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Australia dedicates $13 million to help Pacific nations quit fossil fuels, electrify and transition to renewables as countries across the region race to switch from the costly and polluting fossil fuel imports.

The post Australia pledges $13 million to help Pacific nations quit diesel, switch to renewables and electrify appeared first on Renew Economy.

Australian gold mine, largely powered by renewables and the first in the world to reach "net zero", selected as supplier for first regarding of cathedral since 1863.

The post Australian renewable-powered mine to supply “green gold” for repairs to London’s St Paul’s Cathedral appeared first on Renew Economy.

California state agencies used a confidentiality agreement to keep some communications regarding the scientific basis for the updated Bay-Delta Plan hidden from public knowledge, as revealed by Ashley Zavala on KCRA’s CA Politics 360 show.

The agreement between the State Water Resources Control Board, Department of Water Resources, and Department of Fish and Wildlife was discovered by Baykeeper Managing Attorney Eric Buescher through a California Public Records Act request. 

“It kept all of those communications between those agencies secret, which basically means it kept the science about water quality and fish biology and the impacts to native fish and wildlife that depend on them secret and out of the public’s eyes,” said Buescher. 

Restore the Delta’s Executive Director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla also shared similar concerns over the lack of transparency, saying, “If we don’t have the basis of the science and the public can’t see that, we can’t have confidence in the decisions being made and the outcomes.” The Legislative Analyst’s Office has also requested greater transparency around the Voluntary Agreements, emphasizing the importance of making related data and reports available to the public.

With the State Water Resources Control Board scheduled to vote on the updated Bay-Delta Plan on October 28-29, the need for transparency, particularly around the science behind decisions at our State agencies, is critical for public confidence and fair processes. 

See the full coverage here.

Join us in New Orleans or virtually as we celebrate this year's Sentinels on Thursday, November 12, 2026.

The post Announcing the 2026 Community Sentinel Award Recipients appeared first on FracTracker Alliance.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections

A crisis is brewing for the U.S. electricity grid – one that could make your electric bill skyrocket and thwart efforts to address climate change.

To understand the problem, think of transmission lines – the poles and wires that transport electricity from power plants to homes and businesses – as an interstate highway system for electrons. Like too many cars on the road, too many electrons traveling across power lines can cause traffic jams.

These sorts of jams haven’t been a problem until just recently, as power-hungry data centers proliferate and demand from electric vehicles, heat pumps, and air conditioning grows.

As a result, Americans’ electricity rates, which already spiked by more than one-third over the past five years, are poised to keep rising.

Read: Home electricity bills are skyrocketing. For data centers, not so much.

What’s more, when rising demand meets inadequate grid capacity, that slows efforts to address climate pollution. When new clean power sources are stymied by too much traffic on power lines, existing fossil fuel power plants are forced to remain in service and burn gas and coal more often. And when data centers are unable to connect to the grid, they often build dirty on-site natural gas power generation instead.

Adding more transmission lines to the grid would ease congestion, but on average, permitting and building a new transmission line in the U.S. takes a decade. Some big multistate transmission lines have taken over three decades to complete. And the Trump administration recently axed Congress’ attempts to accelerate the process.

A bipartisan group of senators just released a bill that would reform permitting for transmission lines and other large projects, speeding up the process for constructing new lines. But time is running short in this session of Congress, and the stakes of inaction are high.

"Failing to pass permitting reforms would have real consequences for all of us,” said Zach Zimmerman, director of research and policy for Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm, in an email. “Every year that major transmission projects are delayed means higher system costs and less ability to move power where it is needed during extreme weather. Without reform, we will continue to pay more for the grid.”

The U.S. has struggled to modernize its grid

The demand for electrons on the U.S. power grid remained relatively flat for decades, increasing by a mere 5% between 2005 and 2023.

Now that’s changed: Analysts at the consulting firm ICF forecast that U.S. residential electricity rates could rise another 15% to 40% over the next five years and double by 2050, with power grid traffic jams being a root problem.

U.S. electricity demand from 2000 to 2025 (blue) in terawatt-hours (TWh) and the range of forecasts (green) by various groups. (Image credit: created by Dana Nuccitelli with data from Ember, Princeton REPEAT, American Clean Power, Bank of America Institute, Enverus Intelligence Research, and McKinsey & Company)

In 2024, the Department of Energy concluded that the U.S. would need between a doubling and quadrupling of its transmission capacity by 2050 in order to affordably meet growing power demand and maintain grid reliability.

