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Video gamers give 110-MW Texas solar project a financing boost
“Fractionalized” virtual power purchase agreements and renewable energy certificate transactions can help underwrite clean energy projects, particularly in volatile energy markets, an executive involved in the transaction told Utility Dive.
When taps run dry in the Caribbean, it’s not enough to blame El Niño
Amira Odeh Quiñones is a hydrologist and Caribbean organiser for the 350.org climate campaign group
El Niño, likely to be one of the strongest in modern history, has arrived on Caribbean shores.
Drought is slowly creeping up on our islands. But unlike the fiery wildfires ravaging parts of Europe, there’s no smoke signalling the damage being done, no sirens to warn of the danger. Only announcements from public health officials to stay indoors and remain hydrated — as if outdoor workers and farming communities have the luxury to heed such advice.
During El Niño, strong atmospheric winds alter rain patterns and trap heat across the Caribbean. But while we have experienced El Niño many times before, it has become very visible in recent years how climate change is making this natural phenomenon worse.
Across the Greater Antilles, temperatures are soaring past 38°C (100°F), with real-feel indexes reaching a gruelling 43°C in parts of Puerto Rico where I live. Cuba has it worse. Widespread power outages mean that methods for cooling down are unavailable for most of the day, leaving millions of vulnerable people at risk of heat stroke when temperatures hit 38°C.
Santa Marta coalition tested as co-chair Colombia turns back to fossil fuels
During the last strong drought a decade ago, I had water only two days a week in my home. Today, there are many families whose taps are about to run completely dry. Water authorities have already begun strict rationing in some municipalities, with more on the list scheduled for rationing if conditions don’t change.
Water rationing is far more than an inconvenience; it is an immediate health risk. This means thousands of people need to constantly haul heavy buckets up flights of stairs just so they could bathe, cook, stay hydrated – the basics of survival.
Heat causes health problemsPuerto Rico is home to roughly 300,000 elderly residents. Many live alone, isolated and without support. They risk severe physical injury when carrying heavy water containers, and are wont to suffer from silent heat exhaustion in unventilated rooms.
Furthermore, when water shortages force residents to store water in open household containers, it inadvertently creates breeding grounds for Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Paired with scorching temperatures that tend to shorten the mosquito breeding cycle, the region is facing explosive outbreaks of dengue fever that endanger our most vulnerable: children and the elderly.
The economic fallout is equally devastating. Dry fields mean millions of dollars in lost crops, forcing small agricultural businesses to collapse, needing urgent government relief to survive. Extreme fuel shortages have already paralyzed Cuba’s agricultural sector, cutting food output by 60% – the El Niño dry spell threatens to decimate it.
At sea, warmer ocean waters fuel massive influxes of sargassum seaweed. Rotting sargassum chokes our beaches, destroying the local tourism industry that so many working families rely on. Tangled seaweed also damages nets and boat engines, slashing fish catches and driving up equipment costs for local fishers.
In the south of Puerto Rico, the coastal town of La Parguera is currently witnessing a historic amount of sargassum on its shores. This has halted most of the boating activity in the area, which is the seaside town’s main tourist draw and economic driver.
All over the Caribbean, from town halls to local group gatherings, the story I hear is always the same: constant headaches, lost work hours, failing health, and a sense that quality of life is silently being stolen. The compounding effects of heatwaves, drought, and marine destruction are exhausting our people, our islands.
Climate change to blameClimate change makes each El Niño year hotter and more damaging. Higher baseline global temperatures increase the energy and moisture available for extreme weather. Latest projections show that El Niño may push the monthly global average temperature past 2°C of warming for the first time in early 2027. In the Caribbean islands, that will not just be breaking records – it’ll be breaking lives.
Recently, I had the opportunity to share a panel with climate scientists behind what is known as the field of “attribution science” – or the science that compares today’s climate conditions to what the Earth’s climate would be like without human activity, particularly burning fossil fuels. They’re unequivocal: it’s no longer a question of whether extreme weather is caused by climate change, it’s just a question of how much.
Attribution science recently got a boost from the U.S.’ top scientific advisory body. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recognized that researchers’ methods have advanced considerably in recent years, resulting in better assessments on how much extreme weather can be attributed to human-caused climate change. It noted that attribution findings could be relevant in some types of legal cases, including those seeking damages from oil companies for climate impacts.
