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With the official start to hurricane season right around the corner, people living in the path of hurricanes are experiencing rain, wind and stormy weather. These communities are no strangers to the full extent of damage caused by destructive weather. Many have lost everything to storms and are still building their lives back after throwing away all of their belongings, boarding up broken windows, buying generators and living out of hotel rooms. 

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is making more money than ever before. Six of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies that are driving the climate crisis – Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and TotalEnergies – are on track to make almost $3,000 in profits every single second this year, according to a new report, as households across the world grapple with soaring energy prices and inflation, which are driving a cost-of-living crisis.

The climate crisis increases global temperatures. Rising temperatures mean hurricanes that form have the potential to bring stronger winds and heavier rain, which, in turn, means more damage. But it’s not just the fossil fuel industry that is making storms worse. Oil and gas companies cannot build their destructive projects without the same corporations that hold significant power over our financial security and daily lives: insurers, banks and investors.

Insurers

Just like how we can’t drive a car or buy a house without insurance, oil and gas corporations can’t build or operate new projects without insurance. Insurance giants like Chubb, Liberty Mutual and AIG provide insurance to fossil fuel companies so more destructive projects can be built. Insurers also take the money we pay for car, health and life insurance and invest it in fossil fuel companies. It’s estimated that insurance companies have more than $534 billion invested in coal, oil, and gas companies.

Insurers know the climate crisis is happening now and that they’re on the hook to pay for the damage it’s causing. But instead of ditching fossil fuels, they’re withdrawing coverage for communities in disaster-prone areas. In Louisiana, insurance is becoming harder to find and difficult to afford. Massive claims from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita drove large national insurance companies to scale back their coverage and remaining companies to jack up rates. Homeowners in New Orleans saw their premiums double, with some required to pay an extra $3,000 per year. After Louisiana was hit by Hurricanes Laura, Delta, Ida, and Zeta, a dozen insurers became insolvent and many others left the state. We pay more and get less protection. They do business “as usual.”

Banks

Similar to a car loan or mortgage, banks lend fossil fuel companies money that must be repaid over time with interest. Banks also give companies revolving loans or lines of credit that companies can draw from as needed, kind of like a credit card. They also help companies raise money by facilitating the sale of stocks and bonds to investors, a process called underwriting.

In 2024, the warmest year on record, JP Morgan Chase was the world’s top fossil fuel financier for the year, with $53.5 billion in fossil fuel financing. Bank of America rose two ranks to become the second biggest financier of fossil fuels globally. Over two-thirds of banks covered in the Banking on Climate Chaos report (45 banks) increased their fossil fuel financing from 2023 to 2024, with Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Barclays each financing over $12 billion more than last year.

Investors 

Investors provide the funding for fossil fuel projects by purchasing the stocks and bonds that companies issue. Institutional investors hold more than $1.6 trillion in shares and bonds across companies planning major petrochemical expansions in the U.S. Vanguard is the largest investor in fossil fuels worldwide, with $444 billion invested across the sector. The new Toxic Finance report found just five investors control nearly one-third (31%) of companies leading the U.S. petrochemical expansion: Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, Capital Group, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Storms didn’t used to be this bad. It didn’t get this hot so soon. Wildfires weren’t this frequent. In fact, a new report from the UN states that the next five years are projected to be the hottest on record. Fossil fuel companies and the institutions that finance them know this, yet they won’t stop injecting their client’s money into projects that continue sacrificing communities for short-term profits. All financial institutions have a responsibility to adopt transition plans that drastically cut fossil fuel financing, including an immediate end to expansion financing. Their money would be much better spent on clean, renewable energies so we can prevent disasters before they happen.

The post Who Makes Hurricane Damage Worse? Insurers, Banks and Investors appeared first on Earthworks.

A sea of solar panels is rapidly engulfing one of the world’s largest salt deserts. By 2029, nearly 60 million panels will cover 280 square miles of India’s Rann of Kutch, extending right up to the border with Pakistan. The Khavda solar park is set to be the world’s largest and most powerful supplier of electricity from the sun, with a generating capacity of 30 gigawatts — 30 times the size of a typical coal or nuclear power station and enough to power Austria. 

With India’s economy now growing faster than China’s, Khavda epitomizes the country’s breakneck rush to electrify with solar power. Installed solar capacity in India has been growing by 40 percent a year. In March, it passed 150 gigawatts, and by 2030 is set to double again. 

Analysts say the world’s most populous nation is on the verge of becoming the first major country to power its industrialization predominantly with solar energy. 

Cheap solar is “enabling India to develop without the long fossil-fuel detour taken by the West and China,” said Kingsmill Bond, energy strategist and director at Ember, a U.K.-based think tank that tracks the world’s transition to renewable energy. “China built on coal; India is building on sun,” he said. “And what India is doing could also be mirrored in other emerging economies.” 

India’s solar revolution comes as a surprise. Just a decade ago, apart from rooftop installations and a few microgrids serving remote rural villages, solar power was virtually unknown. The government seemed hell-bent on industrializing with coal, unleashing a rising tide of carbon dioxide emissions and supercharging climate change.

Sources: Ember, Energy Institute. Yale Environment 360 / Made with Flourish

In 2015, shortly after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to double coal output by 2020. And at successive international climate negotiations, his ministers pushed back angrily against demands that the country renounce the fossil fuels that drove industrialization in Europe and North America. 

“How can anyone expect that developing countries make promises about phasing out coal [when they] still have to deal with poverty reduction?” Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav asked angrily at COP26 in Glasgow five years ago, before sabotaging the conference’s planned declaration on eliminating coal from the global economy. 

But back home, policy was already changing. The country’s sunny climate made it a natural home for solar energy, and the cost of solar panels was falling fast. Ever since the Glasgow conference, India has been introducing solar energy at an accelerating rate. Last year, for the first time, more than half its installed generating capacity was from non-fossil fuel sources. 

As booming India’s electricity demand continues to grow by more than 6 percent each year, the solar trend is set to continue. According to the International Energy Agency, or IEA, about half the growth anticipated between now and 2030 will be met by solar power, and another 25 percent from other low-carbon sources, mostly wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear. 

Leading the solar surge is the country’s largest private power producer and the world’s second largest solar developer, the Adani Group. Founded in 1988 initially as a commodity importer by Gautam Adani, a long-time confidante of Prime Minister Modi and reputedly now Asia’s richest person, it is widely regarded as having benefited from Modi’s patronage. 

Eyebrows were raised in 2023 when long-standing military protocols banning all construction within 6 miles of the border with Pakistan were set aside weeks before Adani gained control of that land for the Khavda project. And in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Adani executives of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian government officials to obtain lucrative supply contracts for its solar energy and hiding this from potential investors. The case was dropped this month after Adani made offers to invest in the U.S., though U.S. officials denied any link. 

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Still, the fast-growing Khavda solar park, which had an installed capacity of 9.4 gigawatts as of April, is the jewel in the Adani crown. Its panels are attended by robots that dry-clean them at night to remove desert salt and dust without requiring precious freshwater. The project also includes wind turbines in the windy coastal region on the shores of the Arabian Sea, which should secure nighttime power for the grid.

India still has a long way to go to break its dependence on fossil fuels. Coal still delivers most of the country’s baseload and fuels about 70 percent of total power generation. It helps make India the world’s third-largest carbon dioxide emitter, after China and the U.S, and is a major cause of the country’s urban smogs, which are the worst in the world. But the target to double coal mining output has been quietly forgotten, and construction of coal-fired power stations has been much reduced. Coal’s share in the energy mix is set to fall below 50 percent by 2035, according to the IEA.

Still, with its enormous generating capacity, coal remains deeply entrenched. And there are other constraints on how much solar power can contribute to keeping the lights on in India. While solar last year made up 28 percent of the country’s total installed electricity-generating capacity, it accounted for only 9.4 percent of the electricity put into supply. 

Why the difference? There are two reasons. 

The first is that the country’s outdated grid cannot yet transmit all the solar power being captured in the deserts of western India to where it is needed in the urban heartlands. At times last year, almost 40 percent of the country’s solar power output did not reach customers. 

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Charith Konda, an India-based energy researcher for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, attributes this to the rapid growth of solar facilities, which has outstripped grid development. “Solar plants typically take 18 to 24 months to build, while transmission projects usually take about five years… The grid is trying to catch up.” To that end, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has committed to spending more than $100 billion on expanding the national grid by 29 percent by 2032, through a series of green energy corridors linking solar hubs to major industrial and population centers.

But a revamped grid is only part of the answer, said Debajit Palit, who researches the country’s energy transition at the Chintan Research Foundation in New Delhi. Solar also underdelivers because India lacks the infrastructure to store renewable energy to meet demand after the sun goes down and during the cloudier monsoon season.

One solution being hurriedly adopted is to use water as a battery — so-called pumped storage. This involves linking two storage tanks or reservoirs, one higher than the other.  When the grid has surplus power, that electricity is used to pump water from the bottom tank to the top tank. Then, when the grid needs extra power, it can be generated by dropping the water through turbines to the lower tank. 

Starting later this year, a 1.4-gigawatt project is expected to pump water from one of India’s largest hydroelectric reservoirs, the Gandhi Sagar on the Chambal River in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Another, with a capacity of 3 gigawatts, is set for completion near Mumbai in 2030. In January, the country’s Central Electricity Authority identified 120 potential pumped-storage sites with a combined capacity of 180 gigawatts.

Another solution to the storage problem is lithium-ion batteries. World battery prices are falling dramatically — down 58 percent since 2023, said Ember’s global electricity analyst Kostantsa Rangelova, “making round-the-clock solar electricity increasingly viable.” 

Recognizing this, the Indian government has since last year required new solar farms to install battery storage so they can supply more constant power to the grid. Adani is currently assembling the country’s biggest battery storage system at the Khavda complex — enough to discharge over a gigawatt of power to the grid for three hours every evening. 

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An additional concern is that India remains heavily dependent on China for the technology behind its solar push. While it now manufactures most of its solar panels, the silicon materials that make the photovoltaic cells largely come from China, as do three-quarters of the lithium-ion batteries essential for energy storage. 