To create that capacity would require a build-out of roughly 5,000 miles per year of high-capacity regional transmission, plus additional miles of interregional transmission, according to Grid Strategies. But it took the U.S. nine years, from 2017 through 2025, to build the last 5,000 miles of transmission lines, Grid Strategies estimated.

The only recent year that came close to the 5,000-mile target was 2013, when Texas built close to 3,000 miles of transmission lines. That was the result of a 2005 Texas state law that encouraged building transmission lines in areas with high potential for wind power, known as “competitive renewable energy zones.”

U.S. transmission build-out has since stagnated, averaging just 600 new miles per year since 2017.

Read: How blue California and red Texas became green powerhouses

Miles of new high-voltage transmission lines built in the U.S. per year between 2010 and 2025, compared to the Grid Strategies estimated need of 5,000 new miles per year. (Image credit: Created by Dana Nuccitelli with data from Grid Strategies and Americans for a Clean Energy Grid)

For comparison, China has been building over 1,000 miles of ultrahigh voltage power lines per year. Ultrahigh voltage transmission lines are like the high-speed rail of transmission. They can carry more electrons more efficiently than America’s high-voltage transmission lines.

Congress has failed to speed up transmission line permitting

Like Texas, Congress passed a law in 2005 in an effort to spur more transmission lines, but with far less success.

One challenge transmission projects face is obtaining permits in every state and local jurisdiction along their proposed path. That can be an onerous and time-consuming process with many potential veto points. In contrast, Congress in the 1938 Natural Gas Act gave the entity now known as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to act as a one-stop shop for interstate natural gas pipeline permits.

Lawmakers tried to establish a similar process for interstate transmission lines in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. That law instructed the Department of Energy to establish “National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors.” These are areas where it would be in the nation's interest to build electrical transmission lines relatively quickly, for example, to relieve traffic jams on the grid. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would then have the authority to permit transmission lines along these corridors in consultation with states.

But for over 15 years, the Department of Energy was unable to designate any such corridors due to a series of court decisions in favor of states, landowners, and environmental groups, ruling that the bill’s language was insufficiently clear. Congress subsequently tried to clarify its intent in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

And that effort seemed to succeed. In December 2024, the Department of Energy finally advanced three proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors in the areas identified as having the greatest need for additional transmission capacity.

The Department of Energy’s “rough approximation for illustrative purposes” of its three retained proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors in December 2024. (Image credit: U.S. Department of Energy)

But in August 2026, Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that he was canceling these three proposed corridors. Despite acknowledging the importance of building new transmission lines, Wright characterized these proposals as part of “a climate-alarmist agenda” intended by the Biden administration “to advance their Green New Scam agenda and accelerate decarbonization.”

What’s next?

Zimmerman of Grid Strategies identified several measures that could speed up domestic transmission permitting and development.

For example, Congress could allow important transmission projects to move directly to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permitting, rather than waiting for the Department of Energy to first define national interest corridors. That would also depoliticize the process, because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission operates more independently from the White House than the Department of Energy.

Zimmerman also pointed to a 2024 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rule called Order 1920. That rule, among other things, requires utilities and regional grid operators to consider the next 20 years of power demand forecasts in their transmission planning rather than simply considering short-term needs.

There’s also “a need for Congress to improve permitting for large-scale transmission and address interregional transmission. And establishing a transmission investment tax credit would be helpful,” Zimmerman said by email.

In order to avoid prolonged fights over who pays for how much of a proposed transmission line, Congress could also establish a formula for fairly allocating its costs among the beneficiaries and define the types of benefits that should be included in that cost allocation.

Congress narrowly failed to pass the Energy Permitting Reform Act in 2024, which would have implemented many of Zimmerman’s recommendations. An analysis by energy systems experts at the nonpartisan think tank RMI estimated that the transmission permitting reform provisions in that bill could have allowed enough clean energy to connect to the U.S. grid to reduce the country’s climate pollution by billions of tons.

This week, a group of senators introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which also includes many of Zimmerman’s recommendations. A preliminary analysis of some of the transmission provisions in the bill from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions estimated that they would cut climate pollution by billions of tons in the next 15 years while reducing Americans’ electricity bills by $19 billion and lessening the risks of widespread power outages.

