingly confident in attributing many of these extremes to human-caused climate change. Rapid attribution studies, pioneered over the past decade, now routinely assess how much more likely or more intense individual weather events have become because of greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Polluter pays’ principle in law

Against this backdrop, the “polluter pays” principle is a basic standard of responsible behaviour: if you cause damage, it is on you to pay for it. It is a longstanding concept in environmental law and economics  that those responsible for creating pollution should bear a proportionate share of the costs it imposes on society.

In 2025 a survey found that 81% of people supported increased fossil fuel taxes being directed to help communities most impacted by extreme weather. And it is no longer just a hypothetical prospect.

A mandatory surtax on highly polluting industries is gaining support as part of the UN Convention on International Tax Cooperation, alongside robust measures to prevent jurisdiction-shopping and anchor taxing rights in real economic activity. Governments meeting in New York next month to negotiate the framework convention should seize the moment to get behind both.

Campaigners from Fossil Free London dressed as firefighters while others poured a black liquid resembling oil over their heads, during a protest outside Shell’s global headquarters ahead of its Q2 results announcement, on July 29 2026. (Photo: Fossil Free London) Campaigners from Fossil Free London dressed as firefighters while others poured a black liquid resembling oil over their heads, during a protest outside Shell’s global headquarters ahead of its Q2 results announcement, on July 29 2026. (Photo: Fossil Free London)

The stakes are high because the economics of the energy transition are increasingly clear. Renewable electricity is now among the cheapest forms of new power generation in much of the world. Yet many countries with abundant renewable resources continue to face prohibitively expensive borrowing costs, limiting their ability to invest at the speed required. Meanwhile, massive fossil fuel profits remain only lightly taxed or entirely avoided in many jurisdictions.

Analysis by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and partners estimated that a 20% surtax on the profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than US$1 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

Time to design mechanisms for justice

Whether governments choose that particular mechanism is ultimately a political decision. But the analysis illustrates a broader point: claims that public investment in climate resilience or clean energy is unaffordable sit uneasily alongside the scale of profits regularly generated by the fossil fuel industry, profits that, this quarter, are on course to nearly double in three months.

There are legitimate debates about the design of windfall taxes, competitiveness, investment incentives and international coordination. But the wider principle – that those who have benefited most from fossil fuel extraction should pay more towards managing its consequences – is no longer confined to campaign groups.

Extreme heat costing India’s poorest workers 2% of GDP, survey finds

It is increasingly part of mainstream discussions among policymakers, economists and legal scholars and, if well designed, such mechanisms will incentivise investment where it’s needed and strengthen international coordination.

This summer has made that conversation harder to avoid. The question is no longer whether fossil fuel giants should pay for the enormous economic and human costs being suffered by communities every day due to our rapidly warming climate. It is when will governments step up and make them pay, for the damage already done and to build the resilience we need going forward?

The post The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sunset at the Gualala River on July 21, 2026
Photo courtesy of Michael Coustier

Insects are critically important to our world: They bolster the global food supply through pollination, recycle organic waste, support food webs that sustain countless species, and more. Yet they are...

In a special crossover, Green and Red co-host Prof. Bob Buzzanco joins Jason Myles and Pascal Robert on THIS IS REVOLUTION podcast to talk about the Black Political Class and…

Location: In-office position, in Helena, Montana.  Scope: The Administrative and Development Associate will handle general office tasks and administrative duties, such as organizing schedules and events, entering data, maintaining office equipment, providing basic tech support, and other general operations activities.   Reports to: Chief Financial Officer (CFO)  Compensation: MEIC offers compensation commensurate with skills and …

The post Now Hiring: Administrative and Development Associate appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.

In April, when the Trump administration first announced it wanted to open the Greater Chaco Canyon region in New Mexico to oil and gas drilling, we asked you to speak up. Following an initial scoping period that generated over 100,000 comments in support of maintaining broad protections for this remarkable place, the Department of the Interior has doubled down on its plans and released a formal Environmental Assessment with a brief 14-day public comment period.

Please take action today and help defend the Greater Chaco Region

After decades of advocacy by Tribal Nations and conservationists, federal protections in the greater Chaco region were finally put in place in 2023 with the establishment of a 10-mile buffer zone shielding the Chaco Culture National Historical Park from new oil and gas leasing. The administration is now considering two options, neither of which is acceptable: revoking protections entirely or shrinking the buffer to just 5 miles.