The Indian government is working to address this reliance on its northern neighbor for the supply chain for its renewables technologies by boosting domestic manufacturing. A more long-lasting constraint may be land. 

Solar panels require a lot of space — a difficult issue in a densely populated country that has more people than China on little more than a third of the land area. In a few places, solar companies are offering farmers the option to continue cultivating below raised solar panels, so-called agrivoltaics. But elsewhere, solar facilities are evicting peasant farmers, creating angry protests. 

Occupying areas empty of people, such as the desert salt flats of Khavda, avoids disturbing people but may put wildlife at risk. The Khavda complex abuts the Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary in Pakistan, which is home to threatened species such as striped hyenas, desert lynx, jackals, and desert foxes, as well as critically endangered great Indian bustards and migrating waterfowl following the Central Asian Flyway from Siberia to the Indian Ocean. 

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Despite such drawbacks, optimists believe that mass deployment of batteries should one day allow India to meet 90 percent of its electricity demand from solar energy. “The question is no longer whether solar can power India’s electricity system,” said Rangelova, “but how quickly it can scale.”

Not all of India’s booming industries can easily banish coal and hook up to solar-powered electricity, however. One logjam is the steel industry, which requires coal to produce the intense heat needed for blast furnaces and to convert iron ore into pig iron and then steel. India has the most ambitious plans of any country in the world for increasing steel manufacturing, aiming to double production in the coming decade. “Steel is the elephant in the room for India’s decarbonization,” said Palit. 

But in other sectors, the news is better. The country is electrifying its transportation system, for instance. The 42,000 miles of broad-gauge track in India’s vast railway network have been almost entirely electrified in the past decade. Meanwhile, electric road vehicles are moving into smoggy city streets. Most rapidly, India’s ubiquitous motorised rickshaws, often called tuk-tuks, are being electrified. Some 60 percent of sales of motorized rickshaws are now electric, making India the world leader. 

The choking of oil and gas supplies from the Middle East in recent months will only further accelerate the country’s shift to electrify its transportation sector, said Konda.

Whatever the drawbacks, the rapid advance of Indian solar power continues, and marks a sharp difference from the energy path chosen by China and, until now, what has been seen by many countries as essential for their economic development. 

For years, China was notorious for building a new coal-fired power station every week. But India is avoiding that path. Its coal use is only 40 percent of that in China at a similar stage of economic development, according to Bond. Instead, it is installing solar generating capacity at almost the same rate as China once built coal plants. 

With India’s leaders aiming to complete the country’s transition into a modern industrial economy by 2047 — the centenary of its independence from Britain — this matters for the world. India’s current per capita use of electricity is only a third of the global average, a fifth of that of China, and less than a tenth that of the U.S. Closing that gap by burning coal would be ruinous for the world’s climate. Achieving it with solar power could go a long way toward saving the planet.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A first among major nations, India is industrializing with solar on May 30, 2026.

African countries are increasingly looking to renewable energy to meet growing power demand.

Read more on E360 →

Katelynn Delos Reyes thought she knew what to expect when Typhoon Sinlaku slammed into Saipan last month. As a lifelong resident of the island, Delos Reyes had survived frequent storms, including Supertyphoon Yutu, the second-strongest in U.S. history. Eight years ago, Yutu’s 170-mph winds devastated her village in the southern end of Saipan. Just three years before that, she survived Typhoon Soudelor. 

But Sinlaku was different. “At the beginning, it was OK. But later on it wasn’t,” said Delos Reyes, who is Chamorro, Indigenous to the Mariana Islands.

A few days before it hit the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI, on April 14, Sinlaku had tropical-storm winds. That made it what is known in the Marianas as a “banana typhoon” because such storms level banana trees but leave others standing. Then over the weekend, the typhoon rapidly intensified by 75 mph in just 24 hours before becoming a 185-mph monstrosity and the strongest storm on Earth so far this year. 

Delos Reyes and her family had done what they could to prepare. They boarded up the windows. They bought gallons of drinking water and filled plastic drums to use in the shower and toilet. 

Then the storm hit, and Delos Reyes grew scared. The winds, which had weakened to 150 mph, ripped the wood from a window. Rainwater gushed through the ceiling and soaked their belongings, including Delos Reyes’ mattress. She and her partner, her mother, her daughter, and their two dogs hid in her mother’s room, where its concrete roof and walls would keep them safe. She heard sections of the roof tumbling away. Eventually, Sinlaku slowed to a crawl, forcing tens of thousands of others to remain sheltered for days. “How long is this storm going to be with us?” she prayed. “I think, Lord, maybe it’s enough, you can go and finish it elsewhere.”

More than a month after Sinlaku tore across the Western Pacific, families in the Northern Mariana Islands and beyond are still grappling with a lack of electricity and clearing debris as they pick up what’s left of their homes.

Debris litters Garapan, the center of Saipan’s tourism district, in late May, more than a month after Sinlaku hit the island. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

The region-wide death toll — including Guam and the Federated States of Micronesia — has ticked up to 17, making Sinlaku the deadliest storm in the Micronesian region of the Pacific since 2002. The deaths include a couple on Guam who succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning while running their generator indoors, as well as six crew members of the cargo ship Mariana, which was caught in the storm when its engine died. 

In Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia, the storm killed nine people, including a baby whose pregnant mother couldn’t reach the hospital due to fallen trees. Other deaths were attributed to a boat capsizing and a tree falling on someone.

Strong storms are common in the Micronesian region of the Pacific but rarely this deadly. Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central, said Sinlaku’s sudden escalation happened over ocean waters 0.6 degrees Celsius warmer than average — temperatures made 70 to 100 times more likely due to climate change, which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas. Scientists have long warned that rising marine temperatures can enable storms like Sinlaku to get stronger faster and hold more moisture, leading to increased flooding. “In general, climate change is making events like this more intense at their peak intensity,” Winkley said. Sinlaku was named for the Kosraean goddess of breadfruit in the Federated States of Micronesia — a cultural staple also threatened by climate change.

A https://www.climatecentral.org map rendering of Category 5 Super Typhoon Sinlaku southeast of Japan in April 2026. FrankRamspott / Getty Images

The Pacific is home to many Indigenous peoples who have contributed relatively little to greenhouse gas emissions, yet are already bearing its disastrous effects, ranging from stronger storms to rising seas. Their nations are increasingly calling on major polluters like the U.S. and China to be accountable for their carbon emissions and help bear the cost of the extreme weather wreaking havoc on their communities. The Federated States of Micronesia was among 140 countries last week that voted in favor of a United Nations resolution affirming that state governments have a legal obligation to protect the earth from the harm caused by greenhouse gases, and nations that fail to do so must pay climate reparations. The U.S., which claims sovereignty over the CNMI and Guam, was one of just eight nations that voted against the resolution. 

The latest available report from emergency officials in Chuuk State, the part of the Federated States of Micronesia hardest hit by the typhoon, estimates that the storm destroyed or severely damaged more than 7,000 homes in Chuuk and Yap and displaced more than 13,000 people. “Access to safe water is critically compromised, food reserves are depleting rapidly, and the outer islands face growing isolation as maritime supply lines remain constrained,” the report warned. 

U.N. agencies such as the International Organization for Migration, along with nonprofit organizations and countries like the U.S. and China, have been providing typhoon relief for Chuuk. The growing Micronesian diaspora in the U.S. has also mobilized to send food and money. “They’re going to need financial support to rebuild their houses. They’re going to need chainsaws to cut down trees,” Josie Howard, head of the Honolulu-based nonprofit We Are Oceania, told Hawai‘i Public Radio. 

Fallen trees line the road leading up to Marpi in the northern part of Saipan more than a month after Sinlaku devastated the island. Anita Hofschneider / Grist

In the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, officials are still counting the number of homes destroyed and people displaced. But as of last week, piles of debris still littered roadsides, and the entire island of Tinian remained without electricity. Families opened their windows to catch breezes, seeking relief from the humidity and 80-plus degree weather. Indigenous fishermen caught ti’ao, or goatfish, to feed their families fresh dinners in the absence of refrigeration. Residents of Guam bought so many battery-powered Ryobi fans to send their loved ones on more affected islands that the Home Depot ran out. In both the CNMI and Chuuk, children were missing school because their schoolhouses had been severely damaged and, in some cases, destroyed, with many not expected to return for months. 

On Saipan, people waited an average of two to three hours at the local recovery center to talk to Federal Emergency Management Agency officials about applying for aid. As of last week, more than 9,000 CNMI residents had applied for federal disaster assistance, and the recovery center was serving an average of 300 more each day. “It’s a snake, kind of like the lines at Disneyland,” JD Reyes, a CNMI Commerce Department official who has been managing the recovery center, said of the rows of dozens of waiting families, some of whom had brought their children.

The families were from all over the island, Reyes said. “Soudelor hit the north, and Yutu hit the south,” Reyes said. “This just hit everyone, and what made it worse is it just sat on top of us for more than 24 hours. So it really made sure, if you’re not affected, you will be.” His wife was working at the hospital during the storm, so he stayed home to watch their two-year-old and mop up the water that flooded their house in northern Saipan. Just before dawn, his neighbors ran to his house for shelter because their roof had blown away. “We actually are very fortunate; we just had our flooding, damage to personal property,” he said. His village went without electricity for more than five weeks. “But at least we have a roof over our head, no windows destroyed, just damage to the car.” 

For Delos Reyes and thousands of other residents, recovery remains uncertain. The deadline to apply for FEMA disaster assistance in the CNMI is June 22. Delos Reyes’ family in southern Saipan is one of more than 450 families who have so far received emergency tents or temporary roofs. A FEMA tent now sits in her yard, and a tarp partially covers her missing roof. 

For weeks after the typhoon, Delos Reyes dragged her rain-soaked mattress into the yard to dry slowly in the hot sun. The first thing she and her family did was clear the debris from their driveway so an ambulance could reach her mother in an emergency. Delos Reyes is a caregiver for the 94-year-old woman, who has dementia and has been bedridden for seven years. That’s one reason why, no matter how bad each storm gets or how many times she needs to repair her house, Delos Reyes doesn’t plan to leave. 

