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The commodification of conservation Channel Comment brendan 11th September 2026 Teaser Media

States that voted for Trump are leading the country in solar adoption. In recent years, Republican opposition to solar has mounted, with the Trump administration making it more difficult to build solar on federal land and Congress scaling back federal tax credits for the industry. But a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association has found that states that voted for Donald Trump in the last presidential election counted for eight of the top 10 solar-building states in the country in the first half of the year. 

“At least at the macro level, Republican-led and governed states are not only open to but embracing solar energy as a technology,” said Tim Pawlenty, CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association and a former Republican governor of Minnesota. 

Altogether, solar construction in Trump-supporting states has buoyed an ongoing explosion in national solar deployment. The country added more than 11 gigawatts of solar power in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 45 percent compared to the same period in 2025. States that supported Trump in the last election made up close to three-fourths of that growth.

Texas and Florida, the two largest Trump-supporting states by population, were ranked first and third, respectively. Those Sun Belt states have been consistent leaders in solar construction, as have Indiana, Ohio, and Arizona, which have also remained in the top 10 solar-building states since 2024. Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, and Utah also reached the top 10 in some, but not all, of those years.

Those red states are fostering solar development through their general pro-business attitude and booming electricity-hungry industries, even if they don’t support solar for climate-related reasons. Republican-leaning states tend to have more available land and easier permitting processes for energy projects, Pawlenty said. That attractive business environment has also drawn electricity-consuming industries, like manufacturing and data centers, to red states, producing demand for quickly constructed, cheap energy sources like solar.

“Red states, as a general proposition, have sort of a pro-build mentality. They want to build things,” Pawlenty said.

But the future for solar in red states is more complicated. After Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, energy companies investing in solar projects and homeowners buying solar for their rooftops received tax credits for their investments. But last year, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and brought an early end to the credits. Credits expired for most uninitiated solar farms on July 4, 2026. As a result, solar developers rushed to start construction before the deadline, helping create a bump in solar installations in the second quarter of 2026. The lack of tax credits could make solar growth less certain in the future, especially for rooftop solar projects, which have already begun declining in 2026, the solar industry report notes.

The nature of this uncertainty is not the same for all solar-investing, Trump-voting states. While Texas has remained a titan in solar development, earning the top spot in 2024, 2025, and the first half of 2026, other states are just beginning their solar booms. Michigan, a politically mixed state where a majority of voters chose Trump in 2024, reached the top 10 for the first time this year. The state has climbed steadily from 23rd place in 2024 to fourth in the first half of 2026. 

Whether Michigan, which lacks Texas’ year-round strong sunlight, can maintain that solar energy growth after the end of federal tax credits is another question, said Michael Craig, an associate professor in the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability. Solar farms may remain economically feasible to build without the credits only in areas with the right weather. 

“The economics of solar largely depends on your solar resource,” said Craig. ”The better the resource, I’d say the less important the tax credits are.” 

Without federal tax credits, Michigan’s solar industry will likely fall back on state clean energy goals, which create demand for solar by mandating that utilities build renewable power sources. Though Michigan voted for Trump in 2024, the state has a Democratic governor and Democrat-led state Senate. The state established a law that utilities must generate 50 percent of their power from renewables by 2030. That requirement, in combination with data center electricity demand, is likely a large factor in the state’s rapid solar rise, Craig said. 

Nonetheless, some strategists have argued the solar industry needs tax credits less than it needs an easier federal permitting process and continued power demand to support growth. Even if Congress never reinstates the tax credits, those structural factors could push the industry forward, especially because solar requires relatively little time to build compared to other power sources. Regardless of cost, tax credits, or even geography, that speed still counts for something, said Rachel Skaar, communications director for Solar Energy Industries Association.

“Solar and storage can deploy so much faster than other technologies,” Skaar said. “So when we talk about the need for energy right now, solar and storage can provide it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline More than 70% of new solar is being built in states that voted for Trump on Sep 10, 2026.

By Roberto Lucchini, Florida International University

Hundreds of first responders have told me they remember exactly how they felt during the World Trade Center attacks, even 25 years on.

They tell me that they remember not being able to think, see or smell anything. They could focus only on digging and pulling debris out of the way. They could not rest because those trapped beneath the rubble could not wait. Death was all around them, and they could only do as much as they could to hold it back.

While what happened on 9/11 was unprecedented, similar tragedies happen quite frequently. As a physician in occupational health who works with 9/11 first responders, I can easily imagine those same thoughts from other firefighters, paramedics and construction workers trying to save lives after the deadly summer 2026 earthquakes in Venezuela, Colombia and Indonesia or the disastrous floods in Nepal.

These first responders may also need to recover human remains from the rubble. Surrounding these moments of intimate grief are dust, toxic fumes and cries for help. And this trauma takes a toll.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was unprecedented, but such disasters are not uncommon throughout the world. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Whether it’s industrial or nuclear disasters, extreme weather, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, war or terrorist attacks, first responders and affected communities can experience significant physical and mental health effects both during rescue and recovery operations and for years afterward. All are vulnerable to mental and physical harm no matter how well trained they may be.

Research from my team suggests that among these risks is post-traumatic stress disorder that may cause their brain to age faster.

PTSD Among First Responders

Post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD, is a complex mental health condition that can develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event. Psychological trauma refers to the lasting emotional effects of direct or indirect exposure to life-threatening circumstances or violence.

PTSD may involve intrusive memories, avoidance, heightened alertness, sleep problems and changes in mood and thinking. Anxiety and depression commonly occur alongside PTSD.

Around 23% of World Trade Center responders have been diagnosed with PTSD. In comparison, around 6% of the U.S. general population are estimated to have had PTSD over their lifetime.

When I talk to 9/11 first responders, they describe their PTSD and cognitive difficulties as interconnected problems that continue to affect their lives today. Those traumatic memories remain vivid, and some first responders continue to experience anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, sleep problems and difficulty controlling their emotions.

Trauma Speeds Brain Aging

As they age, many 9/11 first responders have also noticed their memory, concentration and mental sharpness get worse. They increasingly fear losing their independence. Rather than occurring as separate conditions, physical illness, cognitive changes and emotional distress often reinforce one another.

In another study, researchers from my team monitored the cognitive function of more than 5,000 World Trade Center first responders without dementia between 2014 and 2022. Over approximately five years, 228 developed dementia before age 65. First responders with the most severe exposure to potentially neurotoxic dust and debris at ground zero had a substantially higher incidence of dementia than those with minimal exposure or who consistently used personal protective equipment such as respirators. This link remained after controlling for demographic, lifestyle, medical and genetic factors.

Before I began studying the health effects of 9/11, I was examining workers exposed to neurotoxic metals and industrial pollution in northern Italy. Knowing the harmful toxins in World Trade Center dust, I began to wonder whether 9/11 responders might face similar long-term risks to their brains. That concern grew when brain scans of both groups showed a similar increase in deposits of a protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline called beta-amyloid.

Research from my team also found that the brains of 9/11 male responders with PTSD had MRI results consistent with older-appearing brains than those without PTSD.

In that 2025 study, we measured the brain structures using MRI scans and an AI model to estimate each participant’s brain age. The AI model had been trained to predict a person’s chronological age from the overall structure of their brain, based on data from more than 11,500 MRI brain scans from healthy people ages 5 to 95. We used the difference between a person’s predicted brain age and their actual age as a measure of accelerated brain aging.

We also saw that first responders with PTSD had brains that appeared about three years older than their chronological age. In contrast, the estimated brain age of responders without PTSD approximately matched their actual chronological age. Each additional month a first responder spent working at ground zero was associated with roughly four to five additional months of apparent brain aging, suggesting that how long they were exposed to the disaster played a key role in this aging process.

Caring for First Responders

The experiences of first responders show that the effects of 9/11 are an ongoing health issue. These health consequences evolve as people age, and they still require coordinated mental, cognitive, physical and social support decades later.

Every 9/11 anniversary brings back vivid memories of the tragedy, along with the same restlessness, frustration and pain of being there. Yet many on the front lines have told me that they feel pride and a sense of belonging with the knowledge that they helped people in desperate need. Their service remains an enduring example of human solidarity in a moment of crisis.

Honoring that legacy also means protecting those who come to our rescue during the emergency. I believe that, as a society, Americans have a responsibility to safeguard, protect and care for their health throughout their entire lives. They were there for America in one of its darkest moments; Americans must be there for them in the years to come.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Previously in The Revelator:

Dr. Green: A Wildlife Researcher Asks About Trauma and Grief

The post Toxic Dust and PTSD May Be Accelerating Brain Aging Among 9/11 First Responders appeared first on The Revelator.

Stretching from West Africa to the Gulf of Mexico, a massive bloom of sargassum seaweed is swamping beaches and killing coastal wildlife. But scientists have discovered the floating algae also shelters a vast array of ocean creatures, and some are now calling for its protection. 

Read more on E360 →

Diesel prices hit an all-time high on Friday. Then another, and another. 

According to AAA, the average price of diesel as of September 10 stands at a staggering $5.98 — about $2.31 more than in late February, when the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran. The jump has been even higher in some states, such as California, where a gallon of diesel currently costs $7.91. 

Most Americans don’t buy diesel fuel, but they pay for it. It powers the trucks and ships that move everything from milk to lumber, and the costs are embedded in the prices people see at stores. The last time consumers saw diesel prices climb to such heights was in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and they hit $5.82 per gallon. 

This year, the Iran war has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 10 percent of seaborne diesel once traveled. This has sent prices soaring, and consumers are increasingly feeling the impact. 

“Early on, much of the cost increase gets absorbed along the supply chain through existing freight contracts and retailer margins,” David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, told the Associated Press. “But as contracts reprice and fuel surcharges take hold, more of that cost makes its way to the grocery store.” 

All told, the rising price of diesel has cost U.S. consumers an additional $46 billion, or about $350 per household, according to a Brown University tracker. That’s slightly less than the impact of rising gasoline prices — at $55 billion — but the 61 percent jump in diesel prices has outpaced the 41 percent increase in gas. 

“Diesel right now is caught up in more of a geopolitical turmoil than gasoline,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, an app that lets consumers track fuel prices. In addition to the Iran war, Ukraine’s increasingly successful attacks on Russian oil refineries have also applied upward pressure. 

“Russia is no longer supplying the global market,” said De Haan, and U.S. refineries are already at full capacity, giving them little ability to pick up the slack. Domestic inventories are at their lowest level since 1982, according ​to data from the Energy Information Administration.

“We’re entering a key period for diesel consumption with the lowest inventories on record for early September,” David Russell told Reuters. He’s the global head of market strategy at the brokerage service TradeStation. “Farmers and truckers typically use more diesel in the ​autumn, which raises the stakes for the current crisis and increases the risk of sharper price increases.” 

Winter is likely to bring more problems. Because heating oil is also essentially diesel, the millions of U.S. households that still rely on it can expect unprecedented bills. This comes as President Donald J. Trump’s administration has threatened to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps households afford their fuel bills. 

“If you’re in the Northeast, then this is much more burdensome than anywhere else in the country,” Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told Axios. “Families are getting hit by both gasoline and heating oil.” 

These surging costs are hitting consumers just before the midterm elections, when the economy is at the front of voters’ minds. Normally, fuel prices are a somewhat downstream factor in the voting calculus, but Kevin Book, head of research at energy consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners, told Axios that this year could be different. “In cold weather states — particularly those that rely on fuels other than natural gas,” he said. “It could be a very big deal.”

Even if the wars in Iran and Ukraine were to end tomorrow, it would take weeks or months for fuel prices to come down and diesel supply to recover. 

“After both of those are solved, then once the flow normalizes, that will start to help global inventories recover,” said De Haan. “Only after inventories have recovered do diesel prices really see a full decline.”

This post has been updated to reflect the current price of diesel fuel as of September 10.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What the record-high cost of diesel means for you on Sep 10, 2026.

'Store food for climate shocks' Channel News brendan 10th September 2026 Teaser Media

The far-right AfD was the undoubted winner of the closely watched state election in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September. Still, the party fell short of an outright majority, in part thanks to a surprisingly strong performance by the Greens. The question now is, can the AfD form a government at all, and if not, what coalition of rivals could possibly agree to govern in its place?

On 6 September, voters cast their ballots in the Saxony-Anhalt widely watched and publicised state election. More than anything, the results have led to a climate of uncertainty and shown a desire for fundamental change. The outcome amounts to a political earthquake whose shockwaves extend far beyond the state’s borders.