In either scenario, thousands of cultural sites would be exposed to drilling. Although only 15-20% of the area has been surveyed, archaeologists estimate that as many as 12,000 cultural sites lie within the areas the Trump administration plans to open to leasing and exploitation. Indigenous communities already living with the health impacts of over 37,000 nearby wells would face even more industrial development at their doorstep. 

Comments are due this Wednesday, July 29. We encourage you to make your voice heard by using the advocacy action from our friends at New Mexico Wild; they also have a web page where you can learn more about the threats facing Chaco Canyon.

Click here to take action now!

The post Another Chance to Speak Up for Greater Chaco Canyon appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Union Jack, which has interests at Wressle and West Newton, has recommended shareholders vote against a proposal to remove the board.

The company has called a requistioned general meeting for next month (August).

This follows a resolution by two investors holding more than 14% of voting rights to remove the three current directors: David Bramhill, Joseph O’Farrell and Zac Phillips.

The investors, described by Union Jack as requisitioners, are former board members, Craig Howie and John Americanos. They have also tabled a resolution for their reappointment as directors.

In a statement today, Union Jack said:

“The Company will today post a circular to shareholders convening the Requistioned GM [general meeting] and outlining the unanimous recommendation by the Company’s board to directors to vote against all the resolutions to be proposed at the Requisitioned GM.

The statement added:

“The Board believes that the Requisition is misguided, ill-timed and destined to lead to a destruction in value for the Company’s shareholders.”

The requisition notice was dated 7 July 2026, less than a week after a takeover offer by Reabold Resources.

Union Jack’s statement continued:

“by proposing the Resolutions just six days after the announcement of the all share offer by Reabold Resources plc, the Requisitioners are simply being opportunistic by seeking to replace the Board during the Offer process without providing the Company’s shareholders with the opportunity to realise a control premium.”

Union Jack also announced it had reconvened the previously postponed annual general meeting. This was adjourned on the day it was planned, 26 June 2026, because of the Reabold takeover offer. The AGM will now be held after the requistioned meeting.

The requisitioned meeting will be at 11am on 24 August 2026 at the offices of Keystone Law, 48 Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1JF.

The reconvened AGM will be held on the same date and place, at 12 noon, or as soon as the requisitioned meeting has ended.

Farm Service Agency County committees are a critical component of the day-to-day operations of USDA/FSA and allow grassroots input and local administration of federal farm programs.

The post 2026 FSA County Committee Elections appeared first on RAFI.

As we write this, deadly wildfires are actively burning across Spain, France and many other countries, with tens of thousands of people evacuated and firefighters risking their lives on the frontlines. Our thoughts are with everyone who has lost a loved one, a home, or a community to these fires, and with every firefighter, emergency worker and volunteer out there right now.

When the world burns

A wildfire is an uncontrolled fire that burns through forests, grasslands, or brush, usually started by a spark — lightning, a downed power line, a discarded cigarette, an agricultural burn gone wrong — that finds fuel dry enough and weather hot, dry and windy enough to let it spread. Fire has always been part of many ecosystems. Some landscapes even depend on regular, low-intensity burns to stay healthy. The problem isn’t that fires happen. The problem is how much bigger, faster and more destructive they’ve become.

Data from just this year confirms the trend. Between January and April 2026 alone, wildfires burned more than 150 million hectares of land worldwide — about 20% above the previous record set in 2020, and roughly double the same period in 2024. The fires weren’t confined to one region: they broke out across continents, fed by the same mix of heat, drought, wind and human ignition, all amplified by a warming climate. Forecasters also expect a rapid swing toward El Niño conditions through the rest of the year, a pattern that has historically lined up with severe fire activity in Australia, Indonesia, the Amazon and parts of North America.

This summer, the crisis has moved to Europe, and it is still unfolding. A punishing run of heatwaves has left the Mediterranean tinder-dry, and fires have already killed at least 16 civilians and three firefighters, and forced more than 320,000 people from their homes across Spain and France alone — with more people being evacuated by the day. Both France and Spain have seen the number of wildfires more than double compared to last year: France has already passed 115,000 hectares burned this year, a national record, with the Gironde fire alone consuming around 42,000 hectares — one of the largest fires the country has seen since the Second World War — while Spain is currently fighting one of its largest wildfires on record near Madrid, which had burned more than 111,000 acres as of late July and remains active. The European Union has activated its largest firefighting mobilization ever, with firefighters and aircraft pre-positioned across a dozen countries for a season that is far from over.

The same heat has driven fires across North Africa: in Tunisia, over 900 fires were recorded within 72 hours, and in Algeria, more than 100 people were hospitalised.

Wildfires have spread across Canada too, with smoke reaching large parts of the US. Toronto’s air quality ranked among the world’s worst, and hospitals reported an increase in ER visits related to the fires.