“One day at a time,” she said. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pacific Islanders slowly recover from the strongest storm of the year on May 29, 2026.

Dear Leslie, 

A lot of my work in therapy for anxiety has focused on recognizing catastrophic thinking and assessing what is more realistic. How would you suggest adapting this for a world where reality itself is increasingly becoming more catastrophic, and science suggests things will get worse in the future? 

—  Anonymously Anxious

Submit a question for a future Ask a Climate Therapist column

Dear Anonymously Anxious,

Your question points to something I’ve had to reckon with in my own practice as a therapist. Before I became more aware of the impacts of climate change, I used the same framework you describe — I helped clients recognize their distorted thinking and recalibrate toward what’s realistic. 

But as I came to understand the actual science, I had a striking realization: For climate-aware clients, their anxiety isn’t distorted at all. It’s a healthy response to real destruction and the inadequate efforts to address it. Shifting toward “what’s realistic” isn’t what we’re after to manage climate anxiety. Instead, it’s about navigating high-stakes uncertainty by developing new skills — helping people stay grounded and functional while channeling their distress into meaningful action with others. 

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

I think part of what you’re asking is how to distinguish a clear-eyed view of the climate crisis from catastrophizing. First, we need to understand the human tendency to catastrophize. Part of what shapes our perception of reality is something less visible than the daily news. We all have cognitive biases operating mostly beneath our conscious awareness. One in particular is relevant here: the negativity bias, which causes us to register threatening situations three to five times more intensely than positive ones. That might have been useful for our evolutionary survival, but it can also have a distorting effect — especially in the age of doomscrolling, when it’s altogether too easy to overwhelm ourselves with bad news.

That’s why a balanced view also requires staying current on the real progress being made: dam removals, renewable energy growth, youth litigation wins, communities building resilience. This kind of news often gets less attention, so finding it can take some effort. But seeking out these stories may help to remind you that there are answers to the problems we face.

Still, these advances don’t diminish the urgency of the genuine crisis we’re facing, and for now, our climate problems are still outpacing solutions. Watching that unfold, watching the status quo persist, can be agonizing. In therapy terms, the cognitive goal has to shift from “accurate assessment” to “functional clarity.” Accurate assessment asks, “How bad is it?” Functional clarity asks, “Given what I understand, what can I do?” The first question keeps you spinning while the second moves you forward. It can help you channel your emotions into motivation — to get involved with a local organization, lobby your elected officials, or change your own behavior.

Learn to distinguish between threat awareness, which is necessary and healthy, and threat rumination, which exhausts without informing. When your mind is cycling through worst-case futures with no path forward, that’s your signal to use the tools you’ve been building in therapy: Take a walk, do a breathing exercise, seek out a story about climate progress.

This is also where therapy offers something that information alone can’t. Climate anxiety lives in the body as much as the mind. Therapeutic tools (somatic practices, working through grief, reining in the runaway thoughts that keep you up at night, and building confidence to act) strengthen your capacity to stay present with the shifting climate reality without being overwhelmed by it. That’s not “coping” in the familiar sense of managing symptoms until life returns to normal. It’s developing the inner resources to keep showing up, keep caring, and keep acting with an open mind and heart. That kind of resilience makes sustained engagement possible.

In this with you,
Leslie

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

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• Ask a Climate Therapist: How can I balance my travel itch with guilt about emissions?

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• Ask a Climate Therapist: How do I deal with friends and family who won’t stop polluting?

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Ask a Climate Therapist: Is it still ‘catastrophizing’ if the threat is real? on May 29, 2026.

Meat your new gene edited food Channel News brendan 29th May 2026 Teaser Media

As a college sophomore with an internet connection during the Obama era, I was instantly intrigued by the promise of the new direct-to-consumer clothing brand Everlane. I don’t remember how or when I found out about the fashion startup exactly; I just remember getting the emails. Launched around 2011 with venture capital funding, Everlane styled itself in a sort-of minimalist, pro-consumer ethos. The idea was simple: sell beautiful clothing made really well — so-called “modern basics” — at reasonable prices. The company made it all the more enticing by amping up the exclusivity factor; like the early days of Gmail, you needed an invitation to shop.  

By forgoing brick-and-mortar stores, Everlane, co-founded by Michael Preysman, advertised itself as cutting out the middleman and allowing the consumer to reap the benefits. Initially, Everlane promised its wares — it started with boxy T-shirts — would always be priced at less than $100.

The company embodied a decidedly millennial spirit: the idea that change was not only possible, but possible via simply buying better things. I spent hours pouring over the brand’s email marketing and clothing collections. I got off the waitlist in the fall of 2011 (“You’re one of the first in the door!”, the email read), but for months, I just browsed. Even at their heavily discounted prices, I wondered if $25 was too much to pay for a pocket tee, when Urban Outfitters was just down the street — or if the quality of a $15 box-cut tee would hold up, especially if I couldn’t see or touch it before buying. In the early days, by Preysman’s own assessment, Everlane was operating almost as more of a branding exercise. “I have seen, candidly with Everlane, we’ve had periods where we had okay product when we launched, and the brand carried all the weight,” he told a business podcast in 2024. “Then we had great products, and we had really high engagement.”  

From the author’s email inbox. Frida Garza / Grist

Indeed, over time, the company’s aesthetic and business model shifted as it grew in popularity and reach, and its price point changed with it. In 2017, Everlane announced that its first brick-and-mortar store would open in New York City, where shoppers can still browse $148 jeans and $268 cashmere sweaters today. Its mission also became more ambitious: Everlane announced plans in 2021 to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The company sought to “empower people to live their best lives with the least impact on the planet — and leave the apparel industry cleaner than we found it.” In its latest sustainability report, Everlane stated the company has reduced Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 60 percent since 2019, and reduced per-product carbon emissions by 42 percent. 

The brand has signaled its commitment to the planet in other ways throughout the years, including its focus on using certified organic cotton and attempting to eliminate virgin plastic from its supply chain. Additionally, the company has taken the public inside its factories, publishing glossy-looking photos from its facilities in Vietnam, China, Italy, and other countries and tracking which ones use renewable energy and pay living wages. 

For these and other reasons, the company mystified consumers last week, when it was sold to the e-commerce giant Shein, which ranked as the biggest polluter in fast fashion last year. Shein offers clothing, jewelry, home goods, and accessories, all for sometimes shockingly cheap prices — the true cost of which is its carbon-intensive supply chain. The sale was orchestrated by L Catterton, the company’s majority owner, according to fashion reporter Laura Sherman who broke the story. (Preysman, who stepped down as CEO in 2022, wrote on LinkedIn that he “found out at the same time as everyone,” and has since announced he would launch another Everlane-esque business with no venture capital or private equity money.) Fashion magazines balked, asking if Everlane’s acquisition spells the end of the fashion industry’s sustainability aspirations writ large. But the sale of Everlane to this particular buyer should turn the inquiry around: Of what use are sustainability goals in the face of hyper-consumerism? Put another way: Was it ever the case that simply buying (more) different things would ever yield a more livable planet?

Consumers, it seems, only want to shop sustainably if it means they can, in fact, keep shopping: A study from 2025 found that even when shoppers are buying secondhand fashion, they’re also still buying new clothes. 

The companies’ offerings are, of course, different: Preysman famously told the New Yorker magazine, “You do not get laid in Everlane.” Shein, meanwhile, is a one-stop shop for plunging necklines, revealing cut-outs, sheer fabrics, and ruffles on ruffles. And the methods are different, too: Shein is less of a fashion brand and more of an everything store — a no-man’s land of AI-powered nanotrends — akin to Amazon or Temu. Hop on over to the Shein website, and you can just as easily find a halter top that makes you look like a ladybug or a pair of oversized jorts or buckets of slime. But, for all the hoopla around the acquisition, there are glimpses of Shein’s story in Everlane’s initial pitch, now adjusted for a new generation of shoppers accustomed to ultra-convenience. 

They were both, at one point, online-only stores offering clothes people wanted at seemingly unbeatable prices. And Shein has also apparently taken pages out of Everlane’s marketing playbook, by offering limited glimpses into its factories — albeit, heavily filtered through its influencer-fueled PR machine. In 2023, the platform invited a group of content creators on an all-expenses-paid trip to tour its facilities in Guangzhou, China. One influencer documented the visit in a video, noting that at least one worker was “surprised” about the rumors that Shein factories’ poor working conditions. (The video has since been deleted.) The publicity move was immediately met with criticism for attempting to sanitize Shein’s reputation. 

Everlane’s store in San Francisco. Liz Hafalia / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

In fairness, fifteen years after it launched, Everlane is nowhere near the scale of Shein, which reportedly produces 10,000 new items per day. But the question around whether the fashion world can ever truly become sustainable is something of a red herring, and even Preysman knows this — or knew it, at one point. “The word sustainability has been completely greenwashed,” he told Forbes in 2021. He went on: “Show me a fashion brand that claims it is sustainable, and I will show you a fashion brand that is not honest. One can be ‘more sustainable’ but nothing is truly sustainable.” In the end, the future of fashion retail relies on consumers buying more clothes. 

I did eventually buy multiple things from Everlane: a canvas backpack that held up really nicely for years; a silk button-down I wore just as much to graduate school classes as I did on vacation. I bought a pair of bootcut jeans after a long, painstaking discussion with a salesperson and a third woman in the dressing room who butted into the conversation. 

But I never shop at the Everlane store or website anymore, and that’s because I don’t have to — the thrift stores of New York City are filled with the brand’s clothes. It’s not the only one: On the racks at Goodwill, I can always dependably find at least one Shein top these days.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Everlane, Shein, and the myth of sustainable fashion on May 28, 2026.

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They never thought the fires would reach them. They lived in cities, after all, far from the parched, combustible wilderness.

There’s the woman who never expected to have to grab her 1-year-old out of her bed in the middle of the night, shielding her soft head from a hailstorm of flaming embers as she dashed to the car. Or the mom of two who wound up on the beach holding her youngest, a 9-week-old baby, wondering how she would swim if the fires bearing down on her from the hills above forced her into the ocean. Or the pregnant asthmatic who had to decide where to put her air purifier as suffocating smoke blanketed her neighborhood — in her own bedroom, or the bedroom of her eldest child. The women don’t know each other, but they share the same instinctive feeling that they didn’t know enough — and didn’t do enough — to keep their children safe.