43.8 per cent of voters opted for the “confirmed far-right”  Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) state branch (+23 percentage points). The ruling conservative party (CDU/Christian-Democratic Union) was punished; with 17.2 per cent, its share more than halved (-19.9). The liberal party (FDP/Free Democratic Party), which had previously been part of the coalition government, was ousted from the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt, whilst the social democrats (SPD/Social Democratic Party), also part of the coalition, made a slight gain but remained at a low level (9.3/+0.9).

On the other hand, the Greens made a surprisingly significant gain, achieving their best result to date with 8.9 per cent (+3.0). They were the strongest force in terms of second votes in the Halle III constituency (33.7 per cent; lowest second-vote result: Eisleben constituency, 3.8 per cent). The Left lost ground again (8.6/-2.4), but managed to win three constituency seats outright (Halle II, III; Magdeburg II). The newly formed BSW (Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht/Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht; a party positioned towards the left economically and towards the right culturally) cleared the 5 per cent threshold.

The election results and accompanying opinion polls reveal a highly politicised, deeply divided state. Voter turnout soared to a record high of 77.8 per cent (+17.5), continuing the trend of rising participation. The previously ruling coalition of the CDU, the SPD, and the FDP has been voted out of office. In the new parliament, forming a government will prove exceedingly difficult, and the BSW is expected to play a key role in any possible coalition.

Chart: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt

The new normal?

Although just over 1.7 million people were eligible to vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the vote was closely monitored in and outside Germany. The reasons for this extraordinary attention are clear: polls indicated that the AfD would become by far the strongest force, as had already been the case in the 2024 Thuringia state election and in the 2024 local elections in Saxony-Anhalt. What was new, however, were the poll figures for the AfD and, consequently, the question of whether the AfD’s state branch – classified as “undoubtedly far-right” – would provide the Minister-President with an absolute parliamentary majority.

This possibility of a government with a far-right character, unprecedented in Germany since 1945, led to an intense media, political and societal debate about the potential consequences for democracy in the country. As a result, the election was subject to unusually extensive scrutiny. At the same time, however, the consequences of the election were discussed in an unusually broad and multifaceted manner, which at least gave voters the opportunity to reflect on the significance and consequences of their voting decisions far more deeply than usual.

However, for two reasons it would be unrealistic to view the state election as essentially an exceptional case. On the one hand, whilst the scale of targeted disinformation, fake news, and defamation – extending even to the acceptance of politically motivated threats and acts of violence from the far right – has indeed risen once again, it is no longer an exceptional case: whether through hybrid attacks and campaigns from abroad (particularly from Russia) or targeted delegitimisation from within (by AfD politicians and right-wing influencers), the aim was to influence the elections directly and to gradually undermine democracy as a whole. The authoritarian playbook for delegitimising democracy has now found its way into the German federal system.

On the other hand, from a sociological perspective, there is much to suggest that the election result, whilst differing in scale, follows the same underlying pattern as a broader societal trend. The AfD has long been a nationwide phenomenon; it is merely the structural conditions and social stabilisers that differ. This explains the variations between the federal states, particularly in times of global uncertainty (e.g. party loyalty, economic structures, collective bargaining coverage, etc.).

Social divisions

The state election in Saxony-Anhalt took place against a backdrop of general pessimism. Whilst this is not unusual in itself, this election year is also characterised by widespread dissatisfaction with the state government and persistent, deep-seated dissatisfaction with the federal government, which goes beyond the negative assessment of the “traffic light” coalition.

A large majority of citizens in Saxony-Anhalt are concerned about the state of affairs in Germany (here and below: Infratest dimap: Saxony-Anhalt ahead of the 2026 election), both regarding the future of democracy and economic development. Concerns are widespread across the population and in all political circles, yet the differences in the details highlight the division within the state. Pronounced fears of inflation and social decline are a defining feature (feeling overwhelmed by price rises: 70 per cent; standard of living under threat: 58 per cent). These concerns are, in part, entirely justified: Saxony-Anhalt has many structurally weak rural areas struggling with an ageing population, and the “Chemical Triangle” in the south of the state is also in the throes of a deep crisis, whilst other plans for new industrial settlements, such as that involving Intel, have failed.

Combined with lower net worth and a lower uptake of transition support schemes, many employees therefore fear that their own jobs – and thus their livelihoods – are at risk, whilst a large share of (future) pensioners are critical of the federal government’s reforms. The survey data clearly show that this fear of loss – partly real, partly perceived – has been exploited politically, particularly by the Right. AfD supporters, in particular, fear they will no longer be able to pay their bills (89 per cent; overall: 70 per cent) or maintain their standard of living (80 per cent; overall: 58 per cent). Supporters of the Left share these fears roughly in line with the overall average, whereas supporters of the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens do so to a far lesser extent. This shows that the divide is clearly discernible along the lines of economic fears.

Furthermore, whilst concern for democracy and the rule of law is shared across all social groups and political currents, there are significant differences in the interpretation of exactly what the threats consist of: Only AfD supporters are more likely than average to see the country’s way of life as under threat or to complain about there being too many foreigners in the country. In addition, only a majority of AfD supporters do not see Russia as a threat. In other words, the perception of these issues among AfD supporters differs fundamentally from that of other parties’ supporters (BSW, FDP: not shown). Thus, whilst the vast majority of people in the country are concerned, their reasons vary greatly and clearly follow party lines (often pitting the AfD against the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens), suggesting that right-wing narratives and interpretative frameworks exert a strong persuasive influence in receptive circles.

This is also confirmed by the splitting analysis of the Infratest dimap post-election survey: neither did AfD first-vote voters cast their second votes for other parties to any significant extent, nor did the AfD list receive a significant number of additional votes from first-vote voters of other parties. The AfD’s voter base is therefore, on the one hand, clearly cohesive, but on the other hand, as the results show, broadly anchored in society: in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is the dominant force in almost all regions, social milieus and demographic groups. It won 38 out of 41 constituencies outright; only in three urban constituencies was the Left able to secure a direct mandate. In only one constituency is the AfD not the strongest force in terms of second votes, achieving less than 20 per cent, whereas the Greens became the strongest force by second votes in that constituency (Halle III).

With the exception of civil servants and older voters, the AfD was consistently the strongest force and recorded double-digit gains, particularly among young men and voters with a lower level of formal education (except among civil servants; data here and below: Infratest dimap: Election Analysis). The party has gained across the political spectrum, but most significantly from the CDU, the group of minor parties, and above all, through the mobilisation of former non-voters.

Voting motives continue to be characterised by protest voting (in particular as a protest against the federal government), but to a far greater extent than before also by conviction in the party, its ability to address issues and its policy platform, as well as, to a significant degree, in its lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund: according to their own statements, four in ten AfD voters chose the party because of him. AfD voters were almost unanimously in favour of a state government led by their party and its lead candidate.

Map: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt. Map data: © GeoBasis-DE / LVermGeo ST dl-de/by-2-0

Dizzying coalition arithmetic

The widely differing perceptions of the situation and the clear divide between the electorate ultimately also shape perceptions of the government’s work at the federal level and, above all, at the state level. Whilst the majority of supporters of the CDU, the SPD, and even the Greens were generally satisfied with their state government, supporters of The Left, and above all the AfD, express clear dissatisfaction. The extent to which these camps have solidified is also demonstrated by the massive shift in the attribution of competence and in preferences for the Minister-President: supporters of the AfD favour “their” party on these points and reject all others across the board, and vice versa.

This clear polarisation of the two blocs against one another is by no means new and is the reason why cooperation between the AfD and the CDU would most likely be to the detriment of the latter: the election in Saxony-Anhalt clearly shows how deeply the AfD has penetrated among the middle class with a charismatic lead candidate and a positive, mood-driven campaign in times of uncertainty. Whilst the AfD has recently focused primarily on mobilising its core electorate in the west, its support in the east – particularly in this election – has already broadened considerably, meaning it has become socially normalised.

Looking ahead to the formation of the next government, this means that the difficulties in securing a majority are not merely a matter of party tactics, but are clearly rooted in policy issues and voter preferences. Everything points to an extremely difficult process of forming a government. If one assumes the model of a majority government (rather than a minority government with shifting majorities), no simple solution is in sight. With 39 seats each for the AfD on the one hand, and the CDU, the SPD, the Greens, and the Left Party on the other, there is a deadlock; 42 votes are required for an absolute majority.

The AfD reversed course immediately after the election, saying it no longer regards an absolute majority of its own as a prerequisite to governing, and that, for the time being, it only sees the need for a reliable majority. This could be achieved through a coalition or at least a firm cooperation agreement with the BSW. A CDU-led coalition against the AfD, on the other hand, would require the involvement of all the other parties in the state parliament – namely the Left , the Greens, the SPD, the CDU, and the BSW – a highly unlikely scenario. Consequently, the idea of a cross-party Minister-President, which the BSW has once again brought into the discussion, takes on a certain relevance: assuming this person were acceptable to the entire democratic spectrum, the BSW could thus play a decisive role in the election of a democratically supported Minister-President.

That said, by being prepared to abstain in the third round of voting, the BSW also has the opportunity, for the first time, to help a Minister-President from a confirmed far-right party into office. This would not be without further complications: the five abstentions would help the AfD but would not break the deadlock. To do so, at least one further vote, one more abstention, or an absence from the vote by one of the other parliamentary groups would be required.

It is now up to the BSW to decide which side to support, but a minority government cannot be entirely ruled out. Saxony-Anhalt, in particular, is one of the few federal states with long-standing experience of this form of government, which is atypical in Germany (except for the “Magdeburg Model”, an SPD minority government from 1994 to 2002). Saxony-Anhalt is characterised not only by high volatility and low party loyalty, but also by a willingness to embrace new coalition models (the “Kenya Coalition” comprising the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens, or the “Germany Coalition” comprising the CDU, the SPD and the FDP).

Chart: Heinrich Böll Foundation Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt

What will the Greens do now?

There was a lot at stake for the Greens in this election, as they had recently been struggling, particularly in the eastern German federal states. In Thuringia and Brandenburg, the Greens lost their parliamentary status in 2024, and this election risked repeating that. However, the outcome – surprising to some extent – turned out differently: the Greens have achieved their best-ever result in a state election in Saxony-Anhalt. The structural patterns in electoral sociology are unremarkable, and the motives for voting also match expectations: for three-quarters of their voters, the decisive reason for voting for the Greens was policy-based considerations, coupled with a unanimous rejection of an AfD government and a clear preference for a CDU-led state government.

And yet something is different. The election result is largely attributable to the debates and initiatives promoting tactical voting: the aim was to prevent the AfD from securing an absolute majority – and thus taking power – by ensuring that the Greens and the SPD retained their seats in the state parliament. Whilst the former objective was achieved, the question of who will form the government remains unanswered.

Although up until July the polls gave little indication that the Greens would return to the state parliament, they managed to capitalise on the window of opportunity presented by this election. They benefited not only from CDU swing voters, but also from the mobilisation of former non-voters. This election campaign was underpinned by disciplined communication and unusually strong support from the entire party – from the party leadership and prominent figures, as well as from many members – but also from figures such as former Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck and Baden-Württemberg’s Minister-President Cem Özdemir.

After the Saxony-Anhalt elections, Özdemir summed up the central responsibility of the Greens – and indeed of all parties – as follows: “What is required is honest and unsparing self-criticism from all democratic parties, leading to a dramatic change in the way we all conduct politics, both in form and substance. Less squabbling, fewer promises, more honest listening, and shared outcomes. Saying what is possible and saying what is not.”

This article was first published in German by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. The English version is taken from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Brussels.

In the wake of the recent flash flood that swept down from the Himalayas, Nepal is seeking immediate aid from a UN fund for climate loss and damage to help vulnerable families displaced by the disaster and rebuild destroyed schools and hospitals, the country’s foreign minister told Climate Home News.

“This is exactly the kind of climate-driven catastrophe the Fund was created to address,” Shisir Khanal said in an interview. He added that “stronger global solidarity and meaningful international support” are needed for countries like Nepal, which are facing increasingly severe climate-related disasters.

The floods were caused by a glacier collapsing and triggering a landslide that forced a torrent of water and debris to rush down the Bhote Koshi River valley, causing catastrophic impacts downstream. More than 1,300 people died and over 5,300 are still missing in the area.

Loss and damage fund urged to hold crisis meeting on Nepal

Khanal described the disaster as a “Himalayan tsunami”, telling Climate Home News that early assessments suggest the roads, bridges, hydropower stations, highways and settlements it wiped out could require billions of dollars to rebuild. Reconstruction estimates by the government range between $2.5 billion and $5 billion.