More than just flames

The most obvious damage a wildfire does is the most visible one: homes destroyed, forests reduced to ash, people killed trying to flee or fighting the fire itself. But wildfires kill in a second, quieter way, one that reaches people who never see a flame: smoke.

Wildfire smoke is loaded with fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, small enough to slip past the body’s defences, enter the bloodstream, and trigger inflammation throughout the body. Globally, wildfire smoke particles are estimated to cause 677,745 deaths every year, with almost 39% of them children under age 5, and the Lancet Countdown 2025 report puts the toll from fine particles at over 100,000 premature deaths a year worldwide, with the burden unevenly distributed between continents. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are consistently the hardest-hit regions. The smoke from a single fire season can carry a global cost: Canada’s 2023 wildfires alone were linked to an estimated 82,100 premature deaths worldwide, with smoke drifting across North America and Europe. In the United States, researchers estimate wildfire smoke could contribute to as many as 24,100 deaths every year, and a separate study found that wildfire smoke in California was responsible for over 50,000 deaths between 2008 and 2018, with an economic toll above $430 billion. Scientists have found that almost no system in the body is spared: smoke exposure has been linked to heart disease, stroke, dementia, worsened asthma, complications in pregnancy and even harm to the brain.

Smoke doesn’t respect borders, either. It can travel thousands of miles from its source, blanketing cities that are nowhere near an active fire in a toxic haze. That means the health burden of wildfires falls on far more people than the ones who lose their homes, and it falls hardest on children, older people, outdoor workers and anyone with an existing respiratory or heart condition.

The fire weather triangle

Fires need three things to spread: fuel, oxygen and heat, plus the wind to push them along. Climate change is altering nearly every one of those conditions. Hotter temperatures dry out vegetation faster, turning forests and grasslands into ready-made fuel. Longer, more intense droughts strip moisture from soil and plants months before fire season even starts. Changing rain patterns mean wet seasons that once kept landscapes green are arriving later, or not at all. And in many regions, the same warming atmosphere that’s supercharging heatwaves is also strengthening the winds that carry embers and flames for miles ahead of a fire’s front.

Scientists call this combination “fire weather,” and it’s expanding. Fire seasons are starting earlier and ending later across the Northern Hemisphere, giving landscapes less time to recover between blazes. None of this means every fire is caused by climate change. It means the climate crisis is making the conditions for extreme fires far more likely, far more often, in far more places.

The fossil footprint

Wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense and harder to contain. Satellite data show that the frequency of the most extreme wildfire events more than doubled worldwide between 2003 and 2023, with the six most extreme years on record all falling within the last seven. A separate global assessment found that the extent of forest fires has grown by around 40% over the past two decades, while the intensity of the world’s most extreme fires has roughly doubled over the same period. This pattern is linked to a hotter, drier atmosphere: warmer temperatures dry out vegetation, lengthen fire seasons and create the conditions extreme fires need to spread. And that hotter atmosphere has a direct, identifiable cause.

Burning fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — causes that increase in carbon (CO2) which drives global heating. No other source can account for it: not volcanoes, not clouds, not solar cycles. Methane is the same story: fossil fuel extraction and use cause around 35% of human-caused methane emissions, with agriculture and waste accounting for the rest. The emissions of these both gases is clearly driven by fossil fuels: this is no longer a matter of  debate.

The coal, oil and gas industries have massively profited from an economic model that forces people to use fossil fuels, and they continue to profit from it. Reports have proven that they knew the damage they were causing since at least the 1970s, and that, instead of abandoning their business model, they actively worked to disinform the public. They still do. We keep burning fossil fuels because they choose (and they chose then) to use their power for that purpose.

While we may not be able to stop wildfires completely, we can reduce their severity and frequency by stopping the fossil fuel industry. We must demand our governments to switch to cleaner energy, and cut the financial flows that allow this industry to still exist. If you haven’t yet, join us in these demands!

More from the Fossil Fuels Did This series:

• Fossil Fuels Did This: Heatwaves
• Fossil Fuels Did This: Tropical Cyclones
• Fossil Fuels Did This: Floods
• Fossil Fuels Did This: Drought

The post Fossil Fuels Did This: Wildfires appeared first on 350.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

A graph has been making the rounds on social media showing the average number of days per weather station above 95F, 100F, and 105F across the contiguous US since 1895. It comes from CFACT analyst Chris Martz, drawing on raw data from NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network daily dataset (GHCNd), and it shows the 1930s towering over everything since. The implication is that extreme heat in the US is nothing new, and that all the recent fuss about record temperatures is overblown.