This crisis, which is already taking a heavy toll on our communities’ survival, needs real, urgent, and structural action that goes beyond aid. With similar droughts now gripping parts of Asia and Africa, we’re falling into the familiar narrative of treating the looming humanitarian crisis as if no one was to blame, as if it is being caused solely by a natural phenomenon we can’t control.
It’s not. The world was already on fire before its regular visitor, El Niño, came. While we need humanitarian action, we need climate action too, in order to permanently put out the flames.
The post When taps run dry in the Caribbean, it’s not enough to blame El Niño appeared first on Climate Home News.
Fresh Air Newsletter Aug2026
Welcome to the August 2026 Clean Air Council’s monthly newsletter.
This month’s newsletter brings you updates from our work all across Pennsylvania, with inside info about environmental laws and ways to get involved.
– Thanks, from all of us at Clean Air Council
What PA’s New Methane Standards Mean for Clean Air
On July 24, Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Pennsylvania DEP announced that new methane standards are on the way for Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry, which will help protect public health, reduce climate pollution, and improve air quality for the more than 1.5 million Pennsylvanians who live near oil and gas infrastructure.
Learn more GET INVOLVEDApply for a Public Space Enhancement Mini-Grant!
Feet First Philly, a pedestrian advocacy project of the Clean Air Council, has opened applications for the seventh round of its Public Space Enhancement Mini-Grants, offering $500-$2,500 for projects that improve public spaces and pedestrian safety across Philadelphia.
Apply NEWS New Gas Pipeline Proposed in PA to Power Data Centers in MD and VAEastern Gas Transmission and Storage’s Project Oak Leaf would add 50+ miles of new pipeline, expand compressor stations across three states, and increase fracked gas transport capacity, all while being presented as an upgrade to existing infrastructure. If that sounds like more than a simple upgrade to you, you’re not alone. Attend an upcoming open house, get informed, and make your voice heard.
Learn more SUPPORT CLEAN AIR COUNCIL’S SUMMER FUNDRAISING DRIVEOur Summer Drive is one of our major fundraisers of the year, and we count on the money we raise to make sure we can keep fighting the climate crisis.
Help us reach our goal of $10,000! TAKE ACTION Give PGW Feedback on its Plans to Reduce Greenhouse Gas EmissionsPhiladelphia Gas Works is developing plans to reduce climate pollution and meet the city’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. The choices it makes could impact our air quality, public health, energy infrastructure, and utility bills for generations. Attend the next virtual community meeting on Aug. 12 at 6:30 p.m. to make your voice heard.
Register COMMUNITY PARTNER SPOTLIGHT Cobbs Creek Park AmbassadorsFrom weekly cleanups to community celebrations, the Cobbs Creek Park Ambassadors has grown into a dedicated network of community members caring for Cobbs Creek Park. This year alone, volunteers have completed more than 50 cleanups and removed over 6,000 pounds of trash from local green spaces!
Join us Support Clean AirAbout Us
The Council is Philadelphia’s oldest environmental non-profit. We have been fighting for everyone’s right to a healthy environment since 1967.
Contact Us
215-567-4004
members@cleanair.org
Q&A: What is in China’s new five-year plan for climate change?
China has released a five-year plan dedicated to addressing climate change.
The 15th five-year plan for a national response to climate change is the latest in a series to outline in-depth climate and energy targets for the 2026-2030 period.
These include five-year plans for “building a Beautiful China”, developing a “new-type energy system” and developing renewable energy.
There are also separate “action plans” for the 2026-2030 period, such as for peaking carbon emissions.
China has pledged to peak its emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality before 2060.
The new plan does not include any major new targets, instead consolidating and reaffirming existing policies.
Nevertheless, it includes significant signals on key policy areas, such as non-carbon dioxide (CO2) greenhouse gases, global climate governance and carbon markets.
Below, Carbon Brief examines some of the notable elements in the latest five-year plan and what it reveals about China’s policy direction through to 2030.
- What does the climate plan cover?
- What does the plan say about non-CO2 GHGs?
- What does the plan say about global climate governance?
The Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) released the plan in late July, in unison with 18 other government departments. These include the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, and the National Energy Administration.
The document covers a range of topics, including CO2 emissions, other greenhouse gases (non-CO2 GHGs), carbon markets, carbon footprints, climate adaptation and international cooperation on climate change.