The minister of foreign affairs said Nepal would not be asking the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) “to write a single check for this total amount”, explaining that the government is finalising a post-disaster assessment “to guide our broader international donor appeals”.

Nepal disaster seen as test case for fledgling fund

In reality, if Nepal does receive rapid support from the FRLD, it is likely to be a fraction of the total bill because the fund has a cap of $20 million per project and has little more than $350 million available to hand out in its initial phase.

So far its board has not approved any projects as it is still working out how to allocate its scarce resources, nor does it have a process in place to respond to sudden climate disasters such as glacial lake outburst floods or powerful storms.

On August 31, Nepal’s government sent a direct appeal for emergency grant funding to the FRLD, emphasising that “a prompt response would… demonstrate that the fund can translate international solidarity into timely support for vulnerable countries and communities when it is most urgently needed”.

A couple of days later, eight developing-country board members – later joined by those from small island states – signed a letter, seen by Climate Home News, asking the fund’s board to hold an extraordinary meeting to respond to Nepal’s request.

The FRLD said in a statement that the devastating impacts on the ground “underscore both the urgency and scale of need and reaffirm the fundamental purpose for which the FRLD was established”.

It added that it is “committed to approaching Nepal’s request with the urgency, compassion, and careful consideration that these difficult circumstances require, while respecting the Fund’s governing instrument and established decision-making processes”. As of Wednesday, Climate Home News understands that discussions were still ongoing.

Designing infrastructure for extreme shocks

Khanal pointed to “the unprecedented scale” of the huge flood which occurred within a matter of minutes and swept away river gauges meant to provide early warning in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, near the border with Tibet.

“You cannot easily ‘plan’ against a mountain collapsing,” he said. But the lesson, he added in written responses in English, is that “our historical baseline for infrastructure engineering is no longer sufficient”.

Building resilient infrastructure means that “hydropower projects, roads and early warning systems must be designed for extreme, unpredictable climate shocks”, he said. Another key element will be plans to better understand and protect ecosystems, he added.

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The minister noted that Nepal, India and China share a common, interconnected Himalayan ecosystem and all three countries are affected by the impacts of climate change in the Himalayan mountain chain.

“Therefore, our call is for the three countries to work together to strengthen preparedness, resilience and regional cooperation,” he said.

New research from consultancy Systemiq, released on Wednesday, finds that Himalayan glaciers are losing mass 65% faster than a decade ago, and that only around 20 of the Himalaya’s estimated 40,000 glaciers are currently monitored. India alone has 56 glacial lakes rated very high risk, it warns.

The Rasuwagadhi flood destroyed a friendship bridge, a road, a hydropower substation, and swept away vehicles in Rasuwa, Nepal in July 2025. (Photo: Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect) The Rasuwagadhi flood destroyed a friendship bridge, a road, a hydropower substation, and swept away vehicles in Rasuwa, Nepal in July 2025. (Photo: Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect) Early cross-border efforts on information-sharing

Since the same region of Nepal was hit by smaller-scale but still highly destructive flooding in 2024 and 2025, China and Nepal have stepped up efforts to cooperate in tackling glacier-related risks in the region.

In August 2025, Climate Home News reported that authorities in both countries had agreed to share cross-border information about the risks of glacial lake outburst floods across the Tibetan region, in a first step that could be expanded to the national level in an effort to reduce deaths and damage. 

This May, a delegation from China’s Ministry of Water Resources and the Water Resources Department of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region held talks with Nepalese officials in charge of water and disaster management about establishing a joint disaster information mechanism.

Then in August, a team from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under the Chinese Academy of Sciences also visited Nepal for scientific research and exchange, sharing China’s experience in monitoring glacial lakes.

Nepal and China agree to cooperate on glacial lake flooding, as warming hikes threat

However, experts told Climate Home News that progress on putting in place concrete measures has been slow. Narendra Khanal, a professor in the department of geography at Tribhuvan University, blamed that partly on Nepal’s traditional administrative system and bureaucratic delays.

“We have to share information with them, and they have to share information with us,” he said. “In my understanding, the Chinese side is also facing difficulties in making this cooperation work.”

Mohan Bahadur Chand, a Himalayan glaciologist and assistant professor at Kathmandu University, said China has the technology and human resources to provide significant information to its neighbour downstream.

But, to make that work, “we have to build trust between the two countries”, which is currently lacking but could be developed, he said. “As scientists, we are already working with them personally. If we create a trusted environment, cooperation should not be difficult.”

Nepal lacks monitoring and warning technology

Experts said Nepal – one of the world’s least-developed countries – does not have the technology or resources to install the sophisticated monitoring and warning systems needed to protect its population from growing threats linked to accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas.

A senior meteorologist at the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home News that the government had not invested enough in rainfall and weather monitoring stations, especially above 3,500 metres, and therefore lacks reliable data about what is happening at high altitudes.

“The stations we have are operated by different organisations, but many of them are not functioning properly,” the official added.

Comment: The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice

This year, the UN’s Green Climate Fund released initial funding for a $50-million project to address the risks from four glacial lakes in other parts of Nepal, but has come under criticism for taking seven years to approve the proposal. The fund said this was due to efforts needed to strengthen and consult on the project, as well as administrative, institutional and COVID-related delays.

Foreign minister Khanal said Nepal was calling on the international community for support to tackle global warming impacts into the future.

“This disaster should not be viewed simply as a one-time event requiring one-time assistance,” he emphasised. “We need to recognise the longer-term consequences of rising temperatures and climate change, particularly for vulnerable communities and developing countries.”

The post Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats appeared first on Climate Home News.

Amy Youngman is a legal and policy specialist at the campaigning group Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

The chair’s August Aid to Negotiations is being sold as a pragmatic way to rescue the global plastics treaty. However, the text is starting to resemble the architecture of a Paris Agreement-style framework: a patchwork of vague commitments, nationally determined action and reporting, with the hardest substantive decisions left to a future that, my experience following these negotiations tells me, would never arrive.

In March 2022, governments adopted UNEA Resolution 5/14 by consensus, launching negotiations for a legally binding international instrument to end plastic pollution. I joined the global plastics treaty process in Paris in 2023, where hopes of drafting a treaty capable of confronting one of the defining environmental and human health threats of our time were first derailed by procedural warfare.

• Aug 12, 2026 News “We’ve gone backwards” – new plastics treaty text dims hopes for production curbs During troubled talks, fossil fuel-producing nations have pushed for a global pact to tackle only plastic waste rather than reducing the size of the problem Read more
• Aug 21, 2025 Comment Why we couldn’t agree on a plastics treaty in Geneva – and what might happen next Switzerland’s lead negotiator at INC-5.2 reflects on why the talks didn’t succeed – and the options now for getting an effective agreement Read more

Five months later, in Nairobi, I watched the chair close a meeting while delegates still negotiated -allegedly to catch a flight. In 2024 and 2025, in Ottawa, Busan and Geneva, the same small group of blocking states grew bolder, cloaking opposition in language about defending the vulnerable while subsidising a system that fuels the pollution crisis. Offended by ambition, ashamed of nothing.

A year after the last formal attempt to negotiate a treaty, we are tasked with protecting a fragile process. And despite long-standing support, including legal, policy and technical expertise from my own Environmental Investigation Agency, the chair has excluded observers from the rooms where the treaty’s fate is being decided.

In that orchestrated quiet, the loudest proposal emerged: the suggestion that the instrument be a “framework convention.” The new Aid, intended to shape the late-September Heads of Delegation meeting, never uses the word “framework”. It does not need to. It strips back substantive obligations and presupposes future action.

A framework is no match for this crisis

Framework conventions outline broad principles and leave each country to develop its own plan, often delaying tough decisions to future negotiations that may never happen. This tactic is a political shell game: persuading states that want action now to give up meaningful, binding measures to reach agreement.

The Chair’s Aid arrives at a framework by subtraction rather than by proposal, which makes it harder to name and potentially easier to accept. Using the Aid, effectively the rejected text from Geneva, as a basis for the next informal meeting in Bangkok will be sold as a way to preserve a distressed UN system and reach consensus in a fractured geopolitical environment.

This is diplomacy drowning in wishful thinking that the countries fighting binding rules today will approve tougher ones tomorrow. Four years of negotiations and decades of climate diplomacy taught us that this is not a bridge to ambition – this is how ambition dies.

Modou Fall, 45, head of Senegal Propre (“Clean Senegal”) Association is covered with plastic cups and bags to raise awareness of the damage on the environment caused by waste as he cleans a beach during World Cleanup Day in Dakar, Senegal September 15, 2018. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra Modou Fall, 45, head of Senegal Propre (“Clean Senegal”) Association is covered with plastic cups and bags to raise awareness of the damage on the environment caused by waste as he cleans a beach during World Cleanup Day in Dakar, Senegal September 15, 2018. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

Production is driven by global oil, gas and chemical markets, while products and waste travel across borders. No singular government can regulate its way out of a problem created and amplified by a globalised system.

Countries have tried, and production kept rising. Now there is plastic everywhere we look, and the cost falls hardest on the people least responsible.

That failure is why there was consensus to negotiate a treaty, because this crisis requires global action. The purpose was never to list national efforts and call that progress but to create common global rules to address pollution.

The most politically sensitive issues cannot simply be postponed. How much plastic is produced, which toxic chemicals are allowed in it, which throwaway products are banned, and how future decisions are made are precisely the issues that require global answers. An instrument that refuses to negotiate them will be easier to adopt but useless on arrival.

Learn from climate governance

Supporters of a framework approach may point to the ozone treaty as proof that it can work. But the Vienna Convention succeeded for one reason: governments quickly adopted binding upstream controls on ozone-depleting substances.

Climate offers the opposite warning: a framework followed by contested, delayed and insufficient measures, while emissions keep rising.

The new chair not only deleted a direct reference to “production and consumption” and bracketed similar preambular language copied from the original mandate. The article on reporting borrows language from the Paris Agreement. Another summer of record heat, fires and floods offers a glimpse of how well that model is working.

Nothing suggests that the states blocking binding rules today will suddenly accept them tomorrow, and the exponential rise in unchecked plastic production will not pause while governments wait for courage. Blockage is not being resolved, but just pushed forward.

A framework would lock in the wrong response: unlimited upstream growth with waste management attempting to handle it downstream. No waste system can keep pace with a material engineered for endless growth. 

Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot

After four years of INC negotiations, governments know this. States must reject the false choice that the only path to agreement is an instrument too weak to solve the problem it was created to address. Compromise is part of diplomacy. Surrender is not.

And if the UN keeps pushing that choice, the countries prepared to act must be willing to pursue alternative pathways. Groups of willing governments have built effective agreements before, and existing environmental regimes can deliver new rules without inventing a new empty instrument. 

This process was never meant to find a lowest common denominator. It was to create the rules necessary to change our direction. Bangkok in September will be where the second iteration of this text is shaped. If ambitious countries do not push back, the argument about a framework convention will already be lost by default.

Negotiations cannot end with governments accepting the crisis rather than solving it. The science is clear and the damage is accelerating. The world does not need another promise to act later. It needs the treaty governments promised to deliver in 2022. 

The post The world doesn’t need a Paris Agreement for plastics appeared first on Climate Home News.

To many visitors a mangrove forest appears as a stretch of trees standing between land and sea. But if you walk through the same forest with a local fisher returning with the tide, a honey collector searching for wild hives, or a boatman who has spent a lifetime navigating its creeks, another landscape comes into view. What seems to be a single landscape is understood as many. Diverse names distinguish places where fish breed, honey is gathered, storm surges lose their force, or tides behave differently.

Across the eastern and western seaboards in India, coastal communities have developed distinct names for tidal forests that reflect ecological function as much as geography. In Bengal, Sundarban evokes a forest historically associated with the sundari tree and its life-sustaining tidal ecology. Along the Godavari–Krishna delta, the Telugu expression mada vanalu refers to brackish tidal forests that nurture fisheries and soften the impact of cyclones. Tamil and Malayali people use terms built around kandal to distinguish salt-tolerant coastal habitats, while related expressions across the Konkan and Gujarat coast identify creek-edge forests, honey-collecting areas, and other ecosystems.

These names are far more than local expressions. They reflect generations of close observation about how the forest functions and how people have learned to live with it.

Much of this vocabulary is quietly disappearing. In administration, education, and even conservation practice, diverse coastal landscapes are increasingly gathered under a single term, mangroves. The forest remains, but the distinctions that once helped people recognize its ecological diversity begin to fade.