It is a compelling figure. The 1930s Dust Bowl really was an extraordinary period of extreme heat in the US, and no amount of correction for changes in measurement techniques over time makes it go away. But the graph is also a case study in why you cannot naively count threshold exceedances in raw daily station data and call it a climate record. Its results rest on two well-documented thermometer problems that artificially depress modern hot day counts, plus a station network that happens to be oversampled where the Dust Bowl happened.

Reproducing the viral chart

To start with, let’s reproduce the figure properly. Rather than averaging whatever stations happen to be reporting in a given year (the station network grew from a few hundred stations in 1895 to many thousands today, with big shifts in where they are located), I selected the 543 GHCNd stations in the contiguous US with long, near-continuous maximum temperature records over the full 1895-2025 period,1 gridded them to 2x2 degree cells, and computed an area-weighted national average.

Average number of days per year at or above 95°F, 100°F, and 105°F over the contiguous US, 1895–2025, from 543 long-record GHCN-Daily stations (raw, unadjusted TMAX), averaged on a 2°×2° grid with cos(latitude) area weighting.

Here we see the same basic story as the viral version: a huge spike in the 1930s (1936 alone averaged 33 days at or above 95F across these stations), elevated values through the mid-1950s, and nothing since that comes close. So the Martz figure is not fabricated, and its shape is not an artifact of the changing station network. To be fair to its author, counting hot days in raw data really does produce this picture.

The problem is what “raw” means here.

Two thermometer problems, both pointing the same way

Raw sounds virtuous, like unfiltered honesty. But the US cooperative observer network has changed in two important ways over the past century, and both changes bias hot day counts downward in recent decades relative to earlier ones.

The first is time of observation bias. Volunteer observers read and reset their max/min thermometers once a day. In the early 20th century most did so in the late afternoon, near the hottest part of the day. An afternoon reset means a very hot afternoon can get counted twice: once for the day it happened, and again the next day if the following afternoon is cooler, since the thermometer still holds yesterday’s peak. Over the 20th century the network gradually shifted to morning observations (better for measuring precipitation), which does not double count heat. Vose et al (2003) documented how this shift alone imparts a spurious cooling trend of a few tenths of a degree in US records, and the double counting directly inflates hot day counts at afternoon-observing stations.

The second is the thermometer switch. In the mid-1980s NOAA replaced liquid-in-glass thermometers in wooden Cotton Region Shelters with electronic maximum-minimum temperature sensors (MMTS) at most cooperative stations. Quayle et al (1991) showed the new sensors read maximum temperatures around 0.4C (0.7F) cooler than the old shelters. This produced a one-time step change at thousands of stations that landed right at the start of the modern warming era. When your threshold is a hard cutoff like 95F, a step down of nearly half a degree C removes a lot of days.

Homogenization algorithms (like NOAA’s pairwise method, Menne and Williams 2009, or the Berkeley Earth approach, Rohde et al 2013) detect and correct these breakpoints by comparing each station to its neighbors. Our 2016 paper validated these adjustments against the pristine, purpose-built US Climate Reference Network and found they perform well. While NOAA does not have daily homogenized data (they only provide monthly homogenized data), Berkeley Earth does. So let’s compare the raw hot day count to the same metric computed from Berkeley Earth’s homogenized daily maximum temperature fields.

Days per year at or above 95°F over the contiguous US. Top: raw GHCN-Daily data from 543 long-record stations, gridded and area-weighted. Bottom: Berkeley Earth homogenized daily TMAX (1°×1°, area-weighted over CONUS), with the dashed line showing the same calculation restricted to the grid cells containing the long-record stations. Absolute values differ because gridded fields smooth out local extremes; the shapes are the meaningful comparison.

The two datasets agree that the 1930s were exceptional. Where they disagree is the modern era: in the homogenized data, recent decades rival the Dust Bowl years CONUS-wide, with 2011 (16.1 days) actually edging out 1936 (14.0 days) as the biggest year in the Berkeley Earth series.

We can make the comparison cleaner by putting each series relative to its own 1951-1980 average:

Days ≥95°F, 11-year running means, with each series shown relative to its own 1951–1980 average. Red: raw GHCN-Daily long-record stations. Blue solid: Berkeley Earth homogenized daily TMAX over the full CONUS. Blue dashed: Berkeley Earth restricted to the grid cells sampled by the long-record station network.