For the first time at the five-year plan level, the plan creates a comprehensive target system covering all areas of climate policy, say officials in a MEE Q&A.
They describe it as “the main policy instrument” for advancing China’s climate action during 2026-2030.
China rarely issues high-level multi-year policies dedicated to “responding to climate change”. In 2014, the NDRC published a plan on the topic running through to 2020, but this was not linked to a five-year plan period.
Qin Yan, principal analyst at ClearBlue Markets, tells Carbon Brief that the plan shows that China’s climate governance has reached “an unprecedented strategic level”.
She adds that the plan creates an “all-encompassing target system” to support China’s Paris Agreement climate pledges for 2030 and 2035.
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Last year, president Xi Jinping personally announced China’s 2035 pledge to cut China’s greenhouse gas emissions to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035, while “striving to do better”.
The five-year plan marks a new phase in China’s climate policy, according to researchers at CIB Research, an economic research body affiliated with the Industrial Bank, whose largest shareholder is the Fujian provincial government.
Their analysis adds that the plan represents a broad effort to strengthen China’s climate-governance system, implementation mechanisms and underlying capacity.
Nevertheless, several headline targets and policies in the document simply reiterate already established plans.
These include:
- Cutting carbon intensity by 17% across the five years
- Reducing carbon intensity per product in industries under China’s carbon market by 3%
- Substituting fossil fuels with renewables
- Strengthening climate adaptation
- Supporting the “free flow” of cleantech
The plan also goes into detail on China’s approach to non-CO2 GHGs. This includes reaffirming a target of an emissions “reduction capacity” from these gases totalling 30m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) by 2030, although the baseline is unclear.
The target previously appeared in the overarching five-year plan, as well as the plan for building a “Beautiful China”.
The goal refers to emissions reductions, which can be realised through implementing current non-CO2 emissions reduction policies and projects, says Chen Meian, programme director and senior analyst at the Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress (iGDP).
She adds that it is “relatively achievable”, with sources including increasing the number of coal-mine methane utilisation projects.
She points to an MEE explanatory note for a draft methodology under the China Certified Emission Reduction (CCER) scheme, China’s voluntary carbon-credit market. Chen says the note suggests that projects using ventilation air methane and coal-mine methane with concentrations below 8% alone could deliver around 20MtCO2e of reduction by 2030.
The note states that, currently, such projects are estimated to be able to “generate annual emission reductions of approximately 4.5MtCO2e”.
In addition, Chen says, measures targeting industrial nitrous oxide (N2O) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) could help make up the remainder needed to meet the target.
According to iGDP analysis of biennial reports submitted by China to the UNFCCC, China emitted around 14,000MtCO2e of GHGs in 2021, excluding land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF).
Non-CO2 GHGs accounted for around 2,700MtCO2e, or 19%, of the total, the majority of which was methane, as shown in the figure below.
iGDP analysis of China’s first Biennial Transparency Report and fourth Biennial Update Report.China’s plans to curb these super-pollutants in the five-year period include coal-mine methane utilisation projects, end-of-pipe destruction technologies for HFCs and guidance on the use of catalysts to reduce N2O emissions.
The plan also calls for the recovery and replacement of sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) in power equipment.
For Chen, the plan’s focus on SF6 control is particularly noteworthy. She says the gas is “finally receiving policy attention” and that proactive action is “timely and will help avoid future emissions growth” as China’s power system expands.
What does the plan say about global climate governance?One of the plan’s clearest objectives for international cooperation is for China to play a more active role in global climate governance.
By 2030, it says China should markedly increase its “influence, guiding power, shaping power and moral appeal” in this area.
It says China’s climate action could also feed into the Global Governance Initiative, a policy initiative aimed at reforming the global governance system.
China will also aim to “build a new narrative on climate governance”, it adds.
Prof Thomas Hale, a professor in public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, writes on LinkedIn that the plan “marks a major rhetorical shift” towards China being increasingly willing to “lead and shape” global climate action.
Another clear focal point for international cooperation is in carbon markets.
The plan calls for China to expand the global influence of its carbon market, such as through international rule-setting, cooperation on standards and by hosting the China Carbon Market Conference.
Qin says China’s more active role in global carbon pricing is already evident in the launch of the open coalition on compliance carbon markets with the EU and Brazil. This coalition is expected to adopt a work plan at the China Carbon Market Conference in September.