As urban sprawl encroaches on wilderness — and as the planet grows drier in many places and hotter almost everywhere — wildfires are becoming more dynamic, unpredictable, and far-reaching, affecting broader and broader swaths of the world’s population. On the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the United States, two of the planet’s most densely populated wildfire hotspots, millions now find themselves in the midst of a public health crisis that is not yet fully understood. Even fires that are limited to wilderness can blanket major cities in levels of pollution that are without recent precedent, leaving residents to guess how to protect themselves and their families. And when wildfires push through city limits, they incinerate synthetic materials, vehicles, and buildings, producing a mix of pollutants more toxic than the smoke that comes from burning vegetation. 

None of this is theoretical. It’s been six years since Australia’s so-called Black Summer coated the country’s east coast in choking smoke, three years since 100 million Americans were exposed to deadly pollution from Canadian wildfires, and just one year since fires decimated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, destroying about 13,000 residential properties and killing 31. But Australian and U.S. public health systems are ill-prepared for the inevitable return of such blazes. Nowhere is the lapse more clear than in the paucity of guidance provided to pregnant people. Scientists are just beginning to study how pollution from fires affects babies in the womb, and warnings from public officials and doctors consistently fail to account for the most vulnerable. 

Years after prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy, parents are left wondering whether asthma, developmental delays, and other health problems suffered by their children began with what was in the air before they were born — and whether it’s safe to raise a family in a place where every summer brings the same threat back to their doorsteps.

Smoke shrouds the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the Australian bushfires in November 2019. Bai Xuefei / Xinhua via Getty Images

Anneke French was excited for her maternity leave. A nurse at Canberra Hospital in Australia’s capital city, French was in her third trimester in the spring of 2019. Many in her tight-knit group of childhood best friends were also preparing to give birth or already had babies of their own.

“We were really looking forward to getting out and having lots of free time to go and have ladies’ lunches, or do some things by ourselves to treasure our time before we had a newborn to care for,” she remembered.

But by the time her leave began, French was preparing for a very different kind of summer.   

Earlier that year, in the depths of Australia’s winter, parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales began to burn — an ominous start to what is typically the country’s quietest fire season. By spring, new blazes were flaring along the east coast, feeding on vegetation desiccated by years of drought. Strong winds pushed flames across parched forests and grasslands, while dry lightning strikes sparked new fires faster than crews could contain them. Summer brought unprecedented heat waves; temperatures rose higher than most Australians had experienced in their lifetimes, cresting to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) in some areas. Hundreds of fires broke out across southeastern Australia, burning millions of hectares of land. More than two-thirds of Australians were exposed to flames or smoke, making it the most far-reaching environmental disaster in the young nation’s history. 

While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020.

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Throughout the crisis, pregnant women and new parents in smoke-affected areas, tasked with the responsibility of protecting both themselves and their infants, were largely given the same public health guidance as other sensitive groups (the elderly, asthmatics, and people with diabetes): Stay indoors as much as possible. 

Even French, a nurse, couldn’t find reliable guidance on what more she could do to protect herself and her baby from the smoke. At a prenatal appointment several weeks before her due date, French’s obstetrician told her to avoid going outside. She stayed indoors as best she could, preparing the house for its newest arrival. But the smoke worried her. “The smell was strong enough that it felt dangerous,” she said, “like you would feel if you were too close to a bushfire and felt it was time to evacuate.”

One night when she was a little more than 35 weeks pregnant, French felt a stabbing pain in her stomach so severe she could hardly take a breath. She and her husband, James, rushed to the hospital, where their obstetrician quickly discovered that French had a placental abruption, meaning the placenta was partially or fully removed from the walls of the uterus, cutting the baby off from its source of oxygen. The condition is usually preceded by either sudden trauma like a severe fall or chronic maternal cigarette smoking. French had not fallen, and she didn’t smoke.

She was rushed into an operating room for an emergency cesarean. 

Stephen Robson, French’s obstetrician, smelled smoke in the operating room that night and realized that the pollution from the fires had penetrated through to the very center of the hospital, into the rooms that doctors are trained to keep sterile at all costs.

French’s daughter, Margot, was born nearly five weeks early and underweight. It wasn’t until later that French began to wonder whether her placental abruption had anything to do with the bushfires surrounding Canberra. She was never told that the smoke might affect the timing of her birth or the health of her baby. She was never given a mask to use. 

As the summer continued and the fires only got worse, French began to notice the smoke in her home as she cared for Margot. She could see blue bands swirling beneath the overhead lights in her house. And even when she couldn’t see it, the stench was always there.

Margot’s birth wasn’t the only abnormal delivery Robson witnessed that summer. He remembers seeing smoke floating in the beam of light cast by an overhead medical spotlight during what was otherwise a routine birth. “It looked like the bat signal,” he said. “It was truly extraordinary.” 

It’s not just the placental abruption that bothers French now, six years later. She had two more children in the years after giving birth to Margot, none of whom endured the kind of bushfire season her firstborn weathered in utero in 2019. Margot is the only one of the three who struggles with asthma, a chronic, non-curable respiratory disease that afflicts neither French nor her husband, and eczema, an itchy and recurrent skin condition. 

Many of the children born to French’s friend group during the Black Summer have also developed asthma and eczema. “Her early months of life were in the Black Summer, and I worry about that for her as she grows,” she said. 

Anneke French sits with her daughter Margot. French worries that early-life smoke exposure may have contributed to some of Margot’s health conditions, like asthma. Jess Davis / ABC News

The evidence connecting chronic conditions suffered by babies born during the Black Summer to the smoke their mothers inhaled is largely anecdotal. That’s part of the problem; the scale of smoke exposure in recent years is unprecedented, so evidence-gathering is still in relatively early stages. But treating the harms of wildfire smoke as an open question is less about waiting for the science to settle, and more about ignoring what we already know about the risks of very similar pollution. In other words, not preparing for wildfire smoke is a policy choice.

General air pollution from trucks, factories, and other industrial sources is one of the most extensively studied environmental health risks in the world. It’s been the subject of sustained scientific inquiry since the 1970s, when governments began regulating and measuring air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. This research shows that fine particulate matter seeps deep into the lungs and circulates through the bloodstream, touching nearly every organ system in the body. 

The resulting inflammation, clotting, and blood vessel damage is linked to coronary heart disease and a higher risk of stroke and heart attacks in adults. Lungs chronically exposed to air pollution are more likely to develop cancer. Brains show signs of neuroinflammation, cognitive decline, and dementia. Immune systems are more fragile and susceptible to disease. In total, the World Health Organization estimates that indoor and outdoor air pollution from all sources combined kills some 7 million people every year — more than the number of people who die from diabetes, tuberculosis, and in car accidents combined. 

In pregnancy, fine particulate matter is particularly damaging. A baby developing in the womb is uniquely vulnerable to disruption. Every organ in the body is rapidly developing. The health of the person carrying the baby is closely connected to narrow developmental windows; reduced lung function in the mother, for example, can restrict the flow of oxygen that’s crucial to brain development and overall growth. Studies show that particles in polluted air can enter the bloodstream and migrate across the placenta and even into placental tissue, where they disrupt oxygen and nutrient exchange with the fetus. Across large epidemiological studies, higher exposure to general air pollution has been consistently associated with increased risks of preterm birth, low birth weight, and stunted fetal growth — outcomes that already affect millions of pregnancies worldwide each year. 

“The exposures in utero, during gestation periods, have an impact on life and the development of children when they’re born,” said Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra. “It can have consequences for many years — the rest of their lives.”

Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra, holds an air quality monitor in his office. While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020. Jess Davis / ABC News

There is some early evidence that wildfire smoke — which also contains fine particular matter — carries similar risks for babies and their mothers. A 2024 study that looked at a large cohort of births in the southwestern U.S. found that particulate matter from wildfires was linked to higher risk of preterm birth and low birth weight. An Australian cohort study of pregnant asthmatic women found that exposure to bushfire smoke was associated with asthma in their babies. Two studies published this year using large sample sizes provided by hospital systems in California found a novel connection between wildfire smoke and autism diagnoses in children exposed in utero. 

Examining the health consequences of breathing in wildfire smoke remains, however, a nascent area of scientific study — largely because, until recently, wildfire smoke was viewed as a periodic byproduct of disaster rather than a chronic public health threat that could match the scale of other sources of pollution. In the U.S., for example, wildfire smoke is still treated differently than other sources of air pollution by the Clean Air Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency considers pollution from wildfires as natural “exceptional events.” The agencies tasked with air quality protection in other countries, including Australia, largely view the issue similarly. 

But the research landscape is changing as global warming lengthens the frequency and intensity of fire weather and wildfire smoke starts to affect more people. Exposure to wildfire smoke, while variable year to year, is trending upward in the U.S., Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Europe, Russia, Canada, and parts of South Africa, among other places. In the U.S., smoke from wildfires has contributed up to a quarter of the total particulate matter pollution nationwide in some recent years, unraveling the air quality gains the country has made since 2000. Some research indicates that wildfire smoke might be more damaging than general air pollution — up to 10 times more harmful than the compounds in car exhaust, according to one study.

Luke Wright takes a rest after putting out spot fires at his brother’s home near Sydney in December 2019.
ABC News

Emergency department records in areas affected by fires show that these intense episodes have the same consequences as background air pollution, but on shorter timescales. They boost hospitalizations for respiratory stress and cardiovascular conditions, and cause premature death. More than 400 people died from indirect smoke inhalation during the Black Summer, and several thousand more were hospitalized. Asthma-related emergency department visits across New York state spiked 82 percent at the peak intensity of the Canadian wildfire smoke event in 2023. Emergency room visits for heart attack symptoms rose 46 percent in the three months following the Los Angeles wildfires. 