The raw and homogenized series track each other closely for the first 85 years, through the Dust Bowl peak and the cool 1960s and 70s. Then, right around 1980 (just when the MMTS transition began), they split. The homogenized data rises to around 1.4 times its mid-century baseline while the raw data stays flat at roughly 1.0. The raw data does not exaggerate the 1930s, but rather erases the last 40 years of increases in extreme heat.

The dashed and solid blue lines in the figure are also worth a closer look. The dashed line averages the Berkeley Earth data over only the 130 grid cells where our long-record stations actually sit; comparing it to the raw series is the fair like-for-like test, since the places are the same and data adjustments are the only difference. The solid line averages over the whole country, and the gap between the two exposes a sampling problem rather than a data problem. Century-old stations cluster in the Midwest and East, which is precisely where the 1930s heat was centered and where extreme daytime heat has increased the least since. Averaged over the long-lived station locations, even in homogenized data, puts the 1930s roughly 45% above the last two decades. If we average over the full contiguous US, however, that gap shrinks to about 10%.

Locations of long-lived weather stations used in the reproducing the viral Martz figure. Note that these tend to oversample the Midwest region where dust bowl temperature extremes were most pronounced. A Dust Bowl story, not a national one

There is a second, subtler issue with interpreting the viral graph: geography. Long-record stations are heavily concentrated in the Midwest and East (only 116 of our 543, around a fifth, sit west of 100W), which happens to be exactly where the 1930s heat was centered. Let’s break the country into NOAA’s nine US climate regions and look at each one separately, using the spatially complete Berkeley Earth data.

Days per year at or above 95°F for each of NOAA’s nine US climate regions, 1895–2023, from Berkeley Earth homogenized gridded daily TMAX (1°×1°), area-weighted within each region. Thin lines are annual values; bold lines are 11-year running means. Note that the y-axis scale differs by region.

The Dust Bowl turns out to be a story about three regions. In the Upper Midwest the 1930s averaged around 15 times as many 95F days as the last two decades (3.4 vs 0.2 per year), in the Northern Rockies and Plains around 9 times (2.8 vs 0.3), and in the Ohio Valley around 4 times (8.7 vs 2.1), with 1936 the record year in all three.

Everywhere else the present rivals or beats the past: the South is essentially tied (22.4 days in the 1930s vs 22.7 over 2000-2023, with 2011 the biggest year in the record), while the Southeast (14.7 vs 11.1 days), Southwest (4.9 vs 3.9), and West (4.6 vs 3.6) all see more 95F days now than in the 1930s, with the two western regions peaking in 2020. (The remaining two regions, the Northeast and Northwest, average less than one 95F day per year throughout the record, too few for meaningful comparisons.)

The mid-century spike in that average comes almost entirely from three regions in the middle of the country. This makes physical sense: the Dust Bowl heat was tied to a specific regional catastrophe, a multi-year drought amplified by human-induced land degradation (Cook et al 2009), with bare, desiccated soils driving daytime temperatures to levels those same fields have not approached since. A record set during an ecological disaster in one part of the country is not evidence that the whole country, much less the planet, was hotter. The national chart is really being driven by a distinct regional anomaly.2

Meanwhile, the thermometers all agree it is warming

Finally, it is worth stepping back from the hottest afternoons of the year, which are a noisy, bias-sensitive sliver of the temperature record, and looking at what US temperatures as a whole are doing. The figure below shows annual average maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures for the contiguous US from NOAA’s homogenized nClimDiv dataset.

Contiguous US annual average daily maximum (TMax), minimum (TMin), and mean (TAvg) temperature anomalies relative to 1901–2000, from NOAA nClimDiv, 1895–2025. Thin lines are annual values; bold lines are 11-year running means.

All three are unambiguous. Since 1970, maximum temperatures have warmed at 0.52F per decade, minimums at 0.51F per decade, and the average at 0.51F per decade (all p < 0.0001), with the last decade roughly 2F above the 20th century baseline. The 1930s show up here too, but as a modest bump in maximum temperatures far below present (as the dust bowl event was largely limited to summer TMax temperatures, with a much smaller effect on the remainder of the year). Extreme daytime heat in summer is one of the places where the US warming signal is weakest (a real and interesting scientific result, related in part to agricultural intensification and irrigation in the Midwest (Mueller et al 2016), but it is not representative of the climate system as a whole.