“This analysis shows that practical reforms to transmission planning and interconnection processes can unlock more clean energy, reduce our reliance on natural gas, lower costs for consumers, and help build a cleaner, more reliable electric grid,” said Nat Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “These benefits are within reach if we move quickly to modernize the systems that power our nation.”

This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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This blog was originally posted on the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust website on October 5, 2026. The Trust is co-managed by National Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy.Despite...

Registered nurses at Kaiser Permanente hospitals across California are celebrating a historic victory against wage theft committed by their employer. California Nurses Association successfully won an arbitration agreement that mandates Kaiser pay stolen wages dating back to at least 2021, potentially totalling a sum in the tens of millions of dollars to be paid out to more than 1,000 nurses.

The justices are considering whether states and localities can try to hold oil companies responsible for damages from climate change. If Boulder, Colo., wins, the companies could owe enormous sums.

Oct. 5, 2026Updated 1:10 p.m. ET

Gift Article

The Supreme Court justices wrestled on Monday with the first case of their new term, a complex dispute over whether local governments can hold oil companies responsible for the damages of climate change — with billions of dollars potentially hanging in the balance.

Officials in Boulder, Colo., sued two oil companies, Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy, claiming that they should be liable for the costs of a changing climate, like droughts, fires and floods.

Depending on its scope, a decision for the oil companies could doom dozens of other similar lawsuits by states, cities and tribes percolating in courts throughout the country.

As the justices begin their latest term, their docket is shaping up to reflect some of the continuing cultural flash points in American life. They are poised to hear arguments on President Trump’s immigration agenda, religious rights and whether assault weapons bans violate the Second Amendment. Throughout the summer months, they have been asked to weigh in on a number of elections-related cases as the midterms approach, and they may see more such disputes.

Most of the arguments regarding the climate change case on Monday were highly technical, focusing on whether federal law blocked these types of lawsuits, and whether the case had reached a point at which the Supreme Court had the power to hear it at all.

But justices across the ideological spectrum, including some conservatives, posed skeptical questions to the oil companies.

With one conservative missing — Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. recused himself from the case days before the argument — there was the possibility that Boulder would pick up the single vote from the court’s remaining five conservatives it would need to prevail. A 4-to-4 tie in the case would leave in place a Colorado Supreme Court ruling against the oil companies.

Still, some of the conservative justices appeared concerned about whether a ruling for Boulder would flood the courts with climate change lawsuits.

“Presumably if you prevail, the next day, a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit that will probably copy your pleadings,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “How would you think that will work out on the ground?”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh likewise raised concerns that the lawsuit and others like it could bankrupt energy companies.

The court’s three liberal justices seemed more sympathetic to Boulder’s arguments that the lawsuit should be allowed to at least move ahead in state courts.

Justice Elena Kagan analogized the case to landmark efforts to sue tobacco and opioid companies, calling those cases Chapters 1 and 2, and climate case Chapter 3, in efforts to hold companies responsible for broad societal harms.

Kannon K. Shanmugam, the lawyer for the oil companies, pushed back, arguing that the harms of climate change are a global problem that should be handled at the national level — not in piecemeal legal cases in state courts.

The Trump administration had flipped the government’s position in the case, reversing the Biden administration’s view that would have had it supporting Boulder, expressed in a recent similar case from Hawaii. Sarah M. Harris, a principal deputy solicitor general, told the justices that “interstate air pollution is an inherently federal area.”

A decision is not expected immediately. The justices announce their decisions by the end of June or early July, and they typically release their most consequential, closest opinions later in the term.

Justice Alito’s decision to recuse came after months of pressure from environmental and court watchdog groups to step aside. Although he gave no formal reason in his announcement, Justice Alito has recused in previous cases about oil companies because of stock he owns. The justice has publicly reported owning stock in the companies ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66.

Neither is directly involved in the Boulder case, but legal experts have said that oil companies could take broad financial hits from a decision allowing such state and local cases to move forward. He had also gone on a luxury fishing trip with an investor in a company involved in the dispute.

In an interview after his announcement, Justice Alito told Bloomberg that he had taken “into account the particular arguments that were made on both sides here” and decided that recusal was “the prudent step.”

Under the court’s ethics code, justices can recuse at their own discretion. They typically step aside if their impartiality could be questioned, including because of a financial tie to a party or a close friend or family member who is involved.