Qin also notes that China “could become the world’s largest [carbon] offset buyer” as its energy transition progresses.
The country would, therefore, “benefit from helping shape global rules under the Article 6 framework [for carbon trading under the Paris Agreement]”, she adds.
Related Interview: Dr Sun Yixian on his new database tracking Chinese climate ‘leadership’ 09.07.2026 China policy Q&A: What do China’s provincial five-year plans say about climate and energy? 18.06.2026 China policy Analysis: China’s new carbon metric leaves Germany-sized gap in its emissions 26.05.2026 China policy Q&A: China’s leadership calls for ‘strict control’ of fossil fuels 24.04.2026 China policyThe post Q&A: What is in China’s new five-year plan for climate change? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
School Meals Nourish Communities Beyond the Classroom
The Rockefeller Foundation is helping regenerative school meal programs scale around the world to nourish children, provide stability for farmers, and transform agriculture systems.
The Foundation’s investment in regenerative school meals aims to connect 100 million children around the world with sustainably grown school meals by 2030. The goal is to nourish young people while supporting local farmers and restoring ecosystems, explains Betty Kibaara, Director of the Food Initiative for The Rockefeller Foundation. “A school meal is a very important tool,” she tells Food Tank, calling these feeding programs “a super initiative.”
An estimated 300 million school-aged children globally go without a nutritious meal each day, according to The Rockefeller Foundation. But when schools nourish students, they can help reduce child hunger and malnutrition by serving a variety of nutritious foods.
“It’s not just about having a plate of food, maize and beans and rice… We want to make sure that what is on the plate is good and nutritious,” Kibaara says. That’s why The Rockefeller Foundation and their partners have worked to bring ingredients including fortified whole grain flour, biofortified beans, millet, and sorghum into school meals in countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya.
It’s also about “the impact of a school feeding program beyond a plate,” Kibaara says.
When students are fed, academic performance improves, allowing students to reach their full potential. These programs also encourage children to stay in school—a benefit that’s particularly important for young girls who might otherwise be asked to remain home and care for the household.
Holistic program design that prioritizes sustainable procurement practices benefits neighboring producers too. “Local farmers want to access the market, so we want to make those connections,” Kibaara explains.
She points to Brazil, where the government has mandated that public schools source at least 45 percent of their produce from family farmers and traditional communities. Kenya is exploring a similar approach, helping link farmers to stable markets and better integrate them into school feeding programs. There is room for growth, Kibaara tells Food Tank, “but it’s already working and farmers are earning more money.”
As these programs scale, knowledge sharing between countries, especially those in the Global South, can strengthen them even more. “They say there is no end to learning,” Kibaara says, “and for us, the South-to-South collaboration is an excellent way to learn.”
Watch the full conversation with Betty Kibaara on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about how schools are enhancing their feeding programs with gardens and clean cooking technology, the role of philanthropy and the private sector in catalyzing progress, and why government support is needed for the long-term sustainability of this work.
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Photo courtesy of Weremito Peter, Wikimedia Commons
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NRG nears 1.2-GW hyperscaler deal amid Texas data center pause
President and CEO Robert Gaudette said NRG’s approach to delivering customer-backed capacity would thrive in a more restrictive environment for data center development.
Eagle and Condor: How Ecuador Translated Indigenous Cosmology Into Constitutional Law
In 2008 Ecuador became the first country in history to grant constitutional rights to nature. Rivers, forests, and ecosystems were no longer treated solely as resources to be managed, but as living entities with rights of their own.
For some it was a legal innovation. For others it was the return of a worldview that had survived for centuries outside the institutions of the modern state.
The question is how an Indigenous understanding of the world was translated into the language of courts, laws, and public policy — and what that experiment might teach policy makers and lawyers?
To explore these questions, I spoke with Julio Prieto, an Ecuadorian environmental lawyer who helped shape some of the country’s most influential debates on the Rights of Nature. Our conversation ranged from Indigenous cosmologies and constitutional law to climate governance, development, and the limits of universal solutions in a world of radically different ways of seeing nature.
This interview was conducted during a research visit in Ecuador in November 2025, carried out as part of the research field work for a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy and social communication.
Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant constitutional rights to nature. But before that could happen, very different ideas about nature had to find a common language. Who were the main voices in that conversation?