Conservation has become notably good at measuring environmental change. Forest cover, species recovery, and habitat loss are monitored with increasing precision. Still, an irony remains. Even as technologies sharpen the view of nature, the ecological languages through which Indigenous peoples have long interpreted these ecosystems and processes are becoming less visible.

Before ecosystems disappear, the ability to read them often begins to erode.

Conservation routinely monitors species richness and habitat extent but rarely asks whether the vocabulary needed to recognize those habitats is itself surviving. That is conservation’s overlooked blind spot. Protecting biodiversity is not only about safeguarding species and habitats; it also requires sustaining the languages that enable people to understand the many distinctions within an ecosystem in the first place. Conservation cannot fully succeed while the ecological languages that make landscapes intelligible continue to disappear.

When Conservation Loses Resolution

Ecologists classify habitats by their vegetation, hydrology, and species, while people who have lived in these landscapes for generations have long relied on another system of classification — language. Their vocabularies did not evolve to describe nature in the abstract. They emerged from everyday interactions. In tidal forests people learn to distinguish places shaped by tides, soils, fisheries, storms, and seasons, allow them to understand differences that matter.

The problem arises when these locally evolved classifications are absorbed into broader, standardized terminology. A common vocabulary undoubtedly makes administration, education, and scientific communication easier. Yet it also carries an unintended consequence: Ecosystems begin to appear simpler than they really are.

India’s mangrove coast illustrates this shift.

These are not simply regional names but ecolexicons that condense generations of environmental observation into everyday language.

As this mosaic of ecological vocabularies gives way to the single label mangroves, something more than linguistic diversity is lost. It’s like reducing the resolution of a satellite image: The coastline remains visible, but its finer ecological distinctions begin to disappear.

This process may be understood as linguistic flattening — not merely a dilution of linguistic richness and a loss of words, but also the gradual loss of ecological resolution. Long before a language falls silent, it can lose the nuances that once helped people read landscapes.

Language as Conservation Infrastructure

Linguistic flattening also weakens the systems that have long governed how people interact with ecosystems.

Language is often treated as a medium of communication, yet in many Indigenous societies it functions as something more fundamental. It carries practical rules, ethical obligations, and ecological boundaries that are learned not from policy manuals but through everyday speech, stories, and customary practice. In this sense, language is part of conservation infrastructure.

The Māori understanding of harakeke (New Zealand flax) offers a striking example. The central shoot, or rito, represents the child, while the surrounding leaves symbolize parents and grandparents. This is more than a metaphor. The vocabulary itself shapes harvesting practices: Inner shoots are never cut, because removing them threatens the life of the plant. Only the outer leaves are taken, allowing regeneration to continue. Even the flowering stalks (kōrari) are managed with care so that nectar remains available for native birds, supporting pollination and the wider ecosystem.

This appears to be a biocultural expression but in practice is a sophisticated system for managing relationships between people and nature. The language does not simply describe ecological relationships; it instructs people how to behave within them.

Similar patterns are found across Indigenous societies, where names, stories, and customary expressions regulate seasonal harvesting, identify sensitive habitats, and define responsibilities towards land and water.

Conservation recognizes the value of Indigenous knowledge, yet it often overlooks the languages through which that knowledge is organized, remembered, and transmitted. Protecting place-based knowledge while allowing the languages that sustain it to disappear is rather like preserving a library after removing its catalogue. The books may still exist, but their meaning becomes increasingly difficult to recover.

Vanishing Languages, Vanishing Environmental Archives

Modern conservation depends heavily on data. Satellite imagery tracks forest loss, climate models project future change, and ecological surveys measure species abundance with precision. Yet most of these records span only a few decades. They rarely capture and interpret the much longer histories through which communities have understood environmental changes.

That longer record often survives in language. Across Indigenous societies, names for plants, animals, winds, tides, and seasons are not arbitrary labels but accumulated observations refined over generations. They preserve knowledge of when rivers shift their course, when particular fish arrive, how flowering responds to rainfall, which plants indicate groundwater, or where storms repeatedly reshape the coast. Much of this information was never written down because it did not need to be. It remained alive in speech, memory, and everyday practice.

When a language slips away, the environmental archive becomes fragmented, and we lose part of nature’s archive. Individual observations may still be recorded by researchers, but the wider system that connected them — linking species, habitats, seasons, and human experience — is gradually lost.

Conservation then faces an unusual paradox. We invest heavily in collecting new ecological data while allowing centuries of carefully accumulated environmental knowledge to disappear unnoticed.

Seen in this light, language loss is not simply a cultural concern. It also represents the quiet erosion of one of conservation’s oldest and least recognized ways of understanding nature. Protecting biodiversity therefore also means sustaining the living archives that have preserved ecological memory across generations.

Conservation Literacy Beyond Species Lists

Conservation governance has made important progress globally in recognizing Indigenous peoples as partners in biodiversity protection. The Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for respecting and applying traditional knowledge in biodiversity governance, while IPBES has repeatedly shown that indigenous and local knowledge strengthens conservation outcomes. Likewise, UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032) emphasizes that these languages sustain knowledge systems shaped through long relationships with place.

Yet an important gap remains. Conservation frameworks celebrate traditional knowledge but rarely ask how that knowledge survives across generations. Knowledge does not exist independently of the language through which it is observed, evolved, organized, and passed from one generation to the next. A conservation strategy that values Indigenous knowledge while overlooking Indigenous languages risks protecting the product while allowing the process that continually renews it to fade.

This calls for a broader understanding of conservation literacy. Alongside species inventories, habitat maps, and ecological monitoring, conservation should also recognize the value of ecolexicons, the place-based vocabularies that enable Indigenous communities to distinguish habitats, seasonal change, and ecological processes.

Supporting community-led language documentation, multilingual ecological education, and regional diversity of Indigenous vocabularies are therefore not simply a cultural exercise. It strengthens the knowledge infrastructure of future generations to interpret and care for the landscapes they inherit.

Reading Nature Before It Falls Silent

Biodiversity conservation has long measured success in hectares restored, species recovered, and habitat protected. These remain essential benchmarks. Yet this understanding argues that another measure deserves attention: whether the languages that enable communities to understand, interpret and care for those landscapes are also surviving.

A forest is more than the trees it contains. It is also the vocabulary through which generations have learned to read its tides, seasons, species, and silences.

The next frontier in conservation is not simply protecting more land but protecting the many ways in which people understand that land. Every ecological language that survives preserves a way of noticing what others might overlook while their disappearance reduces the world’s ability to see nature in all its complexity.

Conservation cannot claim to protect the living world if it allows the languages that have long interpreted that world to disappear unheard.

Long before a forest falls silent, its words often do.

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

The Extinction of Languages Is an Environmental Issue

The post Conservation’s Blind Spot: Why Language Matters for Biodiversity appeared first on The Revelator.

By several measures, Chinese industry is becoming less dependent on fossil fuels, according to a new analysis.

Read more on E360 →

With June’s UN climate talks inching towards gridlock, a group of diplomats calling themselves “Friends of Science” issued a stark warning: climate science was under attack in Bonn.

The coalition, spanning the world’s richest to its most vulnerable nations, pointed the finger primarily at those who think “science threatens their economic prospects” – a thinly-veiled reference to fossil fuel-dependent states accused of casting doubt on long-held scientific tenets in the UN climate process.

Fiji’s lead negotiator, Sivendra Michael, went still further. He denounced what he called “a very polluted narrative” taking hold outside the negotiating rooms and singled out ECO, a daily newsletter on the talks produced by Climate Action Network (CAN) International, for overlooking the issue. 

“They are representing developing countries, but they are not representing us,” Michael said. His words hinted at how a rift between governments over the science of global warming has created tensions inside the climate movement.

Watchers of the UN climate talks have told Climate Home News there is growing unease over where the world’s most influential coalition of climate NGOs stands in an increasingly heated debate about how scientific messages produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are crafted and turned into global climate policy. 

UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot

CAN’s international leadership has publicly backed a line of argument, championed by some big emerging economies including India, that questions how fair and equitable the models underpinning the work of the IPCC – the UN’s climate science body – are because they are dominated by research from the Global North. 

But some climate activists, including from nations on the frontline of the climate crisis in the Pacific, are increasingly disappointed by CAN’s silence in a connected row over whether the IPCC’s forthcoming assessment report should be finished in time to inform the next UN scorecard of global climate action.  

Over the last two years, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Kenya have pushed back against attempts by a large coalition of nations to align the IPCC’s AR7 report timeline with the second stocktake of national climate plans under the UN climate process. They claim this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and restrict their ability to provide scientific input into the process.

India flags bias in IPCC assumptions

CAN International Executive Director Tasneem Essop spoke at an online event last month in which panelists challenged the “Friends of Science” campaign launched at the Bonn talks. 

During the webinar, an Indian scientist and government negotiator set out her view that the IPCC’s way of working and scientific assumptions perpetuate inequity between developed and developing countries – and yet its reports have come to be treated as “scripture” that cannot be questioned. 

In her intervention, Essop did not comment directly on the Bonn science campaign nor on the IPCC timeline issue. But the participation of CAN’s leadership in an event where such criticism of the IPCC was aired has sparked concern in some parts of the NGO community.

“The way in which CAN International is playing into what could be the destruction of the IPCC inputs into the climate process is very concerning,” said Bill Hare, who was involved in CAN’s establishment nearly four decades ago and now runs think-tank Climate Analytics. 

Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks

He added that it was a mistake for CAN International to align itself with arguments made by India and Saudi Arabia, when those countries are blocking the conclusion of the IPCC’s next key report on cutting emissions in time for it to feed into the next global stocktake, which is due to conclude in 2028.

Like other insiders Climate Home News spoke to, the veteran Australian climate scientist fears these tensions could hamper CAN’s widely recognised power to influence the talks.

“The CAN International voice has been very, very important in the process. That voice doesn’t need to be diluted at this moment in history – that would be a really bad move,” Hare said.

Dialogue to reconcile differing views

Over the last decade, CAN has been working to transform itself into an organisation that is more representative of, and responsive to, voices and needs in the Global South. In 2019, it appointed Essop – a South African expert on climate, energy, poverty and social justice – as executive director, shifting further away from its European and North American roots.

CAN International, which functions as the broader network’s secretariat, says it is discussing how to reconcile varying views on the IPCC and the science and equity question among its hundreds of member groups spread across 130 countries.

“We acknowledge that there are different perspectives within a global network of over 2,000 members on these issues,” CAN International’s Essop said in response to questions from Climate Home News. “Given this diversity, we have democratic processes to build internal agreements.” 

“Science and equity are both fundamental principles for effective climate action and are firmly embedded in CAN’s work,” she added in a written statement. “Putting these principles into practice in a painfully unjust world is not always straightforward, which is why we need continued dialogue across the network.”

Calls for “fair share” approach

The webinar in late August – which aimed to untangle what organisers described as “a growing narrative” that “treats science and equity as opposing priorities” – opened with a presentation by Tejal Kanitkar, a prominent Indian climate scientist who also serves on her government’s delegations at the IPCC and UN climate talks. 

Outlining the findings of a paper she co-authored, Kanitkar argued that the IPCC had used scenarios for future emission reduction trajectories based primarily on assumptions put forward by Global North researchers that are skewed against the world’s poorest nations. These, she noted, were then incorporated into the first UN review of global climate action in 2023 and turned into widely cited emissions-cutting targets for limiting warming to 1.5C – a goal the UN has now conceded will be breached, at least temporarily.

Tejal Kanitkar speaking at a meeting of the IPCC in March 2026. Photo: IPCC Secretariat | Melissa Walsh Tejal Kanitkar speaking at a meeting of the IPCC in March 2026. Photo: IPCC Secretariat | Melissa Walsh

Kanitkar said the “Friends of Science” group included “some of the people who have over-consumed the carbon budget and now use science as a slogan”. When Climate Home News raised the participation of diplomats from vulnerable countries, she said they should be asked why they “accept outcomes that burden the poorest the most”.

Commenting on Kanitkar’s presentation, CAN’s Essop said everyone knows that “imbalances of power dictate who sits at the table, who designs the models and who determines the assumptions underlying them”.

Her wider intervention focused more generally on the need to ensure that emissions-reduction pathways follow an equitable approach and account for the “fair share” of action countries need to take based on their historical responsibilities for climate change. 

IPCC working to update models

Hare later acknowledged that most of the IPCC models used for 1.5C scenarios fail to account for the higher cost of capital and transition financing faced by developing countries. But as this is a “well-known” limitation, the IPCC gives a nuanced reading of the scenarios, and the next generation of models it uses is expected to include more consideration of equity, he added.