The problem is set to get worse as the world moves deeper into the 21st century. Already, particulate matter from forest, grass, and peat fires kills an estimated 339,000 people a year worldwide. And climate-driven wildfire conditions are expanding across Australia, South America, Europe, and boreal Asia. A recent analysis found that millions of people at the edges of Australia’s biggest cities could experience urban wildfires similar to the devastating blazes that beset Los Angeles in the winter of 2025.

The Black Summer was a golden opportunity to extract valuable information about the health effects of wildfire smoke on major population centers, but Australia’s government at the time appeared more interested in downplaying the severity of the crisis. “We’ve had fires in Australia since time began,” Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, leader of the right-wing National Party of Australia, said as the fires burned in 2019, calling the push to study the role climate change may have played in fueling the blazes the “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke capital city greenies.”

The federal government ultimately committed just 5 million Australian dollars for bushfire-related health research across nine projects: AU$3 million for smoke exposure, and AU$2 million for the mental health consequences of the event. The sum was only enough to scratch the surface of the work required to understand the full scope of the smoke’s effects. (A single large epidemiological study in the U.S. can cost $3 million alone.) The health ramifications of the Black Summer were quickly eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck as the fires were ebbing. The biological samples — blood, tissue, placental cells, and other clues that could have laid the groundwork for long-term analyses of the health consequences of smoke exposure — were never collected and studied. 

“Initially, we had grand plans of going and getting blood samples and doing respiratory tests,” said Christopher Nolan, an endocrinologist in Canberra who conducted surveys of pregnant women in 2020 to assess the impact of the fires on maternal and fetal health. The onset of the pandemic complicated those plans, and Nolan never ended up getting funding at the scale necessary to collect samples. After a series of public meetings, the Australian Parliament published an interim report in 2020 concluding that “long‑term funding and research is needed to more definitively determine the impact of hazardous smoke exposure and inhalation on individuals and the community.”

“We had a missed opportunity in Australia to invest in [understanding] the long-term consequences,” said Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra who is part of Doctors for the Environment Australia, a network of medical professionals that advocates for climate action. 

Robson, the obstetrician who was working at Canberra Hospital during the Black Summer, feels similarly. “When babies were born, I noticed many of the placentas had changes that often you only see in severe disease, like severe blood pressure, or women with immunological diseases,” he said. “It was striking and it occurred for months afterwards, because I presume women had been affected by the smoke when it was there and it played out across the rest of the pregnancy for them.”

Stephen Robson worked as an obstetrician at Canberra Hospital during Australia’s Black Summer wildfires.
Jess Davis / ABC News

Both Hunter and Robson say they fear Australia’s capacity to respond to smoke events hasn’t improved since. Robson envisions a protected area inside the country’s hospitals that can keep smoke out — a sort of citadel deep inside medical facilities where surgeons and other specialists can do their work without fear of smoke creeping in. Hunter would like placentas and other biological samples that may have been preserved in hospital freezers from that time to be thawed and studied. But the institutional will to take that on hasn’t materialized.

“I don’t think we’re any better prepared to deal with an environmental catastrophe like this than we were the last time around,” Robson said. 

Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra, looks at lung scans.
Jess Davis / ABC News

Even in the U.S., the country that produced the bedrock research on fine particulate matter underpinning global air quality standards, the dynamics of fire are changing so quickly that parents are still being left in the dark. 

Irene Farr could hear cars exploding somewhere in the distance on the night of January 7, 2025, near her house in northern Pasadena, California. When she poked her head out of her front door, she smelled thick smoke in the air. There was a red glow in the sky around Eaton Canyon, a nature preserve a few miles to the east. Farr thought she might get an alert telling her to evacuate or see fire trucks racing down her street. But the neighborhood was eerily quiet. Her neighbors were indoors. It seemed like just another night in Pasadena.

Reddit, the social media site, told a different story. People were putting pins on a live map that showed where flames were erupting. Every time Farr checked the map, the pins were closer to her house. At 3 a.m., she reached her breaking point. She roused her daughter, Azul, and rallied her husband, David, and his parents, who live on the same property. They drove to David’s brother’s house half an hour away and stayed awake the rest of the night, wired and anxious for news about their neighborhood. The sun never rose that morning; the smoke was so thick that 6 a.m. looked like midnight. 

Smokes and flames overwhelm a commercial area during the Eaton Fire near Altadena, California, on January 8, 2025.
Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

The Eaton Fire, one of two devastating wildfires that struck the Los Angeles area that January, ultimately killed 19 people and destroyed 9,000 buildings. Most of the deaths occurred west of a prominent north-south thoroughfare called Lake Avenue, where Farr’s house is located. Evacuation orders from the city arrived late — hours after residents on the east side of Lake Avenue had been told to leave. 

The Farr’s house was spared, but more than a year later the family still hasn’t moved back home. Azul was just 11 months old when the fires broke out — too young, Irene figured, to risk her being exposed to whatever the fires left behind. Schools, hospital clinics, supermarkets, warehouses, appliances, and plastics had been burned to ash. People online were saying that the affected areas would be toxic for at least a year. 

“We decided that we would wait until we had more data and information,” Farr said. “What ended up being a two-week wait ended up being a one-month wait, ended up being a three-month wait …”

Whenever she went back to check on the old house, Farr felt a burning in the back of her throat, a “bubbling up.” There was something lingering in the air, she thought, but she didn’t know what it was.

Irene Farr holds her daughter Azul. They evacuated their home during the Eaton Fire in January 2025.
Zoya Teirstein / Grist

Frankly, no one knew — not even local air pollution researchers who have spent years studying the health dangers of wildfire smoke in the American West. “It was unprecedented,” said Yifang Zhu, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Air monitoring stations across the country installed by the federal government are often designed to monitor general air quality. They take measurements every few days, data that helps states determine whether they are compliant with federal regulations. When the fires broke out, stations in Los Angeles continued to collect routine data on urban air pollutants, but the sensors weren’t equipped to capture the novel mix of compounds produced by burning cars, buildings, and asphalt. Many of the sensors were themselves lost to the fires.

“One big lesson we learned is if something gets burned that’s not a traditional wildfire compound, if you don’t specifically look for it, you’re not going to find it,” Zhu said. “It’s as if it didn’t exist.” The problem is that designing and deploying air quality monitors that can capture the heady mix of pollutants released by urban wildfires is expensive and requires a lot of technical expertise. 

Yifang Zhu is an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

Zhu’s colleague Mike Kleeman, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Davis, drove around the Los Angeles burn zone in April last year, when cleanup crews were hauling away material, and took air samples with an expensive specialized air sampling instrument. He was looking for hexavalent chromium, a very toxic form of chromium used in industrial welding and manufacturing that’s linked to lung cancer. Air monitoring stations, and even air pollution research laboratories like Zhu’s, don’t measure the toxin because it requires unique equipment and it’s unstable, meaning you only have a short while to get it to the lab before it disappears. 

Kleeman found hexavalent chromium in the samples he collected at levels that were 200 times higher than they would be on a normal day in the city — not high enough to warrant a public health emergency, but illuminating for air pollution researchers who quickly realized that these urban blazes had introduced a new set of unknown variables.

“We are facing an entirely new challenge when wildfires burn into major cities,” Kleeman said. 

Zhu and Kleeman are members of the Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study, a collaboration between eight universities across the U.S. aimed at studying the short- and long-term health effects of the Los Angeles fires. The collaboration, funded by the Spiegel Family Fund, a philanthropic foundation formed by the creator of Snapchat, collected some of the biological data that researchers in Australia largely couldn’t obtain during and after the Black Summer. 
An initial study found peculiar trends in sodium and protein levels in the blood of people affected by the fires, an outcome experts still don’t understand. More research on those abnormalities and other findings is coming. Researchers involved in the initiative were focused initially on measuring the contaminants the fires produced and recruiting cohorts of people to study. Now, they’re turning to the work of investigating the long-term health impacts of the fires on those people, including subgroups like first responders and pregnant women.

More in this series

• In Arizona, a fight against a deadly fungus is under threat from Trump’s health policies
• As aid dries up in Kenya, millions are threatened by the climate-driven disease kala-azar
• Rising heat, failing kidneys: Climate’s hidden toll on migrant workers
• In Bangladesh, thousands of volunteers are battling climate-fueled disease at its source
• A hotter, wetter South is becoming a breeding ground for mold
• The frantic, high-tech fight to stop climate-fueled dengue fever

But the funding that rolled in from ultra-wealthy Los Angeles philanthropists in the immediate aftermath of the fires is starting to dry up. The federal government, beyond failing to fill the void, is cutting resources needed to understand the conditions that fuel wildfires in the first place. In April, the Trump administration announced a reorganization plan that includes closing 57 of 77 Forest Service research stations across the country, many of which study fire risk. 

There’s not much more momentum in Australia. Despite a change in government in 2022, no new major federal funding has been earmarked for bushfire smoke exposure research since the Black Summer, perhaps in part because a smoke event of that scale hasn’t happened since. 

As countries around the globe begin to grapple with the health consequences of smoke exposure, tens of millions of data points are entering the public record. But the way researchers in different countries conduct research — even the way scientists define the term “smoke exposure” — is highly variable. Some scientists use satellites to study smoke exposure, while others use computer modeling. For pregnant populations, some scientists choose to analyze smoke exposure by trimester, others look at the total number of “fire days” pregnant women live through. Efforts to identify long-term health trends are often scrambled by this lack of standardization, delaying the kind of unequivocal findings that prompt hospitals and governments to quickly implement new policies. 

The American and Australian co-authors of a 2024 global meta analysis of the research on wildfire smoke exposure in pregnant women found just 31 studies of a high enough caliber to include in their review. Their analysis was inconclusive because the studies, conducted in various countries with different methods, couldn’t be appropriately compared. In the end, the authors were forced to conclude that they had found “suggestive evidence of harm from exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy” and that more research was needed. 

Nolan, the Australian endocrinologist, thinks there should be a scientific protocol that experts all over the globe use as they conduct research on the effects of smoke exposure on natal health. A universal standard that harmonizes datasets would allow researchers to share data between institutions and hone in on the biggest risks more quickly. “[When] different groups around the world collect the data the same way, well, then you get statistical power,” Nolan said. 