The debate over the Rights of Nature in Ecuador brought together three very different ways of understanding the world.
First, there are Indigenous peoples, who see themselves not as owners of nature but as part of it. Nature is not separate from society; it is the larger living system to which humans belong. Caring for nature, in this view, means caring for the community itself.
Second, there are environmentalists, many of them based in Ecuador’s cities. Their perspective is shaped by climate change and modern ecological science. They see the environment as something that must be protected through conservation, regulation, and public policy.
And finally, there is the dominant Western worldview, which tends to see nature primarily as a resource. Nature can be used, managed, and even protected — but ultimately for human purposes.
When Ecuador drafted its Constitution in 2008, these different perspectives collided in a rare national conversation. Indigenous organizations played a decisive role, but what ultimately made the Rights of Nature possible was an alliance between Indigenous movements and environmentalists.
I see the constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature as an act of translation.
These rights already existed in practice within Indigenous communities, even if they were never expressed in legal language. The legal system itself is a Western invention, built on written norms, categories, and definitions. Indigenous peoples do not experience nature as a legal object that needs to be named or administered — it is simply the way life is lived.
What Ecuador achieved was not the translation of a word, but the translation of a worldview.
The Constitution transformed a lived relationship with nature into a language that courts, governments, and legal institutions could understand. In doing so, it recognized something revolutionary: that humans are part of nature, and that nature itself possesses the right to exist, regenerate, and maintain its vital cycles.
How can one worldview be translated into another? How can deeply Amazonian abstract concepts be articulated into the literal language of law?
This process is known in legal studies as vernacularization. But in Ecuador, it happened in reverse. Traditionally, universal human rights are formulated in global, Western contexts and then imposed on countries through a top-down process, forcing each society to adapt them locally. In Ecuador, the knowledge moved in the opposite direction. It came from below — from the Global South, from ancestral practices, from diverse worldviews rooted in the past. We can call this process criollización.
It may sound highly theoretical, but it helps explain how ancient knowledge was transformed into constitutional law. Ecuador did not invent the rights of nature. It translated a lived reality into a language that the Western legal world could understand.
Puyo lies at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. Photo by Alice Deliau.Do you see the Ecuadorian case as an example of setting a new agenda of introducing local perspectives into global debates?
There is an ancient Amazonian prophecy known as the story of the Eagle and the Condor, shared in different versions across Indigenous cultures of the Americas.
Long ago the eagle and the condor were friends. They flew together in the same sky. Over time, however, their paths diverged. The eagle came to symbolize the industrial world: masculine, dominant, rational, and driven by control. The condor, by contrast, represents nature: feminine, intuitive, relational, and deeply connected to life itself. Eventually, the eagle broke away from the condor. They fought, and they separated.
According to the prophecy, this split coincided with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in the late 15th century. For the next 500 years, the path of the eagle dominated the world, nearly pushing the condor — and the worldview it represents — into extinction. But the prophecy does not end there. It says that after those 500 years, beginning around 1990, the eagle and the condor would have the chance to meet again, to fly together once more. If they were able to reconcile, to recognize each other, humanity could enter a new era of consciousness. The prophecy speaks only of potential; it is up to people to make that reconciliation possible.
I believe the Rights of Nature represent that meeting point. Rights of Nature are the common ground where the Occidental, anthropocentric worldview of the eagle could encounter the biocentric (or even ecocentric) Indigenous worldview of the condor. In that sense, Ecuador’s constitution is not just a legal innovation but a prophecy manifestation: an opportunity to allow both birds to share the same sky again.
What makes it possible to translate Indigenous worldviews into the modern legal language of the constitution? Is it possible to translate concepts that are not present in another language?
Western legal systems, universities, and international institutions are accustomed to translating other societies into their own language. Human rights, for example, emerged in a particular historical and cultural context, yet they have been adapted and interpreted across the world. What happened in Ecuador was the reverse.
For centuries, we learned to think about nature through Western concepts and translated those ideas into environmental law. But environmental law and the Rights of Nature are not the same thing. Environmental law is ultimately anthropocentric. It protects air, water, and ecosystems because they are necessary for human well-being. Air quality, water quality, land use — all these standards are designed primarily around human needs.
The Rights of Nature begin from a different premise. Nature is not simply something that serves humanity; it possesses value and rights of its own.