Echoing this, a climate scientist from a developing country currently involved in the IPCC process, who did not want to be identified, told Climate Home News that economic models inevitably contain biases and IPCC authors are already working to identify and correct them. 

• Sep 2, 2026 Science UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot Leading scientists say warming must peak at 1.8C to be able to reverse course this century, but current government climate policies are way off track Read more
• Sep 2, 2026 Comment Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot We need a strategy for navigating the huge risks to ecosystems and societies Read more

Despite criticisms of how IPCC scientific reports have been produced, all governments must sign off on every line of a key “summary for policy-makers” at a dedicated meeting. In 2023, the approved summary included the emissions reduction figures in question that informed the UN’s first global stocktake. 

Irrespective of this wider debate, Hare said the “Friends of Science” campaign, which he supports, is focused on the timing of the IPCC’s next assessment cycle rather than the equity of its models.

Unresolved row over IPCC report timeline

A political battle over that time-frame has dragged on for more than two years at successive meetings of the science panel, with governments repeatedly failing to find a solution. 

A large majority of nations have been pushing for a timeline that would ensure the next round of AR7 reports can feed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings that this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and have lobbied for a longer process.

Member of the “Friends of Science” campaign wears a pin in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth Member of the “Friends of Science” campaign wears a pin in Bonn. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

In Bonn this summer, the coalition that wants to align AR7 with the 2028 stocktake – which includes diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama – vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”, including the IPCC assessment reports. 

They pointed the finger at “the usual suspects” but stopped short of singling out any countries at the public press conference. Discussions in the previous week had seen Saudi Arabia and India play down the centrality of IPCC reports in the UN stocktake and oppose calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios to limit an overshoot of the 1.5C warming goal.

Bonn upset fuels further tension

A campaigner with knowledge of internal discussions told Climate Home News that many civil society groups from some of the world’s most vulnerable nations, including the Pacific islands, had expected CAN International to back calls in Bonn defending the centrality of the IPCC in UN climate policy-making. 

Despite this, a day before the “Friends of Science” press conference, CAN published an ECO newsletter that did not mention the issue. Instead, it voiced surprise over the claims of an attack on science happening in the negotiations and accused some of the IPCC’s loudest-defending governments of hypocrisy for continuing to expand fossil fuels and not delivering “fair shares” of emissions cuts and finance to the developing world.

“We were really shocked we could not find a common position and then this jarring narrative was being pushed,” the campaigner added. 

After divisions hardened in Bonn, Hare said his organisation was approached by “very upset” CAN members from various regions about the stance taken by the network’s international leadership on the issue.

Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push

While Climate Home News understands that internal discussions have continued during the summer, including at a CAN leadership meeting in Nairobi in recent days, the campaigner said that CAN International’s endorsement of the recent webinar that directly challenged the “Friends of Science” coalition did not send a reassuring signal. 

Some observers said they feared it would inflame tensions over how climate science is defined and utilised for policy purposes, with consequences reaching well beyond Bonn.

In a statement to Climate Home News, Essop said that “at a time when communities are experiencing the most horrific impacts of climate chaos, our collective energy must turn to solutions such as filling the Loss and Damage Fund, the phasing out of fossil fuels led by the Global North, and justice for people who are least responsible for this climate emergency”. 

The post As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond appeared first on Climate Home News.

For years, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has been working to make the state a welcoming home for clean energy manufacturing — EVs, solar panels, batteries for storage. The state went all out with tax breaks and a worker training program to attract EV and battery makers — and for a while it was working. 

Georgia-based bus manufacturer Blue Bird started selling electric buses commercially in 2018 and built an expanded factory for electric buses in 2023. In 2022, Hyundai built a plant near Savannah that it said would be dedicated to making EVs. In 2024, Kia started making EVs at its West Point plant. And in 2025, Rivian broke ground on its manufacturing plant near Atlanta. The Hyundai and Rivian operations are two of the biggest economic development projects in Georgia history. The state has also worked to attract other parts of the EV and clean energy manufacturing sector, including battery makers and recyclers and solar panel companies.

Under the second Trump administration, the economic outlook for these companies has been destabilized. In addition to ending federal EV tax credits, the Trump administration has imposed tariffs on battery packs, charger hardware, and other components; loosened rules around emissions from gas-powered cars; and ended the Biden administration’s push to make government vehicle fleets electric. And a year ago, federal immigration agents raided an electric vehicle battery plant and arrested more than 400 people, most of them South Korean workers there to help get the new factory off the ground.

The past year and a half has been a grim moment for what was a booming industry in Georgia. But the EV makers are still forging ahead, even if that means making some adjustments.

At Kia’s plant in West Point, a long and constantly varied line of vehicles moves steadily forward on the assembly line, step by step gaining all the trimmings that turn metal shells into driveable cars. But this plant functions more like a short-order cook than a traditional assembly line. Instead of producing big, uniform batches, Kia has designed the plant to manufacture cars according to unique specifications — each one a different model, color, trim, or even drive train — that is, gas-powered, hybrid, or electric. Kia says it has done this to make more of the cars people most want to buy at any given moment. Right now, that means hybrids.

“What we’ve seen is a transition back away from maybe full EV vehicle building to this kind of a middle-of-the-road opportunity,” said factory CEO Stuart Countess.

Electric cars are still the future, he said. But for several reasons, including price and charging access, consumers just aren’t there yet. Changes to federal policy are a major factor, too.

“We had a tax incentive credit that did go away,” Countess said. “Sales were really moving in the right direction, but once it went away, it became a much different environment.”

Just as Kia has ramped up hybrid production, its sister company Hyundai has added hybrid production to the lineup produced at its massive plant near Savannah, which was originally built to make EVs. 

“It’s kind of a messy period we’re in right now,” said Stephanie Valdez-Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “But I think the manufacturers are adjusting.”

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At the same time, battery makers throughout the state have started shifting to producing storage batteries for electricity in addition to ones made to power vehicles.

“The state continues to have a lot riding on the success of both the electric vehicle but also the battery market,” said Stan Cross of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, or SACE. 

Georgia leads the region in EV and battery manufacturing, but the growth has stumbled, with layoffs at SK Battery earlier this year. More than $4 billion in investment has been canceled or scaled back in the last year across the Southeast, according to SACE. 

That’s dwarfed, though, by the nearly $74 billion in manufacturing investment that’s moving ahead. Still, one open question, Cross said, is whether Georgians will buy the hybrids and EVs being made in the state.

Despite actively pursuing EV manufacturing, Georgia doesn’t have incentives to encourage EV adoption like some other states. In fact, there’s an extra registration fee designed to make up for lost gas taxes. And the thorny politics may extend beyond state policy and the now-ended federal incentives. “When it comes to electric vehicles, Georgia politics remains utterly confused,” Cross said.

Private investment continues, though. Kia and Hyundai are part of a charging consortium called IONNA that has installed several charging stations around the state, including one at the Kia factory site in West Point. Electric utilities are investing more in vehicle charging too. Across the region, EV-related investment by utilities increased by 14 percent this year, according to SACE.

“Though we’re not seeing a lot of activity on the legislative side, we do see potential on the regulatory side and really are encouraging Georgia Power to step up and help kind of fill the void that policymakers in the state are creating,” Cross said.

Valdez-Streaty believes that, over time, making EVs in Georgia will likely lead to more people in Georgia buying them.

“It’s like that familiarity, right?” she said. “People have jobs at those companies and familiarity with those products.”

Though shaky for the last 18 months or so, she said the EV market is starting to stabilize — and the auto industry is still going electric, it’s just taking a little longer.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia bet big on EV manufacturing. Trump pulled the plug. on Sep 9, 2026.

Wendell Berry made his choices and stuck to them. He did not have a computer or a smartphone. He wrote more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, mostly with a pencil and paper, from his farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. By the time of his passing last week, the 92-year-old had lived many lives — as a farmer, teacher, philosopher, environmental activist — and inspired several generations of writers, farmers, and advocates in turn. From these varying perspectives, Berry grappled with humanity and the natural world. 

His answer to the fundamental question of how to live right was to start small — to revere the Earth’s endless beauty, and to work a little, each day, to reverse the harm we’ve caused. 

“There is no public crisis that is not also private,” Berry wrote in his essay “Think Little.” Written in 1972 as the environmental movement emerged, the piece marked a conflict of Berry’s: Despite strong environmental convictions, he sometimes despaired of the movement’s focus on bending the ear of politicians, without individuals healing the rupture between modern life and the land. “The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living,” Berry wrote. 

He extolled this approach in one of his most well-known poems, “Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front”: “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant.”

The language of activism was often at odds with Berry’s worldview. It seemed to warn of a coming apocalypse, but to Berry, the world had no end and no beginning. To move in nature’s time meant to think in cycles of death and rebirth, not a straight line leading toward destruction or salvation. 

That didn’t stop Berry from engaging with activism even when it frustrated him, said Jeffrey Bilbro, an English professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who’s written several books on Berry. 

Berry was arrested in 1979 for protesting a nuclear plant in Indiana. In 2011, he was arrested again during a sit-in inside Kentucky state government offices while protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. He remained active in the fight against coal throughout the 2010s, helping to block the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., and pulling his papers from the University of Kentucky after the school accepted a $7 million donation from Alliance Coal.

After Berry wrote his essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer” in 1987, some called him a Luddite. As a Grist article in 2014 pointed out, he was, in perhaps the truest sense, taking after that early 19th century movement, when textile workers at the advent of industrialization destroyed machinery to protect the dignity of their work. Berry refused, as much as he could, to let technology alienate him from his work. For this, he was sometimes criticized or called a curmudgeon.

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His views didn’t fit neatly into modern politics. He believed that marriage and family strengthened community ties, but didn’t believe the government had authority to legislate such things. The law of nature, he said in one essay, was universal kinship and kindness, and Biblical stories and Psalms supported that. Berry was religious, but didn’t always like church, calling himself, according to Bilbro, a “bad weather church-goer” because he preferred to spend nice Sunday mornings walking in the woods. He hated dualisms — between humanity and the natural world, between body and soul, between person who believes x and person who believes y. This lent him broad appeal across the political and class spectrum, especially to those who felt that capitalism and industry had moved humanity away from a more honest way of life, whether through agriculture or other means.

“For an uncompromising person or a person of convictions, I think he recognized the need in a fallen world,” Bilbro said. “Our hands are all dirty, and we’re making these compromises, and it’s better to be honest about the necessity to do so and try to do what we can to live right, even if we can’t attain the purity that we might wish.”

The environmental crisis, according to Berry, takes hold in our lives and evinces itself as a sort of social decay. But living isn’t an unforgivable sin in itself, if we can only leave things better than we found them, knowing that the strip-mined mountaintop where we plant spruce, aspen, and wildflowers might not become a lush forest again until long after we’re gone.

In the poem, “A Discipline,” Berry imagines apocalypse: “it approaches / on every side, there is no other place / to turn.” 

And yet, the poem continues, nothing ever really goes away: “It is the time’s discipline to think / of the death of all living, and yet live.”

Only the hard work of tending the land and learning its rhythms again can heal it, he believed. In coming into relationship with the smallest handful of earth, you can understand what it means to fight for change almost too enormous to fathom. To Berry, by tending a sprouted seedling in the ground, you can recognize you are it, and it is you.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wendell Berry’s life on Earth on Sep 9, 2026.

The soft body of the turtle Channel Comment brendan 9th September 2026 Teaser Media

Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.

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With less than a year to go before France’s presidential election, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen seems almost certain to reach the run-off. Her party’s fortunes have continued to rise in recent years thanks to its leaders’ ability to rally working-class voters while securing support from business elites. Tensions between these two bases remain, but they are unlikely to come to a head before the vote.

Marine Le Pen is no stranger to strategic ambiguity. She has existed in this state for the past year, promoting Jordan Bardella as a potential presidential candidate for the Rassemblement National (RN) in 2027, but not ruling out running herself if the courts decided to reduce her sentence for embezzlement of public funds.

In July, her sentence was reduced to three years in prison, two suspended, one under house arrest. Her ineligibility for public office was cut to 15 months. Because she had already served this since the first verdict, her path to the presidency reopened, and she immediately threw her hat back into the ring.

Le Pen has already launched an appeal against the new sentence too, at the Cour de Cassation, France’s supreme court. Depending on when this judgement is delivered, she may have to face an ignominious end to the election campaign, spending the last few days wearing an electronic ankle tag and under curfew. If she is lucky, however, the sluggish timeline of French justice may spare her a verdict until after the second round, by which point she hopes to have presidential immunity.