If the justices were to split 4 to 4 in Justice Alito’s absence, a lower court decision to allow the Boulder suit to move ahead would stand. Such deadlocked decisions set no binding national precedent.

The legal fight began in April 2018, when the city and county of Boulder sued Exxon and Suncor, asserting that the companies should be required to share in the costs of climate change, including damages from more heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods.

Boulder argued that local governments and taxpayers “cannot pay the full costs of all that is needed, nor should they.” The suit contended that the companies “knowingly and substantially” fueled the climate crisis by “producing, promoting and selling a substantial portion of the fossil fuels that are causing and exacerbating climate change.” It also claimed that the companies concealed and misrepresented the dangers of their products.

After a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to allow the case to continue in state court, the oil companies asked the justices to intervene. The Trump administration joined them, a reversal of the Biden administration’s stance on the climate lawsuits.

The oil companies argued that the case should be heard in federal court, not state. Federal courts are often thought to be a more business-friendly venue.

The companies claim that federal laws regulating the environment pre-empt Boulder’s lawsuit and that because climate change is a global problem, it cannot be handled in state courts.

Dozens of environmental activists had gathered on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court on Monday morning for the argument. They wore bright orange T-shirts with the message, “People v. Big Oil,” and displayed a large banner with the words “Big Oil Knew.” In another sign of interest in the case, a long line of lawyers stretched around the corner of the building waiting to snag a seat in the courtroom.

Adam Liptak, Ann E. Marimow and Claire Brown contributed reporting.

Dominion said it wasn’t relevant to its merger with NextEra Energy, but Clean Virginia, a customer advocacy group, said it spoke to the governance “fitness” of the potential combined company.

The tech giant and energy producer are backing improvements and renovations at the 1,790-MW Calvert Cliffs Clean Energy Center, the state’s largest source of clean energy.

Mandates and long-term trends toward electrification are supporting demand for these HVAC technologies despite federal headwinds.

For utilities, keeping capital expenditures well-balanced is “going to be a little more challenging with [interest] rates going higher as quickly as they have,” said Tim Keller, managing director of U.S. Bank’s power and utilities group.

The 120-day study process would be available for loads larger than 200 MW and new generation that *are*>is* in the same local resource zone, which generally cover individual states.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will open its new term with a major climate lawsuit brought by Boulder, Colorado as its first case. In 2018, the city and county of Boulder sued ExxonMobil and Suncor, alleging that the companies misled the public about their climate impacts, in violation of Colorado state law. The Supreme Court will hear a request from ExxonMobil and Suncor to block the case from being heard in Colorado district court; a ruling on jurisdiction over these types of cases would have implications for several other pending cases across the country.

“These big oil companies are really desperate to escape trial in these cases so they’re asking the Supreme Court to step in and save them from trial,” Corey Riday-White, legal director for The Center for Climate Integrity, told the Denver Post. “It’s clear the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want the damning evidence of their climate lies to be presented at trial.”

Lawmakers introduce bill to prevent future orphaned wells

On Friday, several Western members of Congress introduced the Stop Orphaned Wells Act, which seeks to prevent oil and gas companies from leaving behind orphaned wells on national public lands. In 2024 the Bureau of Land Management updated bonding requirements to better ensure that oil and gas companies can pay to clean up their own wells, but the Trump administration’s recent proposed Oil and Gas Rule would roll back these updated requirements. The Stop Orphaned Wells Act would codify and strengthen bonding requirements and other accountability measures.

Quick hits Judge blocks border wall construction in Big Bend in Texas

New York Times

Long-awaited Senate deal to speed permitting faces familiar hurdles

Inside Climate News

Massive nuclear plant/waste dump/data center complex planned for BLM land in Utah

The Land Desk

Nevada backcountry vulnerable to more off-roading, logging under federal rule changes

Nevada Independent

Effort to save California’s iconic Joshua trees scrapped after Trump administration blocks funding

Los Angeles Times

Tweak to Endangered Species Act could allow widespread development

Mountain Journal

Opinion: If Doug Burgum got a performance review

RE:PUBLIC

Baseball in a national park? We found 7 ball fields at Grand Teton and Yellowstone

WyoFile

Quote of the day

They said that the [baseball] field was a good place for employees to get outside and recreate. Cory and I both turned and gestured towards the Tetons at the same time and said something like ‘they have this right here.’ I think at that moment they understood that their proposal wouldn’t fly.”