Translating that worldview into constitutional law required building bridges between Indigenous knowledge, environmental law, ecology, and biology. We needed a language that courts and policymakers could understand. That is why the Constitution speaks of vital cycles, regeneration, and ecological processes. Much of that language comes from biology and ecology.
In a sense, the Rights of Nature are an exercise in translation. They express an Indigenous understanding of the world through concepts that can operate within a modern legal system.
I believe this helps explain why humanity has struggled to respond effectively to climate change. We continue trying to solve a planetary crisis using legal and political tools designed for a very different relationship with nature.
Imagine a mining company wants to destroy a hill. No one lives nearby. There are no rivers, no immediate impacts on human health. Under conventional environmental law, there may be no violation. But what if that hill is the only habitat of a species found nowhere else on Earth?
Under the Rights of Nature, that species — and the ecosystem that sustains it — has a right to exist. The question is no longer whether nature is useful to humans. The question is whether it has a right to continue being itself.
Deforestation and forest fragmentation reduce monkey habitats, making conservation of the Amazon rainforest essential – by eating fruit and spreading seeds, helping the rainforest regenerate. Puyo, Amazonia. Nov. 2025. Photo by Alice Deliau.In the Ecuadorian constitution, there is a procedure for public debate and consultation with Indigenous peoples before land is used for mining.
Yes, that procedure is called consulta previa, libre e informada — free, prior, and informed consultation. And that is not an invention of Ecuador. It comes from ILO [International Labour Organisation] Convention 169. This is a legal obligation for all countries: They must consult Indigenous peoples.
Consultation is supposed to be free and informed. That means you have to explain to people what the project is, what it will do, and what its impacts will be, in a way they can understand.
But the process is often abused. Authorities create the appearance that consultation has taken place, but if you go back to the communities afterward and ask them, they say they did not understand anything. There is a lack of translation from scientific, western perspective into local realities.
Sometimes Indigenous people do not even speak Spanish, they ask them to alone understand maps, numbers, chemical data, or technical language.
Local Indigenous guides share unique, non-Western ecological knowledge passed down through generations, offering a deeper understanding of rainforest plants, animals, and the balance of Amazon ecosystems. Puyo, Amazonia, Nov. 2025. Photo by Alice Deliau.What’s the role of international organizations when it comes to translating these concepts and worldviews? How do you assess efficiency of United Nations agencies in this matter? Are external facilitators really needed in this debate?
I don’t think the main challenge is a lack of goodwill. The challenge is translation.
Many international organizations, including United Nations agencies, still approach environmental issues through concepts that remain fundamentally anthropocentric. They speak about natural resources, sustainable management, and development. Indigenous communities often begin from a different premise altogether: that humans are part of nature rather than its managers.
As a result, both sides may use similar words while meaning very different things.
This is why I often say that cooperation itself needs to be decolonized. Too often, international institutions arrive with predefined priorities, predefined solutions, and predefined indicators of success. The conversation begins with the assumption that expertise already exists elsewhere and simply needs to be transferred.
But meaningful cooperation should work in the opposite direction. It should begin with local realities, local knowledge, and local priorities. The role of international organizations should not be to prescribe solutions, but to create the conditions for genuine dialogue.
When that happens, cooperation can be extremely valuable. When it does not, consultation risks becoming a formality rather than a conversation.
Some European cooperation agencies have become more sensitive to this challenge. The most productive partnerships are usually those that allow communities to define their own objectives and then provide support for achieving them, rather than imposing external models of development.
Ultimately, the question is not whether international organizations are needed. The question is whether they are willing to listen before they speak.
We’ve discussed translation, competing worldviews, and the power of narratives. How are mining companies trying to shape that conversation today?
They are trying to convince people that mining is progress — and that progress is impossible without mining.
We have heard this story before. Decades ago, the same promises were made about oil. Today, mining has become the new development narrative. For the past several years, companies have invested heavily in campaigns designed to persuade Ecuadorians that mining is the country’s only path out of poverty.
One of their most effective arguments concerns illegal mining. Illegal mining is a serious problem in Ecuador. It is linked to criminal organizations, violence, labor exploitation, and environmental destruction. Mining companies present themselves as the solution, arguing that large-scale industrial mining can replace illegal operations with something safer, more transparent, and more regulated.
But this is also a narrative strategy. They use the fear generated by illegal mining to legitimize a broader expansion of extractive industries.