Candidate, or perhaps not. Ankle tag, or perhaps not. The uncertainty of the French justice system is not where the ambiguity ends either: Le Pen’s bid for the Élysée Palace rests on her ability to maintain unity between different fractions of her base that have competing interests.

A short-lived social turn

When Le Pen achieved her first major breakthrough, advancing to the second round of the presidential election in 2017, she did so off the back of a “social turn”. Advised by Florian Philippot, then vice-president of the Front National (now RN), she ran on a platform of retirement at 60, scrapping the 2016 labour reform which restricted workers’ rights, fighting against tax evasion, and maintaining the 35-hour work week and the wealth tax, amid a host of other statist measures.

Ten years on, […] Le Pen has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

During the campaign, she attacked Le Siècle, an elite cross-partisan social club that she described as a secret meeting point of the oligarchy. She borrowed the slogans of populist left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon to appeal to his voters in the second round, calling them to “dégagez-les” (“throw them out”), a direct echo of his call to “dégagez-les tous” (“throw them all out”). She even quoted the Socialist leader of the early 20th century, Jean-Jaurès, but it was to no avail. She had spent the 2017 campaign talking up the benefits of euro-exit and Frexit, which business and 70 per cent of the French public strongly opposed. At the last minute, she tried to backpedal but failed to convince the electorate. Her campaign ended with a bruising debate against Emmanuel Macron in which she appeared not to understand her own economic policies.

Ten years on, little remains of that Marine Le Pen. As part of the de-demonisation strategy of rendering the RN palatable, she has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

Unlike in the US or the UK, companies in France cannot donate to political campaigns, and donations from private citizens are capped at 7,500 euros. Industry thus doesn’t intervene as directly in the democratic process as the cryptocurrency and fossil fuels interests backing Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Similarly, because of the RN’s ties to historical fascism, business has previously been wary of being seen to associate with the party, to the point that the Front National couldn’t even access French bank loans.

Nonetheless, since 2024, when the Rassemblement National became the largest individual party in both the European Parliament and the French National Assembly, the RN and big business have gradually moved closer. This has been in no small part thanks to Jordan Bardella, the young gun who would have replaced Le Pen if the courts had rejected her appeal. Bardella, who is just 30 years old and currently dating an aristocrat, believes the RN needs to expand beyond its working-class and struggling petit-bourgeois base into the affluent classes. He sees austerity as a core part of the RN’s project: in 2024, he proclaimed the need for “order in the streets and order in the public accounts”.

Party of capital

Two additional factors have enabled the RN to become a standard party of capital: support from oligarchs, and an attempt by centrists to paint the Left as the real extremists, letting the RN off the hook.

Media moguls Vincent Bolloré and Pierre Édouard Stérin relentlessly platform the party and talk up its preferred themes in the media (although they also boost other right-wing forces, like Éric Zemmour’s party Reconquête, various other Catholic reactionaries, and what remains of the Sarkozyist right). François Durvye, a former hedge fund manager for Stérin and a special advisor to Bardella, was tasked with establishing relationships with the business elite. Durvye recently quit the party, but in a parting shot, he claimed he was unable to reconcile himself to Le Pen’s insufficiently neoliberal positions. In reality, reporting in Libération and Mediapart suggests that his departure was largely an ego-driven firing by Le Pen, who made clear that his days were numbered after he had unsubtly expressed his dissatisfaction to various RN bigwigs that she – and not Bardella – was running for president. This was not an ideological purge. Bardella, and his other economically liberal advisors like Ambroise de Rancourt, remain part of Le Pen’s campaign team. On 29 August, the party announced that, if it gained power, it would enshrine a “golden rule” of keeping the deficit below 3 per cent in the constitution.

Durvye and Bardella’s strenuous efforts to sign up to the agenda of the patronat – France’s business establishment – appear to be working. In 2011, Laurence Parisot, then head of the business lobby MEDEF, denounced Le Pen, accusing her of sitting squarely within the far-right tradition. By 2025, Bardella was a guest at the MEDEF summer university, keen to demonstrate that the party was abandoning any statist economic policies it may have previously favoured. In 2026, he was invited back for a working lunch, which he later described as “courteous”. The rapprochement extends to Le Pen herself: In April, she dined with influential corporate leaders including France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, the owner of luxury goods firm LVMH, who backed Macron in 2017 and 2022 and is a personal friend of Vincent Bolloré.

The institutions representing business interests are taking the RN seriously because the polls currently show Le Pen/Bardella making it into the second round in all scenarios, and likely beating their opponent in the runoff. Business leaders feel they have to suss out the potential next party of government. They also fear the alternative: though centrist candidates seem to stand a better chance of making it to the second round, some polling scenarios show the RN candidate facing off against Mélenchon, who is himself running for the fourth time.

The centrist parties have already supplied the arguments for business to back the far right, treating Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”, LFI) as an equivalent “extreme” to the RN, while also slowly turning the framework of demonisation away from the RN and onto LFI. In 2024, the newspaper Libération revealed secret dinners between Édouard Philippe, the likely candidate of the Macron camp, and Marine Le Pen. At one of these dinners, Philippe reportedly said that he wanted the next election to be between his camp and the far right; an election of “project against project, without moral critique”, according to the revelations. Last year, Bruno Retailleau, head of the right-wing Les Républicains party and former interior minister under Macron, called for a united “republican front” including the RN against LFI. Most of the attacks from the Macron camp on the RN have thus far concentrated on the party’s economic irresponsibility, based often on the promises they made during their brief social turn.

In this context, business has little work to do to abandon republicanism and justify a swing behind the RN. In the 2026 Toulouse municipal election, local industrial leaders threatened to cancel investments or to pull their businesses from the city if LFI candidate François Piquemal beat Macronist Jean-Luc Moudenc. Business and industrial leaders are primed to take this one step further and come out against LFI in future LFI-RN runoffs. As Bernard Cohen, the head of a lobby group representing the interests of small- and medium-sized businesses put it recently: “whether they are small, medium or large, what the bosses like generally is financial and economic stability […] economic danger for the bosses comes not from the Left of government, but a certain section of the Left; by which they mean LFI”.

For their part, the unions, or at least the more radical ones, have started to push back against the bosses creeping toward the RN. In August, Sophie Binet, the leader of the CGT, denounced MEDEF in an interview with Le Monde for helping roll out the red carpet to the far right. She argued that the party’s economic position was irrelevant and that business leaders should be thinking about the RN’s programme regarding women, LGBT rights, climate change, the constitution, and the independence of the judiciary, rather than any economic reforms that the bosses might favour.

The standard position across the unions is that the far right is a unique and dangerous threat to the republic, to which any other political force is preferable. The Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front; a broad left-wing electoral alliance in France) was endorsed in 2024 because it was a rare instance of left unity. In other words, the unions wouldn’t burn any bridges by backing it. In 2024, the leaderships of various unions condemned media outlets and politicians trying to invoke a false equivalence between LFI and the far right, but they prefer to remain relatively politically neutral, not least because the leadership of LFI and union leaders have butted heads over strategy many times.

Kicking the can

The RN’s move closer to its roots on the economy poses problems for the coalition that it is trying to build over the long term. The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

For example, the RN has been keen to position itself as the party of French agriculture, and has allied closely with small farmers who smile in selfies with Bardella. These traditionalist farmers are the kinds of people who oppose the over-financialisation of agriculture and the mass purchase of land by agri-giants like Otium, owned by Pierre Edouard Stérin, one of the oligarchs instrumental in smoothing the party’s path to power. When iron and steel colossus ArcelorMittal entered crisis due to global overcapacity, the company closed two sites and said it would cut a further 600 jobs. The RN attacked Macron incessantly, but when LFI proposed a vote on nationalising the firm, it abstained, fearing it would alienate business.

The party has also opposed wealth taxes as well as taxes on private jets. It promises a better life for workers through horizontal redistribution away from immigrants, welfare cheats, the recipients of overseas development aid, and a very optimistic assessment of government waste. It also proposes cutting France’s contributions to the EU, which could ultimately result in reduced subsidies for its agricultural base. In the RN’s 2026 counter-budget, the party put forward proposals for deeper austerity than the Macronist government, arguing for 36 billion euros in savings compared to prime minister Sébastien Lecornu’s 30 billion. In short, the RN is back to the ultra-racist Reaganism that defined the party under Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.

The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

To obviate the conflict between the interests the RN is trying to represent, Marine Le Pen defaults to unity through nationalism. She talks in the language of the people and presents the struggle as a national one against a cosmopolitan establishment. As political scientist Théo Bourgeron has observed, Le Pen kicks down the road the difficult spending tradeoffs that will arise when not enough government waste is found to cover what remains of the party’s social commitments.

Where there is a genuine tension in the strategy is Le Pen’s disagreement with Bardella (and previously Durvye) over pensions. Bardella used the period when he was the likely presidential candidate to argue against Le Pen’s position on the subject. Fearful of alienating the party’s older working-class base, she wants to roll back Macron’s pension reforms and revert the retirement age to 62. Bardella, by contrast, wants to keep the reform and is even considering scrapping a rule that allows people to retire at 67 on full pension, aiming to replace it instead with a minimum of 42 years of contribution, or the option to take a smaller pension. While it does open the party up to accusations of abandoning its base, even this tension could work in the RN’s benefit. Candidate once more, Le Pen can set the line in favour of the lower pension age, while Bardella privately reassures his newfound friends in MEDEF that he will do his utmost to lobby for a higher one when in power.

Maintaining the coalition

For the moment, this tension seems unlikely to pose too many problems for the RN. The far right does not have a monopoly on the working class, most of whom choose abstention, and many of whom vote for left-wing parties. It is true, however, that the voters they do have, including those among the working class, are unlikely to be fazed by the imprecision on economic questions and the cosiness with big business. Félicien Faury’s Des électeurs ordinaires (“Ordinary Voters”), a study of the RN electorate, has demonstrated the importance of race and identity to the far-right vote. He has amassed ample evidence that RN voters tend to feel that the distributional conflicts in society are almost entirely between natives and immigrants, not between social classes, and that they generally share the low-tax impulses of the Grand Patrons – France’s most influential corporate bosses.

The contradictions of the RN aren’t likely to be confronted on the ground or in the media. Although LFI speaks in the language of class conflict and is committed to highlighting RN hypocrisy, Mélenchon’s strategy is to assemble a “New France” of public sector workers, educated young people, and the urban, often racialised working class. This means that they will spend limited time and resources during the campaign in the working-class areas where the far right is strongest, because their strategy is not premised on converting far-right voters, but on building an alternative coalition by activating abstentionists to reach the second round.

There is a certain logic to Mélenchon’s gamble. Abstentionists are sociologically closer to left-wing voters, and have values that more closely resemble those of the left bloc than those of the centre or the far right. The French presidential election accounts only for raw numbers, not the geographic distribution of voters, so there is a lot to be gained for a Left concentrated primarily on winning votes in densely populated urban areas.

Polling hypotheticals show Mélenchon, currently the only left candidate with a plausible shot of making it to the second round, being destroyed by both Le Pen and Bardella in a runoff. To this, the Insoumis retort that polls always underestimate Mélenchon and overrate Le Pen. They argue that the extra votes from the abstentionists they hope to activate can be combined with the same dynamic that made the New Popular Front, a broad left-wing electoral alliance, win the legislative elections in 2024 (albeit without a majority), when enough centrist voters chose to block the far right.

Mélenchon’s candidacy remains a long shot, though his campaign is progressing well. The far right’s unity is currently being held in place by proximity to power. Commonalities are emphasised and differences dissolved by the possibility that Marine Le Pen might soon be in the Élysée. If Mélenchon wins, the factions will compete to establish the post-Le Pen orientation of the far-right bloc. If she (or a candidate of post-Macronism) wins, then the reverse occurs: the Left will be scrambled, and the succession battle will play out among the interest groups and political tendencies to the left of Macron. For now, the far right’s contradictions are likely to remain unresolved.

On August 26, the side of a mountain near the border between Nepal and Tibet collapsed. Seven billion cubic feet of glacial ice and rock, enough to fill 100 football stadiums, crashed roughly a mile straight down into the river below. The impact created a muddy wall of water that swept through the valley as fast as 100 miles per hour, destroying villages dozens of miles downstream and killing more than 1,300 people. Thousands more remain missing. 

The scale of the disaster is extraordinary, even for a region accustomed to deadly floods and landslides. It will take months for scientists to confirm exactly what happened. But, they warn, one thing is already clear: As climate change melts icy landscapes worldwide, tragedies like this are more likely to happen. They are also incredibly hard to predict.