Zooming all the way out

One last piece of context. The contiguous US covers less than 2% of the Earth’s surface, and as we saw above, even within the US the Dust Bowl signal is regional. So what does the very same chart look like for the planet as a whole? The figure below reproduces the design of the viral graph (days at or above 95F, 100F, and 105F) using the Berkeley Earth daily data over global land. To avoid mixing climate changes with changes in the locations we measure (global station coverage grew from under 40% of land area in the 1890s to essentially complete today), I restrict the average to the grid cells with continuous century-long records, covering 42% of global land.3

Average number of days per year at or above 95°F, 100°F, and 105°F across global land, 1895–2023, from Berkeley Earth homogenized gridded daily TMAX (1°×1°), area-weighted by cos(latitude) and land fraction. Restricted to grid cells with complete data in at least 90% of years over 1895–2023 (42% of global land area), so that changing station coverage does not affect the trend.

Globally there is no 1930s spike at all: 1936, the year that towers over the US record, comes in at 15.1 days at or above 95F, less than a day above the surrounding years. The Dust Bowl, extraordinary as it was in Kansas, barely registers when averaged over the world’s land. Instead, hot days hold roughly steady until around 1980 and then climb: days at or above 95F are up around 70% between the early 20th century (1895-1924) and the last decade (12.8 to 22.1 per year), days at or above 100F have more than doubled (3.0 to 7.5), and days at or above 105F have nearly quintupled (0.3 to 1.6). The hotter the threshold, the faster the rise, which is exactly what you expect when a whole temperature distribution shifts upward. All ten of the warmest years by the 95F metric have occurred since 1998, and the six most recent years in the series (2018-2023) are all among them.

The US Midwest is one of the few places on Earth where the hottest days of the mid-20th century still stand; picking it as your yardstick for global warming is, to put it charitably, a choice.

So what are the takeaways here?

First, the Dust Bowl was real, and it remains the benchmark for multi-year extreme daytime heat in the central US, in adjusted and unadjusted data alike. Anyone claiming the 1930s heat is purely an artifact of bad data is simply wrong.

Second, it was a regional phenomenon. Break the country into NOAA’s nine climate regions and the 1930s is only exceptional in only three of them (the Upper Midwest, the Northern Rockies and Plains, and the Ohio Valley, at roughly 4 to 15 times recent levels). The four regions where hot days are the most common (the South, Southeast, Southwest, and West) all match or exceed the Dust Bowl today, with record years of 2011 and 2020, not 1936.

Third, raw daily data is the wrong tool for this question. Time of observation changes and the 1980s switch to MMTS sensors both suppress modern hot day counts relative to the past, and the raw and homogenized series diverge almost exactly when the instrument transition happened. In homogenized data, recent decades rival the 1930s even averaged nationally.

Fourth, hot days above a fixed threshold are a narrow and noisy way to look at the data. The overall US warming trend (around 0.5F per decade since 1970 in max, min, and mean temperatures) is robust in every dataset, raw or adjusted, satellite or surface. And globally, days above 95F have been climbing steadily for a century, with no Dust Bowl bump at all: the central US is one of the few spots on the planet where the mid-20th century still holds the record for extreme daytime heat.

The viral chart is built from real measurements, and the heat it shows was real too. But it takes a regional catastrophe, fails to account for changes in instruments and observation times, and presents the result as a national climate verdict. Accounting for the thermometers and the geography, and the US looks a lot like the rest of the planet: the hottest days on record are increasingly the ones we are living through now.

I’ve included a more detailed writeup of the methods and code to reproduce this analysis on my GitHub here.

1 Specifically: stations whose GHCNd TMAX record spans at least 1900 through 2024, keeping station-years where at least 80% of April-October days have a valid, quality-controlled observation, and keeping stations valid in at least 85% of years over 1895-2025. Hot day counts are averaged within 2°×2° grid cells and combined with cos(latitude) area weighting over the 130 cells with near-complete records. The results are insensitive to these choices: stricter completeness screens shrink the network but leave the series essentially unchanged (details and robustness checks are available in the methods writeup on my GitHub). A map of the station network is also available in the repo; note that coverage is much denser east of 100W, a point that becomes important later in the post.

2 This also explains most of the difference between the dashed and solid blue lines in the “days ≥95°F, 11-year running means” figure. The long-record station network oversamples the region where the 1930s were most extreme and undersamples the South and West where recent warming has added the most 95F days.

3 This matters a lot. Computed naively over whatever area has data each year, the global days above 95F triple from ~12 to ~37 days per year, but much of that rise is an artifact of hot regions (the Sahara, the tropics, interior Australia) entering the dataset over time. On the fixed network the increase is a still-substantial ~75% (from ~13 to ~22 days per year). The fixed-coverage region is disproportionately Northern Hemisphere midlatitude land, so this series should be read as “hot days where we have century-long records” rather than a true global land average.