Ultimately, the debate is not only about mining. It is about the meaning of development itself.
Every day, people are told that prosperity, modernization, and economic progress depend on extracting more resources. Those messages dominate television, advertising, and political discourse because they are backed by enormous financial power.
The challenge for environmental movements is not simply to oppose mining projects. It is to offer a different story about what development means and what kind of future we want to build.
That, in the end, is the real struggle.
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How TEK Center Is Tackling Eastern Kentucky’s Trades Shortage
Four years after the devastating Eastern Kentucky floods of 2022, communities across the region are still rebuilding. While significant progress has been made, the disaster further exposed challenges that existed long before floodwaters rose, including a shortage of affordable housing and the need for a skilled trades workforce. In Magoffin County, TEK Center is working to meet that need by training the next generation who will help build Eastern Kentucky’s future.
For founder Angie Reynolds, the idea came from years spent working in human resources, where she repeatedly encountered the same problem: there simply were not enough skilled tradespeople to meet demand.
“Everywhere I looked, employers were desperate for qualified workers,” Angie said. “At the same time, there were people in our communities who wanted a better future but didn’t have access to training that fit their lives.”
Establishing the CenterFollowing years of networking, grant writing, and planning, Angie officially established TEK Center in 2021 with a mission to prepare Eastern Kentuckians for good-paying careers in less than a year.
Today, TEK offers accelerated training programs in electrical work, heavy equipment, welding, and industrial mechanics, with more pathways in the works in masonry, carpentry, plumbing, and industrial machinery maintenance. Unlike traditional college programs, students attend classes just two days a week and graduate in about 10 months with nationally recognized certifications.
“Our goal isn’t to keep students in a classroom for years. It’s to help them master the skills employers need and get them into careers as quickly as possible.”
What makes TEK unique is that the programs are employer-driven. Tradespeople help design the curriculum and serve as instructors. Many graduates move directly into positions earning approximately $77,000 annually, or union jobs making over $50 an hour, creating opportunities that can be life-changing for individuals and families across the region. Before students even graduate, TEK brings employers to campus for job fairs and recruitment events.
Supporting the Larger Picture of a New EconomyWithout a strong pipeline of skilled workers, housing and other development projects become more expensive, timelines grow longer, and communities have fewer options.
“When people talk about affordable housing and economic development projects, they’re often talking about materials or financing. But you also need the workforce. You need the electricians, the plumbers, the carpenters and masons who can actually build those homes and buildings,” Robin Gabbard, President of Mountain Association said. “We have to grow that workforce if we’re going to solve these larger community challenges.”
The organization is also working to remove barriers that prevent students from enrolling. Childcare, transportation, and financial constraints often stand between students and opportunity. Tuition is approximately $10,000, but partnerships with organizations such as EKCEP can cover up to $7,000 of that cost. Additional workforce programs can assist with expenses such as gas cards, steel-toe boots, and other necessities.As Angie was developing the idea for the TEK Center, Mountain Association provided critical support through our Business Support program, helping TEK strengthen its foundation to apply for grants, as well as build its website and strengthen its public presence. Through participation in our SPARK Nonprofit Collaborative, TEK gained access to capacity-building resources, networking opportunities, and guidance that supported its growth. Today, the partnership continues to evolve, with additional marketing and development projects underway.
Constructing A New State-of-the Art FacilityIn order for TEK to build out more pathways, it needs more than its existing 5,000 square foot facility. With the support of a $3+ million Abandoned Mine Lands Economic Revitalization (AMLER) Program grant, they will soon break ground on a 30,000-square-foot training center in Magoffin County.
“The trades aren’t slowing down,” Angie said. “I believe it could take 30 years or more to catch up with the demand, and with the new center, we are prepared to tackle this challenge.”
TEK is developing an intermediary apprenticeship program that connects students directly with employers. Businesses can bring students on three days a week while TEK assists with apprenticeship paperwork and administrative requirements. Some employers are even exploring agreements to cover a student’s tuition in exchange for a commitment to remain with the company for a period after graduation.As Eastern Kentucky works to address workforce participation, economic development, and affordable housing shortages, TEK Center‘s mission offers a reminder that solutions often begin with people, skills, and opportunity. By training the next generation of trades professionals, the organization is helping lay the foundation for the region’s future, one student at a time.