Epidemiological standardization is what formed the basis of general air pollution regulations. The World Health Organization created global air quality guidelines in 1987 and established a benchmark for particulate matter pollution in 2005. Researchers were then able to draw concrete conclusions: A 2015 study, for example, found that for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase in fine particulate pollution, all-cause mortality rises by 4 percent. 

We know that wildfire smoke is bad for pregnant women. But answers to more specific questions — should women evacuate when particulate matter reaches a certain threshold? How many days of smoke exposure meaningfully increase the risk of preterm birth? — are still out of reach 

Read Next An early-life wildfire exposure sickened these monkeys for decades Jesse Nichols

It’s not a matter of if the fires will come again, but when. Much of the American West just had one of its warmest winters on record. More than half the region is in a drought at a time of year when snowpack should have hit its peak, priming the landscape for fire. “We are facing a very challenging fire year,” Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, said in April. “Our resources will be tested not only in Colorado, but across the West.” 

Earlier this year, southeastern Australia experienced the most intense heat wave it has seen since the Black Summer — an event made five times more likely by climate change. The heat fueled a spate of bushfires across the state of Victoria that burned hundreds of homes and killed one person and thousands of livestock. 

In Canberra, where temperatures approached 110 degrees F, the smell of smoke from prescribed burning this fall brought French back to 2019. “As soon as you see that plume of smoke or smell it on the air, you want to know: Where? How close? Is it in control? Is it accidental?” she said. 

French can find the answers to those questions on the Australian Capital Territory Parks website. But there is nowhere she can go for resolution about the long-term effects of the Black Summer on Margot’s health.

“I don’t know how that will affect her,” she said. “I still don’t know.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire smoke engulfed their cities. Did it make their babies sick? on May 28, 2026.

A sprawling, 40,000-acre data center planned for northern Utah has stirred up controversy across the state over the past month, partly because of the pollution it’s expected to contribute to a region that already struggles with smog.

Officials with the quasi-governmental Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, which approved the project and created tax incentives to spur its development, have become de facto cheerleaders for the data center campus, called the Stratos Project. They say Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian TV personality and the main backer of Stratos, specifically selected a remote valley north of the Great Salt Lake because a gas pipeline runs through it.

The plant that will generate electricity for the data complex would be powered “100 percent off the Ruby Pipeline,” a MIDA official said in April. 

But after weeks of protests, reams of comments against the project, and disgruntled Utahns digging into state leaders’ finances and family businesses, the state’s Republican governor has now asserted the project will “never” be solely powered by natural gas.

“That’s never going to happen,” Governor Spencer Cox told The Salt Lake Tribune last week. “The very first phase will be natural gas, but the other phases should not be. They should be nuclear, and they should be geothermal, and solar and other technology.”

The proposed Stratos Project is light on details so far. O’Leary has said that at full build, it will be one of the biggest data centers in the world, as large as Washington, D.C. Scientists, environmental advocates and some residents have raised alarms about the impact that the project — and the possibility of a massive natural gas plant to power it — could have on air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and water supplies near the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

According to some estimates, a 9-gigawatt power plant entirely powered by natural gas could raise Utah’s carbon emissions by 64 percent. Although it’s still unclear how much water the facility would need, the project’s developers have said they’re working to secure 13,000 acre-feet in Hansel Valley and the surrounding area, which is mostly agricultural. That’s enough water to meet the needs of more than 20,000 households in Utah.

The north end of the Great Salt Lake and Hansel Valley, the planned site for the Stratos Project. Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune

Opposition to the proposal has been intense. A water right filed to support the data center and power plant received nearly 4,000 letters of protest this month. Opponents held a rally at Utah’s Capitol last week and delivered a letter to Cox with more than 6,000 signatures urging him to take “binding action” to preserve the Great Salt Lake instead of issuing platitudes over social media.

During a news conference on Wednesday announcing a geothermal partnership with the neighboring states of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, Cox acknowledged problems with the rollout of the Stratos Project in Box Elder County, saying future decisions like it should involve his office and elected representatives.

“There’s no question, the process was not good,” Cox told reporters. “It’s something I’ve worried about for a long time with that entity that made that decision.” 

Cox appeared to be referring to MIDA, a development authority ostensibly meant to fund projects to support the military. Its biggest developments in recent years, however, include a hotel at the Deer Valley luxury ski resort and a swanky ski village. MIDA officials and other Stratos supporters have called the project a matter of national security.

“That was not a decision that was made by me or the Legislature,” Cox said. “In the future, those are decisions that should be made by us, so that we can do these types of things ahead of time to make sure people understand what’s actually happening out there. That did not happen, and it should happen.”

When he made his comments, Cox was hosting the final workshop in his “Energy Superabundance” initiative as chair of the Western Governors Association, part of a broader push that complements his “Operation Gigawatt” goal to more than double Utah’s energy production over the next decade.

Electricity use across the country has held relatively steady for decades, but a surge in demand for artificial intelligence computing and data centers is putting a strain on the electric grid. That’s left Western states scrambling to build new energy supplies.

At the same time, public skepticism toward large data center developments appears to be growing, particularly over concerns involving water use, noise, energy costs, and pollution.

“It feels like the future is here,” Cox said during his opening remarks at the workshop. “It’s coming quicker than people asked for, and there are so many amazing things that can come from that future, and some pretty awful ones as well.”

Read Next Utah’s fragile desert could feel like the Sahara if America’s biggest data center gets built Leia Larsen

Cox has also pushed for faster permitting timelines for large energy and infrastructure projects, arguing that environmental review processes often take too long. “This whole idea of being rushed — I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done,” he said in April. “It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer. It absolutely does not.”

Last week, Cox struck a more measured tone as criticism of the project continued to mount. “One of the things people are worried about, and rightfully so, is air quality,” he said in a brief interview as he left the workshop. “That’s a yearlong [permitting] process. … We’re not speeding those up. Those are really important, and we want to make sure that things are done the right way.”

Earlier this month, O’Leary, who was featured on the reality show “Shark Tank,” also seemed to suggest that renewables could help power the Stratos Project. He described other technological advances — such as turbines cooled with air rather than water — before turning to the natural gas power causing a stir.

“We can also put a percentage of the power generation through solar, wind, and batteries, because the battery technology is 10x more efficient than it was just five years ago,” O’Leary posted on X on May 5. “So that’s very helpful, because it makes the cost of energy lower.”

But he stopped short of fully endorsing renewables for his project.

Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and analyst with Utah Clean Energy, calculated that a 9-gigawatt natural gas power plant will produce around 35 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. By comparison, the entire state of Utah generates 55 million metric tons annually, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. So the Stratos Project could raise Utah’s emissions by about 64 percent.

“That’s massive,” Mitchell said. But it could be even more, because his estimate didn’t account for “any additional methane leakage” from piping and using the natural gas, he said.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world’s largest data center was supposed to run on 100% natural gas. Utah’s Republican governor says ‘never.’ on May 28, 2026.

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Songbirds generally make their migratory flights at night, and during spring migration tens of millions of birds may be streaming north above us as we sleep. But when the sun rises, where do these tired birds choose to stop, rest, and refuel?

You may picture a nature preserve or grassy field, but a study published earlier this year in the journal Nature Cities shows that a large percentage of these birds are making their “stopovers” in cities, illustrating the importance of urban conservation efforts.

Ornithologist Miguel Jimenez was a Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University when he led the study as part of his dissertation. The project was inspired by his desire “to do work that was useful to people who are actively working to conserve birds,” he says. “So I had a bunch of conversations with different folks doing that work, and one thing I consistently heard was that it’s often really hard to convince people that bird conservation in cities matters.”

Jimenez’s dissertation focused on studying bird migration using weather radar. Large masses of migrating birds show up clearly on the nationwide radar system used by meteorologists, and this data isn’t subject to the same biases as bird counts carried out by people. If you capture a radar image just as migrating birds are starting out in the morning, Jimenez explains, you can pinpoint the stopover locations from which they’re leaving.

“You see this kind of mushroom cloud of birds taking off, and then they start to dissipate over the landscape.”

Jimenez and his colleagues used data from 143 radar sites to identify stopover hotspots across the continental United States for both spring and fall migration, then calculated how many of those sites fell within urban areas.

“To be totally honest, I ran this analysis originally expecting, like, I’ll probably figure out that most of it doesn’t happen in cities,” says Jimenez.

Instead, nearly half of the stopover sites he found were within what the U.S. Census Bureau has defined as Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Other ways of statistically defining cities showed a similarly disproportionate number of migrating birds using urban stopover sites.

So why would migrating birds choose city habitats?

“Probably a good chunk of my career is [going to be spent] on that question,” says Jimenez.

But there are already some indications. Cities often develop along coastlines and rivers, places that already have high biodiversity, he points out. And birds are attracted to artificial light at night (though scientists aren’t sure exactly why), so perhaps they’re being drawn in by city lights.

Taking things a step further, Jimenez and his colleagues searched for signs of the so-called “luxury effect,” the tendency of urban wildlife to congregate in high-income neighborhoods due to the greater amounts of green space. Analyzing bird stopover use of more than 2,000 parks across 88 urban areas, they found that stopover density was indeed higher, on average, in areas with higher-income residents.

These nationwide averages, however, don’t tell the full story. Both the overall density of urban stopovers and the strength of the luxury effect varied considerably from one U.S. region to another, and the reason may have something to do with water.

Cities where the luxury effect was most pronounced, such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, were in regions where surface water can be scarce. Dryer regions also had a higher overall proportion of urban stopover sites. It seems in dry places, the way that humans concentrate the available water (and the resulting vegetation) in the places where we live — and especially in the highest-income neighborhoods — may also attract high concentrations of migrating birds.

“This area, where ecology meets the social forces that shape biodiversity, is really important and interesting,” says Emily Cohen, a bird migration expert and faculty member University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who was not involved in the project. “Not only are cities important for birds, but the connection between people and birds [that can happen in cities] is just a really powerful tool for conservation.”

Cohen says she’d love to see follow-up research on the regional variations uncovered by Jimenez’s work, as well as on how the birds using these urban habitats are actually faring.