—Brad Boner, Wyoming photographer, WyoFile

Picture This @usinterior

Fall has entered the chat.

Quaking aspens turn brilliant shades of yellow each fall, but what you see above ground is only part of the story.

An entire stand of aspens can be connected underground by a single root system, meaning what looks like hundreds of individual trees may actually be one genetically identical organism. The trunks can live for a century, while the roots beneath them can survive for thousands of years.

Photos by Jim Grindley | @chileno_hikertron and NPS

 

Featured image: Smoke from the Marshall Fire over Superior, Colorado; the destructive impacts of this fire are widely attributed to climate change driven by oil and gas production. Tristantech via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

The post Supreme Court to open term with Colorado climate lawsuit appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

In a new documentary, The Vegan Poultry Farmer, filmmaker Kadir van Lohuizen follows Ruud Zanders as he grapples with a moral dilemma: raising animals for food while following a vegan diet. Zanders travels the globe, meeting with food systems experts, to determine if an animal-free food system is possible.

“Personally, I would say: stop exploiting farm animals,” Zanders says in the documentary.

Zanders opened the first Kipster farm in the Netherlands in 2017 after his large-scale poultry operation went bankrupt. He realized that large-scale farms are efficient and produce cheap eggs, but “something else is paying the price… biodiversity, the climate, the animal itself,” he tells Food Tank.

His farming model, he says, is based on sustainability, animal welfare, and transparency. Zanders ultimately envisions an animal-free food system, but until that becomes a reality, he aims to provide the highest-welfare eggs possible. “It’s very complicated to produce eggs or other animal-based products in a really animal-friendly way,” Zanders says.

His farms house 24,000 chickens per barn, compared to industrial operations which can hold up to 350,000 per barn, according to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). The chickens receive indoor and outdoor space, fresh air and sunlight, and an enrichment playground to exercise their natural instincts.

Kipster is working to produce carbon neutral eggs by giving their chickens feed made from waste streams, including stale pastries or other food no longer fit for human consumption. This feed model eliminates competition for food (corn, grains, soy) between people and farm animals. Zanders bases this model on the idea that growing crops directly for human consumption can decrease agricultural land usage and allow for more land to be restored to natural ecosystems.

He was inspired to do this by Imke de Boer, a Wageningen University professor of livestock and sustainable food systems, as well as environmental activist and writer George Monbiot, who Zanders visits in the film. Monbiot tells him that livestock farming is the single most destructive human activity to the environment.

The farm also uses solar panels and transforms chicken litter into fertilizer. They report that a Kipster egg’s carbon footprint is about 23 percent lower than that of a conventional egg.

The documentary examines behind the scenes of Kipster farms and other operations to reveal the industry’s reality. It shows chickens being shoved into crates to be transported to slaughter, limp carcasses dangling on a conveyor belt, and workers wearing blood-spattered aprons. Even under Kipster’s higher-welfare standards, the end result is still the same.

Zanders meets with various stakeholders to help him answer the film’s driving question: Is an animal-free food system possible?

Melanie Jaecques, co-owner of a farm animal sanctuary in Belgium, saves chickens predominantly from the egg industry. She talks to Zanders about the complexity of chickens’ behavior and personalities, and that even on his higher-welfare farm, they are not given the proper environment to thrive. To her, housing 24,000 chickens in one barn is “terribly wrong,” and that Kipster is “not a good system, but the least bad.”

To answer his logistical questions about fertilizing crops without animal manure and whether people can maintain proper health on a vegan diet, he visits a human waste fertilizer producer in Ghana and a plant-based hematologist, respectively. Together, these experts affirm his belief in an animal-free agriculture system—which only intensifies his internal struggle as a poultry farmer.

Although Zanders concludes that it is possible to have an animal-free food system, he knows that his vision is not shared by all. As long as there is a demand for animal products, Zanders hopes that Kipster can help bridge the gap between his ideal vision and the current industrial system. That’s why he believes that he can positively impact farm animals as a poultry farmer. “We have to do our utmost best to give them a life worth living.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

The post The Vegan Poultry Farmer: Rethinking Animal Agriculture appeared first on Food Tank.

Across the Caribbean, people have installed roughly twice as many solar panels as official statistics would suggest. That is the finding of a new report, which calls on countries to make it easier for new solar installations to connect to the grid.

Read more on E360 →

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