Liz Slooten couldn’t believe how many dead dolphins she was seeing. It was 1984, and the New Zealand-based zoology student was just beginning to study the smallest and rarest dolphins in the world. Now corpses were washing ashore in alarming numbers. Most were found entangled in fishing nets. For others, the cause of death was a mystery.

“We started asking the question, what the hell’s going on here?” Slooten remembers.

More than 40 years later, she’s still asking uncomfortable questions.

Recently retired from the University of Otago, Slooten is a leading expert on the endangered Hector’s dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori). As of 2024, there are only 15,000 of these miniature dolphins left. A closely related subspecies, Māui’s dolphin (C. h. maui), teeters on the brink of extinction with fewer than 50 remaining.

An endangered male Hector’s dolphin, around five feet long, jumps out of the water off the coast of South Island in New Zealand. Credit: Steve Dawson, New Zealand Whale and Dolphin Trust

There has long been debate whether Māui and Hector are separate species, but a 2002 study presented genetic analysis confirming that Māui is a subspecies of Hector’s with a bigger skull.

Māui live in the shallow water along the northwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island, at least 100 miles away from the home waters of Hector’s dolphins, in the shallows off South Island.

Both mammals still face the threat of entanglement from set nets and trawling, as fishing has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry in New Zealand, according to a recent report from the International Whaling Commission.

Established in 1946, the International Whaling Commission recommends conservation measures for both whale and dolphin populations. Its scientific committee also conducts population estimates on animals, including Māui dolphins, who are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Just this March a dead juvenile Māui dolphin appeared along the shore of Port Waikato, a rural coastal town on the North Island of New Zealand just over 90 kilometers (56 miles) from Auckland. The remains were so decomposed that officials were unable to determine a cause of death and were initially unclear on whether it was a Hector or, as DNA later confirmed, a Māui.

“It was heartbreaking and really concerning,” says Christine Rose, the founder and chair of Māui and Hector’s Dolphin Defenders, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting both the country’s endemic dolphins. “We feel it in a visceral sense every time we get a report of a dolphin dying or being killed. Those small populations, with Māui in particular, it’s particularly tragic.”

Both dolphin subspecies, known for their fins shaped like Mickey Mouse ears, are protected under the Marine Mammals Protection Act passed in 1978. This New Zealand law works to preserve all animals in the country’s waters, prohibiting people from harming or killing them without a permit.

On-Board Monitoring

In October 2023, as Māui and Hector’s populations reached dire levels, New Zealand turned to alternative conservation methods by introducing electronic monitoring or cameras on board to watch for dolphins caught in nets.

That bycatch appears to be increasing. In the first year, fishermen reported 12 Hector’s dolphins found dead in trawling nets, later confirmed through camera footage. This is a stark increase: In the 30 years before cameras were put on board, onboard observers reported only two Hector’s dolphins in trawling nets and a single Māui caught in 2012.

The new figure may even be an undercount. Officials often rely on reports from fishermen before reviewing camera footage, and many fishermen do not report when a dolphin is caught, so bycatch numbers may be a conservative estimate, according to the International Whaling Commission report.

While fishermen are required to report when they find a dolphin in their net, they are exempt from “accidental capture.” They only face penalties if they are caught lying to officials in their report. Last March officials charged one South Island fisherman $5,000 after camera footage documented him cutting his nets and allowing a dead Hector’s dolphin to sink to the ocean floor. Initially, he told officials he had not caught any protected species.

This occurred years after the government declined to follow repeated advice from the IUCN and a request from the IWC to expand the no-net zone as far as 20 miles offshore and ban trawling in all dolphin habitats.

Despite calls to ban trawling in dolphin habitat, another former commercial fisherman, Nathan Hines, says, “As a fisherman, there’s never really any hate towards the dolphins themselves.” Hines started his fishing career by working on a wide range of fishing trawlers. During the past 10 years, he owned his own fishing vessel, where he was fishing the “heart of Hector dolphins’ habitat.”

“They’re always a highlight of my day,” Hines says. Lately, he’s been using dolphin acoustic deterrent devices, which are attached to fishing gear, releasing sounds and alerting marine mammals in hopes of reducing bycatch.

There are no requirements to use these devices in New Zealand, though.

Preserving the Subspecies

To try and push the government for stricter conservation efforts, a new generation of researchers is turning to genetic analysis, seeking better strategies for both dolphins. In a 2025 study, an Otago-based team reported it had sequenced the genomes of both dolphins and found no evidence they are interbreeding — an alarming conclusion for the much smaller Māui population.