“Glacial loss destabilizes slopes in many far-reaching ways that are often unpredictable and catastrophic,” said Mark Carey, a professor of environmental studies and geography at the University of Oregon who leads a lab that studies glaciers. Proactive research and monitoring have saved lives in some parts of the world, Carey said, but in a place like the Himalayas, where thousands of glaciers are spread over vast areas, “it’s impossible to predict everything and establish early warning systems everywhere.”

The world’s glaciers have shrunk by about one-fifth in the last century and are expected to lose at least another quarter of their mass by 2100. Each fraction of a degree of warming makes them vanish faster, with hundreds of billions of tons of ice lost each year.

The downstream effects of this disappearing ice are complex and varied. Glaciers often buttress the sides of mountains and, as they retreat, newly exposed silt and rock can become unstable. The soil itself is also often glued together by a frozen layer known as permafrost, which helps lock slopes into place, but thaws when temperatures become too warm. Glacial meltwater can eat into the cracks in the bedrock, weakening it over time. All of these processes can result in sudden avalanches or rock slides — like one that caused a 1,500 foot tsunami in Alaska last summer, or possibly like the collapsed mountain slope in Nepal.

It’s also common for retreating glaciers to leave behind ridges of dirt and rock, known as moraines, that trap meltwater and rain. These natural dams can release enormous amounts of water if they break. 

Glaciers themselves can behave as dams, too. In Juneau, Alaska, glacial meltwater has triggered flooding every year since 2011. Just north of the city, a glacier-dammed valley, known as Suicide Basin, fills with meltwater and rain throughout the year. When it becomes too full, the ice holding back the water lifts up, releasing billions of gallons at once. But while the yearly flood causes plenty of property damage, it has never killed anybody. That’s because it’s carefully monitored, said Eran Hood, a hydrologist and professor of environmental science at the University of Alaska who studies the basin.

“Every single cell phone in Juneau goes off when the lake starts to drain,” he said. “We have a lake in a known location, we have cameras all over it, we have a laser measuring the elevation of the water, and we have the ability to make drone maps every few weeks to update our estimates of the volume of water in the lake.”

Close monitoring and engineering has successfully prevented disaster in Peru as well. The country has spent decades draining dozens of high-risk glacial lakes across the Andes, “no doubt saving tens of thousands of lives,” said Carey, who wrote a book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers, about these measures. And last year, Swiss authorities were able to evacuate 300 residents from the Alpine village of Blatten just days before a glacier collapsed and engulfed it in an avalanche. 

But success stories like these stand in stark contrast to what happened in Nepal, Hood said. While early-warning systems in the Himalayas monitor water levels in some high risk rivers and lakes, there is no regional system capable of continuously watching for the kind of sudden rock-and-ice collapse that triggered the disaster. Doing so would require intensive research and surveillance across a vast, remote, and difficult-to-access landscape where resources are limited.

“There’s really no effective way to monitor all these glaciers,” Hood said. “When you’re dealing with something that releases immediately and moves downslope so quickly, how can you find a way to provide people with any warning?” 

The village of Blatten, Switzerland, in May 2025 after a glacier collapse.
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images

Emerging or repurposed technology may be able to help fill some of these gaps, said Dan McGrath, a glaciologist and associate professor at Colorado State University. 

In places like Mexico City, seismic early-warning systems have sometimes given residents more than a minute to prepare before strong earthquake shaking arrives. Scientists are now wondering whether these same networks could be used to detect landslides and floods caused by glaciers. The glacial-break in Nepal caused readings equivalent to a 5.2 magnitude earthquake that traveled as far as Alaska, leading authorities to initially assume a seismic event had caused the disaster. There, too, just a few minutes of warning was shown to make all the difference. After warnings of the flood reached a school downstream, the principal was able to evacuate 900 students to safety before the torrent submerged it. 

Researchers have also recently experimented with laying fiber-optic cables across a glacier in Switzerland to detect “icequakes,” or tiny fractures in the ice that generate seismic vibrations and could provide clues about changes in a glacier’s stability.

A new satellite, recently launched jointly by the United States’ and India’s space agencies, also holds promise. Known as NISAR, it was designed to detect subtle changes in Earth’s surface, like shifting glaciers, and can capture detailed information about ice and snow cover while seeing through cloud cover in ways that previous satellite sensors were not capable of. Recent analysis of the satellite’s data showed that it had recorded slumping on the mountain slope in Nepal several weeks before it collapsed. 

But still, there’s no silver bullet, McGrath said. “Many of these mountain ranges are at a tipping point,” he said. “Freezing, or not freezing, is binary. And as temperatures warm above that and permafrost thaws, that is undoubtedly going to lead to an increase in disasters like this.”

Matt Simon contributed reporting to this article.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why it’s so hard to predict a tragedy like Nepal’s glacier collapse on Sep 8, 2026.

This summer was more than uncomfortably hot — it was record-breaking, with many countries reporting their highest average temperatures yet. Western Europe, for example, sweated through five grueling heat waves this year that sucked moisture from the soil, turned vegetation into wildfire fuel, and shrank rivers until the fish ran out of water. Emergency rooms and ambulances were overwhelmed. Early estimates found that at least 35,000 excess deaths were recorded as temperatures soared — and that only accounts for the first four heat waves in about half of the continent.

But all this, the World Health Organization said, was just a “dress rehearsal.” The coming summers are bound to be even hotter. 

Two factors in particular could push global temperatures even higher in the coming years: El Niño and human-caused climate change. El Niño is a climate pattern that brings extra warmth around the globe every two to seven years. We’re in the early stages of the current cycle, which is on track to be the strongest in a millennium. 

And then there’s the problem of Earth’s atmosphere increasingly filling with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Addressing climate change requires countries to drastically move away from burning fossil fuels and invest in alternative technologies, such as solar and wind power. In 2015, nearly every nation in the world entered a voluntary commitment to try to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, with a more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). But a new United Nations report released last week found that we are certain to overshoot the latter goal within the next few years. This means that even more severe heat, drought, fire, sea level rise, and glacier loss is headed our way. 

As the effects of climate change and El Niño converge, scientists predict 2027 is very likely to be the hottest year ever recorded.

“There really is nowhere that is terribly well adapted to these very extreme events,” said Kristie Ebi, a lead author of the U.N. report and professor of global health at the University of Washington. Poor countries are the most vulnerable to climate change, but even wealthy countries are failing to adapt fast enough, the U.N. report found.

Some countries have found ways to reduce suffering and death from heat, even as the climate has warmed. After a 2003 heat wave claimed 70,000 lives across Europe, countries took steps to protect people, instituting early warning systems, establishing cooling centers, and helping hospitals prepare. France made an aggressive national plan that mandated air-conditioned rooms in nursing homes, instructed health workers to check in on older and frail people during extreme heat, and developed green spaces in cities to help cool them down. 

The Paris Fire Brigade displays a heatstroke kit to Minister Laurent Nunez and the press in Paris, France, on June 28, 2026, as part of measures to protect the population against the heat wave.
Daniel Perron / Hans Lucas via AFP via Getty Images

“A given heat wave is now actually much less deadly in France than it was before,” said Christopher Callahan, a climate scientist who studies heat, health, and economics at Indiana University. Still, the world is already at 1.4 degrees C of warming and counting, and scientists expect that at some point, “the heat waves will become so intense that they will sort of outstrip that adaptation progress,” he said. If countries continue to adapt to heat at the rate they have in recent decades, it would only prevent about 1 in 10 deaths that would be expected, according to one of his studies.

Ebi said that health officials have failed to keep up with the pace of change, such as more heat waves occurring outside of the traditional mid-May to mid-September season, and have overlooked extreme scenarios such as the record-breaking heat waves seen in Western Europe this summer. “The temperatures were just so high, much higher than the heat wave early warning systems were designed to manage,” Ebi said. 

The fact that the world is struggling to adapt to the amount of warming that’s already arrived is a troubling sign. Studies in recent years have suggested that the threshold at which heat becomes hazardous for the human body is lower than previously thought, with the danger zone starting with temperatures as low as 26 degrees C (79 F) when combined with high humidity. In addition to causing heat stroke, increased temperatures can put lethal amounts of stress on organs such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys.

“When 1.5 was decided, there was an assumption that 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial [temperatures] would be relatively safe,” Ebi said. “And I would say, today, that Europe does not think 1.4 degrees is relatively safe. For most of the U.S., it does not feel like 1.4 is relatively safe.”

A heat wave pushes temperatures in Granada, Spain, past 40 degrees C on July 7, 2026.
Alex Camara / Anadolu via Getty Images

So what will it mean for the world to overshoot its climate goals? The U.N. report warns that there “are no good outcomes above 1.5 degrees C” and the updated best-case scenario for global temperatures ends up peaking at 1.8 C. It lays out potential paths to slowly bring average temperatures back down to safer levels after that peak, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean a return to present-day conditions. At that point, it may be impossible for dead coral reefs to thrive again, or for all the melted ice to be refrozen. But it could still help with extreme heat.

To prepare for hotter conditions, Ebi said it’s important to “stress test” possible disaster scenarios, just as banks and militaries conjure worst-case scenarios to see how they’d play out and better prepare for them. Otherwise, communities will be forced to discover the devastating effects of extreme heat in real time, such as when Portland, Oregon, was struck with 116-degree F temperatures during the heat dome in June 2021. Under those unprecedented conditions, roads buckled, bridges warped, the power cables on the streetcar melted, and the light rail’s overhead copper wires expanded and sagged.

“There are a million different ways in which we can imagine making our society resilient to this kind of threat,” Callahan said, “and we just aren’t there yet.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world is adapting to extreme heat — but not nearly fast enough on Sep 8, 2026.

Dan Dallas had defended these communities before. The little towns on the Karuk tribal land are nestled in a gorge along the Klamath River, amidst a million-acre wilderness of Northern California conifer and hardwood that makes up the Six Rivers National Forest. This time, August 2023, a fusillade of lightning strikes had ignited the web of steep canyons south of the town of Orleans in two dozen places, and as the fires expanded, they merged.

As an incident commander for the U.S. Forest Service, Dallas wasn’t called up until fires got big. On the drive from Colorado, he considered the recent experiences that had begun to trouble him.

“I’d been to multiple places, two, even three, sometimes four times,” he remembered in a recent interview. On each fire, he’d followed the Forest Service playbook. Keep the fire small. Contain it quickly. Box it in by throwing hardware at it, bulldozing the ridgetops, and dropping fire retardant slurry or water from planes and helicopters. Don’t light the fuse on a megafire that could reach the nearest town. But he was starting to realize: Even if you don’t light the fuse, you still have the bomb.

“Finally, I figured out all I’m doing is deferring risk to this place,” said Dallas, whose day job is director of renewable resources for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region. “I’m going to come back and protect it again.”

When he got to the Six Rivers, he found the local forest supervisor and the Karuk Tribe had been percolating the same idea he had. It had rained in those mountains, and the conditions were mild. Fog was rolling in from the coast in the mornings, settling in the canyon bottoms. “It actually had gone from being fire weather to basically prescribed fire season,” Dallas remembered.

What if, instead of tearing up the Six Rivers to attack this fire, they allowed it to creep along the forest floor as long as they could? There’d be less fuel to burn the next time a fire came through, and it wouldn’t burn as hot even if the weather was bad. Fifty thousand acres of fire; fifty thousand acres less fuel to burn next summer.

Incident commander Dan Dallas gives a briefing on the Divide Complex Wildfire in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest in 2021. Photo courtesy of Brenda Bowen, Rocky Mountain Team 1, Fire Information Officer

The strategy was a success, but a fleeting one. The opportunities to let wildfire do its job are being increasingly extinguished by hotter, drier conditions that last longer throughout the year. The Trump administration has also returned to “full suppression” — shutting down every fire, even when it doesn’t threaten human life and property — after three decades of federal policy that, at least on paper, encouraged a friendlier approach to wildfire.

The problem with putting out all fires, said Dallas, is the same one that troubled him on that drive to California. You’re leaving fuel there that could stoke the next megafire you can’t manage, or even stop. “We keep going back to the same places, and it’s more often that the fires are more severe,” Dallas said. 

Over the past decade, so-called megafires — characterized not only by their size, often bigger than 100,000 acres, but by their severity, speed, and impact — have become more common. They now account for the bulk of the money spent on firefighting, with the federal government spending 10 times more on suppressing wildfires than it did 30 years ago.