“I would describe this paper as more opening up questions than giving answers,” agrees Jimenez. Having completed his Ph.D., he has moved on to a postdoctoral research position at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute in Chicago, where he hopes to continue pursuing answers.

But what we definitely know, he says, is that “the actions that we take where we live, which for most people today is in cities — those matter a lot for migratory birds.”

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

What City Birds Around the World Have in Common

The post City Birds: New Study Shows Urban Habitat Matters for Migrating Species appeared first on The Revelator.

In June, athletes from 16 countries will kick off the World Cup wearing other people’s used clothing.

Well, maybe. They’ll be sporting uniforms made from recycled fabric, potentially including a mix of scraps and old clothes. It’s the latest initiative from Nike, one of the world’s largest apparel companies, to incorporate more recycled material into the attire it makes. This time, the garment giant said it used “advanced chemical recycling” to produce its first elite performance apparel from 100 percent textile waste. 

Nike executives and some media coverage have implied that the outfits represent a turning point for sustainable fashion — that “circular” clothing, capable of being recycled over and over again, could soon reach everyday consumers.

The real picture, as you might expect, is a bit more complicated.

Nike has indeed signed deals with two chemical recycling companies, but no one is saying much about their technology or how scalable it is. Despite increasing investments from fashion brands, experts said not to expect to find sales racks lined with chemically recycled clothing anytime soon. 

“Yeah, it’s technically possible,” said Veena Singla, an environmental health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “But is it going to happen in reality?” She and others who study chemical recycling don’t think so — at least not in any way consumers might expect. The day when they can buy chemically recycled clothes, wear them, then return them for another trip through the cycle isn’t nigh. 

What seems more likely is the fashion industry expands its use of this recycling technique with industrial scrap fabric — and at nothing approaching the level needed to address projected increases in textile production.

Nike is right that the fashion industry has a sustainability problem. Apparel companies produce more than 100 billion articles of clothing every year. In the process they generate up to 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and an unfathomable amount of waste; the vast majority of textiles are eventually landfilled, incinerated, or sent to unofficial dump sites in poor countries. And all of this is made possible by fossil fuels, with nearly 70 percent of clothes made from oil-derived fabrics. The most common is polyester, a type of plastic also used in water bottles.

Rather than easing up on production, Nike and many of its competitors have pledged to boost the “circularity” of polyester — mostly through recycling.

The push to do so through chemical means is a response to the shortcomings of other strategies they’ve tried. Traditional mechanical recycling through shredding and grinding causes fibers to break down. The resulting fabric must be blended with 70 to 80 percent virgin material so anything made with it doesn’t pill and tear. 

The much more prevalent strategy involves turning discarded plastic bottles into new polyester. Patagonia pioneered this approach in the early ‘90s, and by the start of this decade virtually all recycled polyester was sourced from old bottles. Today, however, companies have increasingly faced lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny from those who would rather see bottles turned back into bottles.

Chemical recycling is supposed to be the next best thing. The term refers to using solvents to dissolve fibers into their base chemical units — building blocks that can be spun into new fabrics. On its face, this is a truly “circular” solution, because it doesn’t depend on bottles, and proponents say it can turn your used polyester shirts or running shorts into new ones over and over again, with no loss in fabric quality. 

That’s the vision now being promoted by fast-fashion brands like Gap, H&M, and Levi’s, many of which have signed multi-year agreements with a handful of chemical recycling startups. Last fall, Nike agreed to source “circular” polyester from two of them: the Swedish firm Syre and Loop Industries here in the U.S.

Research does bear out some of the hype. Technically, chemical recycling can produce virgin-quality polyester, and at least one method, called methanolysis, is capable of preserving that quality through repeated rounds of recycling. But there are significant constraints.

Diana Ferreira, a textile researcher at the University of Minho in Portugal, said textile-to-textile chemical recycling remains limited by the availability of suitable fabric to work with. “If we are dealing with clean, well-sorted, polyester-rich waste streams, chemical recycling can in principle produce material with properties comparable to virgin polyester,” she said. “However, if we are talking about post-consumer textile waste, the situation is much more complex.”

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In other words, chemical recycling works best with industrial scraps, which are more uniform than piles of used clothes. The latter may include blends of cotton, nylon, wool, spandex, and acrylics, not to mention dyes, chemical coatings, thread, labels, and zippers. All of this stuff makes chemical recycling much less feasible — at least, not without meticulous sorting and repeated rounds of pre-treatment to chemically remove all of those contaminants.

“If we wanted it to work, we would have to have our clothes … be 100 percent polyester, and we’d need to get rid of so many toxic chemicals,” Singla said. 

Beth Jensen, of the nonprofit Textile Exchange, is more sanguine. She said “all solutions,” including chemical recycling, are needed to reduce the fashion industry’s dependence on fossil fuels. But she agreed that establishing the infrastructure required for companies to accept used clothing and use technologies like methanolysis to make it into new apparel remains a ways away. Plus, it’s not clear who will build it. Companies like Nike? Governments? Recyclers? Some combination of those entities working collaboratively? 

Even if the industry can hit its optimistic targets for chemically recycled polyester by the early 2030s — whether from scrap or from people’s old clothes — production of “circular” fabric would likely pale in comparison to the more than 169 million metric tons of polyester projected to be manufactured annually by then. Dionisios Vlachos, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Delaware, said Syre’s goal to produce even 3 million metric tons by 2032 is “too aggressive.”

Instead, companies need to “reverse the trend of fast fashion,” said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the nonprofit Changing Markets Foundation. That means making less clothing overall, whether it contains recycled or virgin materials.  Last year, growth in recycled polyester — mostly from bottles — was dwarfed by an even larger increase in the production of fossil fuel-based polyester.

Urbancic sees chemical recycling as “an excuse to keep producing plastic clothes” and advocates for a shift away from polyester altogether; the material sheds microfibers and may expose consumers to hazardous chemicals.

Nike, Syre, and Loop Industries did not respond to interview requests or detailed lists of questions, highlighting a transparency problem flagged by Singla, Vlachos, and others Grist spoke with. Industry confidentiality makes it difficult to know what’s actually going on in these firms — and whether “#TheGreatTextileShift” they promise will be different from failed chemical recycling initiatives in the past.

It’s worth noting that Loop Industries has never turned a profit since its founding in 2010. The company is under investigation by the SEC following a 2020 report accusing it of systematically misrepresenting its technology to regulators and investors, and in 2022, it settled a class-action lawsuit over similar accusations. Syre, for its part, has not said how the “gigascale” factory it plans to build in Vietnam will be able to process consumers’ old clothes, given the country’s ban on used apparel imports.

“It remains to be seen whether [Nike’s announcement] amounts to anything,” Singla said. For the foreseeable future, it seems chemically recycled polyester will be limited to niche products like World Cup uniforms.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nike’s recycled World Cup uniforms reveal the limits of ‘circular’ fashion on May 27, 2026.

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At General Motors’ annual shareholder meeting on June 2, 2026, shareholders will have the opportunity to vote on whether the company should report on the effectiveness of its policies and processes related to Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

General Motors has made commitments to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Now the company needs to show how it is following through. The controversies and harms associated with the Thacker Pass lithium mine are just one example of how General Motors is not adequately implementing its policies on respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

The shareholders who presented the proposal, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, say that not respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights exposes General Motors and its investors to material risk. Project delays, higher costs, damage to a company’s reputation, loss of public trust, and more can all result when mining projects violate Indigenous Peoples’ rights. 

The Thacker Pass Mine raises concerns

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is just one example of a project that raises concerns about the significant risks associated with sourcing materials from projects that violate Indigenous Peoples’ rights. General Motors invested $650 million in Lithium Americans Corp in 2023 and became a joint owner of the mine in 2024. 

The mine is located in a landscape that is sacred to the Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock peoples in Nevada in the United States, who have cared for it since time immemorial.

In 1865, the US Cavalry massacred dozens of people when they attacked families in a Paiute camp now known as Peehee Mu’huh or Rotten Moon. The attack took place during the so-called “Snake Wars,” when settlers came into Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock lands and took land, water, game, and gold. 

Now, the Thacker Pass lithium mine is making permanent changes to this sacred landscape. Ranchers, environmental nonprofit organizations, and local Tribes opposed the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) approval of the mine. They raised concerns about inadequate consultation with Indigenous Peoples, inadequate analysis of mining claims, and impacts to water. The entire permitting process for the fast-tracked project lasted approximately one year.

Despite these shortcomings, the BLM approved the project in 2021. Courts concluded that the BLM had violated the law by not properly validating the mine’s claims, but the courts did not take away the mine’s permit. 

A 2025 report by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch concluded that by permitting the mine, the US government had violated Indigenous Peoples’ rights. A new report from Amnesty International on lithium mining in Nevada held up the mine as an example of a “business model that systematically prioritizes speed, scale and profit at the expense of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and the environment.”

The federal government invested in Lithium Americas and the Thacker Pass mine last year, diluting GM’s shares and posing potential political risks.

The litigation delays, alongside higher exploration, administrative, and investment costs related to the problematic mine resulted in a net loss of $42.6 million and increased liabilities, according to analysis by the US Sustainable Investment Forum.

A gap between commitments and actions

This is not the first time concerns about GM’s investment in Thacker Pass and its impact on Indigenous Peoples’ rights have come up. In a report published by Mighty Earth in 2023, civil society and Indigenous-led groups highlighted an important gap. The report revealed that although GM has made ambitious commitments to respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, the company does not have adequate mechanisms to ensure these commitments were put into practice.

The Lead the Charge Leaderboard is an annual ranking of 18 of the world’s leading automakers and their commitment to building fossil-fuel-free supply chains that respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights and human rights and protect the environment. It shows a poor track record of respect for the rights of Indigenous People affected by mining for the materials used to build GM vehicles. Since the Leaderboard began in 2023, GM has only received 11 out of 100 points on its respect for Indigenous Peoples’ rights, with no improvement in three years. 

According to the latest report, “Despite having commitments [to Indigenous Peoples’ rights in its supply chain], the company fails to disclose tangible evidence of how they are being effectively operationalized and enforced in practice.”