“We’ve known that the Māui’s dolphin [has] been in trouble for many years,” says study co-author Sebastián Alvarez-Costes, a doctoral student at Otago. “Now we have evidence that they are completely separated. The authorities need the most evidence that you can give them about the populations to then act and protect them.”

 

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Māui’s dolphins split from Hector’s as global sea levels began to rise after the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, when the passage between New Zealand’s two main islands became too deep for the dolphins to comfortably traverse, according to the study.

Despite the extensive genetic evidence that Māui’s and Hectors are separate subspecies, Shane Jones, a member of parliament and the New Zealand Fisheries Minister, continues to deny Māui’s existence, a claim he first stated in 2020.

“There is no Māui’s dolphins,” Jones reiterated on NewstalkZB, a New Zealand-based radio network in September 2025.

That same month Jones implemented an overnight three-month blanket ban on set-net fishing along the Otago coastline on the Southern half of the South Island to reduce the amount of bycatch of another endangered species also endemic to the country, the yellow-eyed penguin, known as hoiho. He then extended the ban an additional nine months.

On the radio show, Jones said the issue of Māui’s conservation is different, because “there is no such thing,” despite evidence showing otherwise. Jones did not respond to The Revelator’s request to comment.

Māui’s dolphins are slightly larger than Hectors and 40% less genetically diverse due to their isolation and small numbers, the study found. This makes them highly susceptible to the risks of inbreeding, including reproductive failure and diseases like toxoplasmosis. The International Whaling Commission report did find that the threat of toxoplasmosis, which killed two Māui’s dolphins in 2013, is declining.

The population is now so small, though, that “every single dolphin mortality is significant,” says Chris Parsons, an independent dolphin researcher who was not involved in the study.

The tragedies go beyond the dolphins themselves. They are regarded by the Indigenous Māori people as Taonga, a word meaning “treasure” that the Māori apply to anything that carries cultural significance.

“The Tribes have responsibilities of looking after the dolphins,” says Alana Alexander, a dolphin researcher and study author who has Tribal lineage and says this influences her work. “It heightens my sense of obligations to making sure that what I do is both useful for the dolphins but also for the Tribes.”

To try and push for better efforts beyond the conservation efforts that got their start in 1986 — largely based on research by Slooten, who was just starting her doctoral studies at the time — Rose’s group is now taking matters internationally. This January Māui and Hector’s Dolphin Defenders filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade to push the U.S. government to enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act and ban the importation of seafood from any foreign fishery that harms or kills marine mammals in excess of U.S. standards.

Protecting these dolphins is a multigenerational effort. Back when Slooten first started her studies, her team autopsied 61 dolphins between 1984 and 1986. Ten were found on beaches with no known cause of death, and 51 dolphins were caught in fishing nets. Interviews with fishers confirmed the problem.

“It became immediately clear: There was no way that that was sustainable,” Slooten says.

The rules that Slooten originally helped instill have helped somewhat, slowing population decline, and the remaining Māui dolphins are younger, a median age of eight years old as of 2021, a hopeful sign of population recovery, according to Rochelle Constantine, another study author. But overall population levels haven’t rebounded.

Part of the problem is that these dolphins, which researchers thought primarily stayed within seven miles of the coast, now stray as far as 20 miles offshore in some areas — beyond the government-determined protected areas — where they are threatened by all sorts of fishing-related activities, including gill, set and trawling nets, as well as seismic testing, mining, and tourism.

Future of Conservation

For Māui’s dolphins the situation has never been more dire. Even standard efforts like captive breeding may be too risky to implement, as the stress of capturing the animals can sometimes kill them, as it did during a tragic incident with critically endangered vaquita dolphins, according to Slooten.

Researchers say we need to stop using fishing nets in Hector’s and Māui’s habitat. If we do not, the ultimate risk is extinction, which could have cascading effects on food webs in coastal waters.

“You [are] basically removing one of the most important predators,” Alvarez-Costes says. “You are losing history and a species that is sacred for the local community.”

Hines says he thinks we could develop better deterrent devices. “I believe with the right research and the right money put into it, it wouldn’t be hard to get that interactions with Hector’s dolphins down to zero, and then everyone wins.”

It’s unclear if the government will move forward with these recommendations. A few months ago, Slooten and other researchers met and discussed the dolphins’ risk assessment. With their findings, they could implement new conservation efforts, but the next International Whaling Commission meeting isn’t until 2028, two years from now.

Māui dolphins do not have time to wait.

“They could go extinct at any time. They’re just treading water,” Constantine says.

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

The Te Awa Tupua Act: An Inspiration for Communities to Take Responsibility for Their Ecosystems

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