This summer’s fire conditions have already been extreme. Nearly 73 percent of the Intermountain West is experiencing severe to exceptional drought, with temperatures breaking records across the country. Add to that last winter’s meager snowpack, which has left forests ready to burn. So far in 2026, the U.S. government has reported more than 53,000 wildfires that have burned over 8 million acres — about 3 million acres more than average over the past decade. 

The onslaught is straining firefighting resources, with many requests for help going unfulfilled. An August 11 memo from the National Multi-Agency Coordinating group, which handles logistics for firefighting across the federal government, warned that “resource availability remains critically low, with commitments approaching all-time peak levels.”

Wildland firefighting is increasingly facing an intractable reality: We’re stuck in a vicious cycle. A doom loop.

In 2013, the U.S. Forest Service quietly convened a panel of futurists to imagine the arc of wildfire over the coming decades. The group included luminaries in futures studies — the science of systematically gaming out distant outcomes — a couple of wildfire experts, and a science fiction writer. 

Over three weeks of conference calls, the futurists grilled the wildfire experts — John Phipps, a regional research station director who helped make national wildfire policy for the U.S. Forest Service, and Sarah McCaffrey, a social scientist with the agency who studied the human aspect of how it worked. Together, the group imagined possible trajectories for the American wildfire saga — carrying it forward beyond the scope of a presidential administration, longer than the span of any individual government career. Where, they asked, was all this really going?

U.S. Forest Service firefighters monitor the Line Fire near San Bernardino, California, in 2024.
Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

They released their final report, “Wildland Fire Management Futures: Insights from a Foresight Panel,” in 2015. The one big takeaway: We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. “As conditions change over time,” the report reads, “the existing fire suppression approach will fail across the whole range of plausible future conditions.”

If we don’t change course, the futures panel wrote, “risk will continue to escalate until fuel-filled landscapes eventually reset catastrophically.” Translation: Much of the West will burn. Today’s children will see forests converted to grass or shrublands in their lifetimes. Biodiversity will be irreversibly destroyed, along with thousands upon thousands of American homes.

This isn’t pessimism. The science behind it has been well-established for decades. In any combustible ecosystem, fire periodically clears away all but the strongest plants, allowing them to thrive and reproduce. The process enriches the soil and opens the understory to new growth. On the other hand, if you suppress fire on the landscape for a century, as the United States has done, leave trees and brush to pile up in a continent-sized pyre, then heat up the planet and take away the rain, everything’s going to burn at once. Windy, hot days and lightning strikes and accidents are bound to converge, and our expanding settlements are bound to be in the way.

It’s not that firefighting doesn’t work; federal firefighters are able to contain more than 98 percent of wildfires. The vast majority of damage to human infrastructure is done by the 2 percent of ignitions that get away, said Matt Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. The top 1 percent are responsible for more than a quarter of the total acreage burned. But those megafires happen under nightmare weather conditions — hot, dry, and windy — and escape control quickly. “There is no doubt that our federal fire suppression apparatus is effective, that’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in,” Hurteau said. “It’s only under the most extreme conditions that things escape, and it’s been that way for decades.”

The more climate change extends the fire season, Hurteau said, the more chances for megafires to start. The more small fires we put out, the more fuel there is for megafires to eat up on the way to our towns. This is what the futures panel meant by “escalate.”

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With the build-up of fuels that constant fire suppression causes, their report concluded, “we are self-selecting for fires we cannot control and do the greatest damage.”

Thirteen years after the futures panel, interviews with more than 20 experts in the field of wildland fire — foresters and firefighters and bureaucrats and scientists and even a lobbyist, from varying positions on the political spectrum — painted a stark picture of where our fire policy is taking us. Several of them had the same question: “What the f**k we are doing here?”

The way out of this quagmire is widely agreed upon: Somehow, we have to get rid of all that extra fuel, and once a semblance of balance is restored, make friends with natural, lower-severity ground fires by hardening human communities against them and letting them be. This plan has, in one form or another, been entrenched in federal policy since the mid-90s.

In addition to establishing programs to physically remove extra fuels and clear out forest floors through prescribed burning, that policy has included allowing unplanned wildfires to do the work, as long as it’s safe to do so. In other words, when fires pose a danger to people, including firefighters and the public, they’re generally fought aggressively. Otherwise, fire managers have had the option of allowing them to play their natural role.

Many fire scientists believe that letting more fires run their course in the backcountry, the way Dallas and his colleagues did on the Six Rivers, will have to happen if we’re going to reduce fuels at the necessary scale.

“We keep putting out fires, and we’re going to get bigger and hotter fires,” said Hurteau. “It’s just true. It’s physics and chemistry.”

Dave Calkin, who recently retired from his job as a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, where he focused on wildland fire risk management, said many fires are “inherently insuppressible”; all you can do is run.

Fires that don’t threaten people, on the other hand, are useful. “The science is clear and has been clear for decades that the answer to the problem is more fire, not less fire,” Calkin said.

A separate camp of foresters believes using wildfires to remove fuel is reckless, given the volatile conditions during fire season, and that the way forward is to clear fuels by loosening environmental regulations and opening public lands much more broadly to “mechanical thinning” — in many cases logging — launching a moonshot effort to revitalize the moribund timber industry in the process.

A member of a local Prescribed Burn Association uses a drip torch to ignite a controlled burn in Angwin, California, last year.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

“Because the forests are all clogged up, you can’t use [wild]fire as a maintenance tool,” said Michael Rains, who helped lead the Forest Service across five administrations. “You’ve got to use prescribed fire, and you have to use mechanical treatments. And then one day, hopefully, our forest lands will be in the condition [such that], when a fire starts, we can manage it to let it burn a little longer.”

The Trump administration has sided firmly with Rains’ camp, doubling down on suppressing all wildfires — including those that don’t threaten communities — while also demanding more board feet of lumber coming off public lands. Frank Carroll, a former Forest Service incident commander and a zealous advocate for full suppression, said the decrees are like “trying to steer an aircraft carrier with a canoe paddle.” Still, he believes, they are a start. 

Adam Mendonca, the Forest Service’s deputy director of Fire and Aviation Management, said the agency isn’t anti-fire. “No two ways about it. Science will tell you, you need more fire on the landscape.” But, he said, the agency’s focus is on prescribed fire. 

The Forest Service did about 1.2 million acres of prescribed burning in 2025, down from 2.2 million the year before. (The agency attributes the drop to dangerously dry conditions that spring, particularly in the Southeast where it does most of its burning). Recent research shows that the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce — a ProPublica investigation found that more than a quarter of the Forest Service’s firefighting positions were unfilled as of July 2025 — also contributed to the slower progress on clearing fuels last year.

Mendonca said the Forest Service needs to be doing between two and 10 times more fuels reduction work to turn the tide. “We’re not doing enough,” he said, “but we continue to try to ramp up.”

Prescribed fire offers what the agency has become less tolerant of losing: control. But Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), said a war on wildfire is unwinnable. “We’re just throwing good money after bad in these reactive, siege-like suppression spectacles, versus proactive preparation and treatments within communities.” 

The wildfire doom loop has roots far beyond the current administration, and is fueled by a cycle of perverse incentives. 

One problem, experts say, has to do with how fire-related funding is distributed. Every year in the hot and dry months, Congress authorizes additional funding for emergency wildland fire suppression as needed, not unlike the way it funds a war. The annual expenditure has grown from an average of about $450 million in the 1990s to well over $3 billion in recent years, with $4.3 billion spent in 2021 alone. (Research published earlier this year projected that climate change could push that number to $13 billion by the end of the century.)

“There are no consequences for spending as much money as you possibly can to put that fire out,” said Kelly Martin, a former chief of fire management for two national parks who also served on the congressionally mandated Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission during the Biden administration. When they have airplanes and bulldozers and armies of firefighters at their disposal, she said, federal fire managers are inclined to use them. “There’s not a connection in people’s brains to say, putting that fire out actually does more harm than good in the long term.” 

Crews cut vegetation to widen a fire line for the Oak Fire near Mariposa, California, in 2022.
David McNew / AFP via Getty Images

In contrast, funding for fuel-reduction initiatives like forest thinning and prescribed burns is budgeted, limited, and comes with mountains of paperwork. “Prescribed burning is discretionary — emergency management is not,” said Martin. “So, you end up with this really lopsided scale that tips the scale to the favor of suppression.”

The annual glut also creates an incentive for private firefighting contractors to lobby for as much involvement as possible while the cash is flowing. “I have clients, they’re like farmers,” said Phil Hardy, a Washington lobbyist for the firefighting aviation industry, including retardant and water tankers, which are most effective in suppressing fires while they’re still small. “They make all their money from June to September or October, and then they’ve got to wait all the way until next year to get paid again. By the time fire season starts, they’ve totally wiped out their line of credit.” Hardy said his clients would vastly prefer a steadier cash flow, but Congress only pays when pillars of smoke are looming and it’s too late to do anything but fight like hell. That means that air tankers, which are among the most costly elements of wildland firefighting, are often used even when they’re not especially effective.

A second problem is personnel — fuel-reduction work is often done by the same federal employees who get sent out to fight wildfires. One federal fuels reduction specialist, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak freely, said even experts who are hired to plan and conduct prescribed burns and other fuel-clearing projects often spend up to half the year fighting wildfires. 

“The simple tasks that are supposed to get done to allow these projects to move forward,” he said, “go almost stagnant for like four to six months out of the year.”

Beyond budgets and workforce management and policy memos, there’s a bigger, more emotional machinery at work. After all, fire can destroy homes and take loved ones in the most terrifying ways.

Wildfires are a seasonal spectacle, with journalists dispatched to the firelines like war correspondents reporting from the front, broadcasting images of towering flames and smoking ruins that stoke the feeling in the zeitgeist that everything in the whole world is going to hell. 

“When you see people’s homes burning on the 5 o’clock news and you know people are chasing their horses and their dogs are dying and people are losing their lives,” said Martin, “it’s hard to switch that narrative into something different.”

The fire-as-invader narrative helps drive a kind of patriotic zeal that moves everyone from firefighters to legislators to defend the homeland.

“I hate war analogies when it comes to fire,” said Riva Duncan, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit firefighter advocacy organization. “It’s not a war and firefighters are not soldiers, because I don’t want them to think that their lives are expected to be given for this.”

Mendonca, the Forest Service fire director, agrees — kind of. “We don’t treat fire as though it’s the enemy,” he said. “It’s just, how do we get there in a way that gets us to those desired conditions or outcomes with the highest probability of success for all the values involved.” 

A home burns as flames from the Dixie Fire tear through the Indian Falls neighborhood of unincorporated Plumas County, California, in 2021.
Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

Fire, in other words, is like a wild animal. We don’t hate wild animals, but the closer they get to us the less we feel we can afford the risk of tolerating their presence.

But Calkin said there’s also a bureaucratic momentum to the status quo. “It’s the inherent human bias of like, right now, the easiest thing for me to do would be to make this fire go away,” he said. “It’s really hard for me to make this fire grow in a safe way to get good fuel treatment. And it’s risky. And if something goes bad, I am responsible. You know, if in the future it actually saved something really important, I’d never get credit for it. It’s just easier to kick the problem down the road.”

More fire isn’t the answer in every part of the country. Native plants like sagebrush and saguaro cactus haven’t evolved to burn, but invasive grasses in the Great Basin and Sonoran Desert have brought fire with them. “There are certain places where we have too much fire and we need to try and keep it out,” said Hurteau. And as long as our communities are nestled in burnable ecosystems, they’ll sometimes need to be defended. The question is whether we can find a balance we can live with.

Since that futures panel wrapped up its conference calls in 2013, we’ve had 13 years of one record-breaking fire after another. The image of burning houses is no longer the uncanny experience it was — the slash of bright orange across the country’s front pages is now part of our collective wallpaper. And the ranks of the dispossessed, the evacuated, and the dead have only grown.

Dallas, a practical man, said it would make a big difference if firefighting teams like his were allowed to back off fires, setting low-severity backburns on ground of their choosing so that the wild flames don’t blow through and annihilate everything in their path. “Right now,” he said, “that’s off the table.”

When we spoke in early August, Dallas had just come from a fire in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, that was threatening hundreds of homes. The local forest supervisor called for a Complex Incident Management Team — the big guns — and got a response that’s becoming more common across the country: no one was available. All the teams were on other fires.

“Our system is taxed beyond capacity to respond,” Dallas said. “It’s already falling apart.” 

For every fire he puts out, Dallas knows he’s leaving a tinderbox behind. More and more, he said, he’s finding himself back at the same table, looking at the same map. 

Next time, he could be watching a bigger, more dangerous fire escape his grasp.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America is losing its war against wildfire on Sep 8, 2026.