A look at next steps

A more sustainable future can only be built by recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights, leadership, and stewardship of land and water. Auto manufacturers that demand that their materials come from mines that respect these rights can help shape the future and build public confidence that their dollars are buying a product that is sustainably made. 

Investors deserve more transparency and information on General Motors’ risk management and human and Indigenous Peoples’ rights due diligence processes. The shareholder proposal requesting a report on GM’s practices regarding Indigenous Peoples’ rights is an important step in ensuring General Motors upholds its own Indigenous Peoples’ rights commitments.

The post Investors Call for Report on General Motor’s Commitment to Indigenous Peoples’ Rights appeared first on Earthworks.

At a time when other public officials and the media are talking less about climate change, Sheldon Whitehouse remains fiercely outspoken. He delivered his 307th climate speech on the Senate floor this month and is pushing back against the recent trend of “climate hushing.”

Read more on E360 →

The risk of snakebites is increasing across the world as reptiles shift their habitats to cope with rising temperatures and growing human pressures, a study of venomous snakes has found.

Read more on E360 →

When it comes to California’s climate future, the most important figure in the state’s chaotic governor’s race may not be any of the candidates on the debate stage. It may not even be outgoing governor Gavin Newsom or President Donald Trump. 

Instead, it might just be Chevron, the multinational oil company that was founded in the Golden State more than 100 years ago. It is among the largest producers, refiners, and sellers of petroleum products in a state rapidly shifting toward electric vehicles. Depending on which candidate is talking, the company is an example of how Big Oil is strangling consumers or an example of how climate regulations are strangling the state economy. 

The behemoth — it reported $12.3 billion in profit last year — took the spotlight last month when an interviewer asked leading Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra about Chevron’s contributions to his campaign. The former state attorney general and Biden-era health secretary gave what seemed to be a candid response:

“Chevron, that’s the problem with politics. They’re not the bad guy. Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron … Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s — that’s their prerogative.”

The phrase “I need Chevron” soon appeared in anti-Becerra videos by the likes of climate hawk Jane Fonda, implying that the candidate was saying he needs Chevron to get elected. Progressive billionaire Tom Steyer, Becerra’s lead Democratic opponent, urged him to return the contribution and said he is “doing [the] bidding” of Big Oil. Representative Katie Porter, another leading Democrat, said in a statement that she “hasn’t made millions off Big Oil or taken their checks.”

Becerra is not entirely wrong. California consumes around 13 billion gallons of gasoline annually, all of it specifically formulated to meet the state’s stringent clean air standards. Most of it comes from just six refineries, and Chevron owns two that account for one-third of the state’s production. That gives the company and its peers tremendous leverage. But California’s gas consumption has declined by about 15 percent from a peak in 2004 due to improved fuel economy in conventional vehicles and growing adoption of electric vehicles. It could fall by half over the next two decades. 

The primary is June 2. The challenge for the next governor will be to continue the energy transition while retaining the infrastructure needed to move and refine oil. This has never been accomplished in a place as large as California, which was the world’s fifth-largest economy in 2025. The risks are tremendous: If the state moves too quickly, it could create shortages and price spikes for drivers already paying the highest prices in the country. If it moves too slowly, it could lock in decades of air pollution and hinder global climate progress.

“It’s messy,” said Emily Grubert. She is a civil engineer and sociologist at Notre Dame who has studied fossil fuel transitions and advised the state government on oil infrastructure. “As soon as you realize that actually transitioning away from fossil fuels means you have to close things, people get really freaked out.”

Newsom spent much of his governorship going after Big Oil, an effort that included a series of executive actions to restrict fracking in Kern County oil fields. When the war in Ukraine sent gas prices surging, Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature passed a series of bills to stop what he called “price gouging.” These laws empowered a new oil-focused watchdog agency, created a tool that could impose refinery price caps, and required refineries to maintain certain storage reserves, all of which cut profit margins for Chevron and others. The new refinery rules added to multiple carbon taxes that make selling gasoline in California more expensive.

However, there is some evidence refiners have overcharged Californians. Even after accounting for state taxes, environmental fees, and production costs, a gap remains between gas prices in the Golden State and everywhere else. This gap appeared in 2015 after a refinery fire in Torrance and has come to be known as the “mystery gasoline surcharge.” It now averages about $1. Last fall, a state regulator concluded that refiners’ monopoly power may be the reason for the price spikes.

Oil companies accused Newsom of trying to regulate them out of existence, and many threatened to leave. Two major refiners, Wilmington and Benicia, announced last year that they would close their operations, forcing a state that already imports about 60 percent of its oil to rely on imports of gasoline refined in Asia. Chevron relocated its corporate headquarters from the San Francisco suburb of San Ramon to Houston in 2024, and it has delivered a series of ominous warnings this year as climate regulators have revised the state’s almost 15-year-old carbon tax.

“The proposed regulation will cripple the survivability of the state’s remaining refineries, which will result in California losing the entire industry,” Andy Walls, the president of Chevron’s refinery business, wrote in an open letter to Newsom in March. The implication was clear: unless you relax your regulations, we will leave the state and strand you without gasoline. That would mean paying Asian refiners to produce more of the state’s specific blend, at significant cost.

The Newsom administration spent much of 2025 trying to work out a grand bargain with the industry. The Legislature eased rules governing drilling in Kern County oil fields, helping maintain a stable supply of crude to refineries. It also delayed implementing a refinery profit cap and allowed the temporary sale of gasoline with higher concentrations of ethanol. The state’s climate regulator has also suggested giving refineries free allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade system, even if it means less money for big projects like high-speed rail and sustainable housing. The idea is to give investors enough certainty that they’re willing to remain in California even as the state uses less gasoline.

Experts believe it will take a lot more than that to manage inevitable changes.

“You actually can’t have a smooth and safe and effective transition without some form of coordinating function for that decline,” said Grubert. She believes a degree of state ownership of refineries will be necessary to keep facilities open if they stop being profitable. The wrong approach, she says, would be to respond to each potential refinery closure with ad hoc subsidies and state support, since that would allow refiners to extort the state one by one. 

That point was reinforced this month by a report from the California Energy Commission that has not received much notice. The analysis of the state’s shaky fuel system found that “California cannot sustainably manage this transition through repeated crisis interventions at an asset-by-asset level.” It suggested options that included “legal obligations to operate,” “centralized planning of closures,” and “direct state management or ownership of assets.”

The Iran war will accelerate a decline in both the supply of, and demand for, oil. Gas retailers like Chevron are already struggling to find additional imports of refined fuel, and some experts predict shortages if the Strait of Hormuz does not open within weeks. Meanwhile, electric vehicles continue gaining market share, and Newsom plans to roll out subsidies for them this year. Wider adoption of these vehicles, and hybrids, will further crimp demand, making any remaining refineries more likely to shutter. 

Chevron’s Kern River Oil Field near Bakersfield is one of the largest oil fields in California. The state’s climate policies have helped reduce gasoline demand by more than 15 percent over the past decade. Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images

All of this helps explain the showdown between the leading Democrats in the governor’s race, who are each trying to find a lane in a field that at one time included more than 50 candidates.

Becerra has given lip service to clean energy, but many public statements suggest a friendliness toward oil producers. As attorney general, he initiated a few lawsuits against petroleum companies, and supported other state climate lawsuits, but punted on major investigations. He has focused his gubernatorial campaign on vows to fight Donald Trump and protect healthcare, and has made controversial promises to freeze utility and insurance rates. On decarbonization, he has noted that “climate action only succeeds if it is affordable, reliable, and fair.”

After the chaos of the early primary, many oil producers have decided that Becerra is their candidate. Chevron last month contributed the maximum allowable amount of $39,200 to his campaign, the first time in a decade it has backed a gubernatorial candidate. Last week, the company contributed another $500,000 to an independent political committee supporting Becerra. California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest driller, also gave $500,000 to a Becerra committee. And gas companies like Sempra are among the donors to an anti-Steyer political committee that has raised more than $24 million.

Steyer, meanwhile, has made attacking Big Oil the focus of his campaign, as it was during his 2020 presidential run. He says he would lower gas prices by activating the refining profit cap that Newsom has declined to use, investigating what is causing high gas prices (something the state has already done), and taxing private jet fuel. When refineries “inevitably” close, he says he will stockpile an oil reserve and import more refined fuel for as long as California needs it.

Steyer has also had to address his own fossil fuel ties. The hedge fund he founded, Farallon Capital, remains a major player in coal power finance abroad, including in Indonesia and Australia. Steyer still holds a stake in the firm, which he left in 2012, but his campaign says he no longer receives dividends from its fossil fuel investments. 

California uses a “jungle primary” in which the top two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party. The latest poll shows Becerra essentially tied with former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican, with Steyer trailing at around 15 percent. The most likely outcome is that Becerra or Steyer will make it to the general election. (The other Democrats, including Porter and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, trail behind in the double digits.)

Railing against Big Oil has long proven to be good politics in California. But in the wake of Trump’s second election victory, Democrats have sought to downplay climate issues and focus instead on affordability. The question in the governor’s race is how best to achieve that in the long run. Is it better to use a bully pulpit against companies like Chevron in an effort to break their market power, or conciliate them in the hope that they don’t flee?

Mike Madrid, a veteran California political operative, believes Becerra’s approach will resonate more with the young and Latinos, both of whom often decide statewide elections.

“This attack on Chevron, it works for the base Steyer already has,” he said. “Young Latino working-class men are the demographic most affected by gas prices. Do you think they’re saying we need to get rid of Chevron? Of course not.”

Steyer’s campaign may not get him over the line in the primary, but he has at least been consistent. In a 2013 blog post for this very publication, he celebrated the result of the Virginia governor’s race, where a climate-focused Democrat beat a fossil-fuel-friendly Republican with help from Steyer’s own war chest.

“A new political dynamic is emerging,” he wrote at the time. “Climate change is a winner, not a loser,” and is “no longer electoral Kryptonite.”

If Chevron has its way, next week’s primary results will prove otherwise.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘I need Chevron’: The oil company at the center of the California governor’s race on May 26, 2026.

Thirst case scenario for climate Channel News brendan 26th May 2026 Teaser Media