The post How TEK Center Is Tackling Eastern Kentucky’s Trades Shortage appeared first on Mountain Association.
Texas data center pause puts 20% of US pipeline at risk of delay: BNEF
The longer the moratorium stays in place, the greater the risk to Texas’ data center boom, analysts at Bloomberg NEF said.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2026
‘Towards electric vehicle misinformation communities: Shared narratives, networked validation, and reassurance among Australian consumers, McEwen et al., Energy Research & Social Science
Electric vehicles (EVs) provide a pathway to sustainable transport systems. Yet public understanding of EVs is shaped by contested information environments in which misinformation circulates alongside facts. Existing EV misinformation research has largely focused on individual EV beliefs, attitudes, and information deficits. However, less is known about how EV misinformation becomes socially meaningful in everyday life. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic data from 122 Australian consumers, we introduce the concept of EV misinformation communities to help interpret how participants share narratives and engage in social interactions and everyday sense-making practices relating to misinformation about EVs across online and offline settings. Our analysis explores how EV misinformation becomes socially meaningful through symbolic framing, networked validation, and reassurance. We suggest that countering EV misinformation requires socio-cultural understanding of people's ideologies, dispositions and circumstances, and recognition of the value and sense of shared experiences that misinformation provides. Policy and programme interventions to accelerate the transition to EVs should seek to foster community through opportunities for creating positive value and shared experiences in addition to the provision of information.
Managing climate overshoot: a risk-based strategy for climate stabilisation, Taylor et al., Frontiers in Climate
Global warming is accelerating, yet current climate strategies centred on emissions reduction and carbon removal are unlikely to prevent temperatures from crossing dangerous tipping points. Although essential, these approaches operate too slowly to counter near-term warming driven by Earth’s growing energy imbalance, weakening carbon sinks, and amplifying climate feedbacks. This mismatch reflects systemic shortcomings in climate risk assessment that underestimate nonlinear risks and the escalating costs of delay. We argue that climate stabilisation should be treated as a risk-management challenge rather than an incremental policy process. This requires explicit comparison of intervention risks with those of continued warming. We outline a comparative risk–risk framework that integrates mitigation, carbon removal, and cooling interventions, and suggests that a viable strategy may require combining rapid decarbonisation and expanded carbon removal with carefully governed cooling interventions to limit near-term warming. Without aligning response timelines with accelerating climate threats, the likelihood of irreversible Earth-system disruption will continue to grow.
Ecological Transformations of Coastal Wetlands of the Conterminous United States in Response to Contemporaneous Sea-Level Rise, Neville et al., Earth s Future
Coastal wetlands are among the most important ecosystems on the planet but are increasingly imperiled by accelerating sea-level rise (SLR). In the past, biogeomorphic feedbacks have allowed coastal wetlands to adjust vertically and persist through periods of accelerated SLR. Recent rates of SLR are faster than any in recent geologic history, making the fate of coastal wetlands highly uncertain. Here, we synthesize surface elevation table marker-horizon data from 442 stations in coastal wetlands across the conterminous United States to evaluate if they are largely persisting in the face of accelerated SLR, or if they are undergoing ecological transformations of submergence and/or migration. Across the conterminous United States, 11% of coastal wetlands in this sample are on a trajectory of submergence whereas 73% of sites are lagging SLR, but may be able to migrate upslope, and 16% of sites are gaining elevation at rates which exceed SLR indicating persistence and an ability to migrate seaward. Vulnerability of these systems to ecological transformation varies across the three coasts of the conterminous United States which, span large biogeomorphic gradients. These results serve as one of the first national syntheses of coastal wetland elevation trends and may help focus conservation and restoration efforts in a rapidly changing future.
Long-Term Trends in the Ionospheric Equivalent Slab Thickness as a Proxy of Climate Change in the Ionosphere, Pignalberi & Alberti, Geophysical Research Letters
Anthropogenic greenhouse emissions do not affect all parts of Earth's atmosphere in the same way. While the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere is expected to cool and contract, and this may also change the ionosphere, the region containing charged particles (plasma). In this study, we analyzed nearly three decades of observations from three stations spanning equatorial to high latitudes. We focused on ionospheric equivalent slab thickness, a quantity that measures how broadly plasma is distributed around the main ionospheric peak. We found that slab thickness generally decreases over time, although the strength of the decrease is neither spatially uniform nor equally detectable at all latitudes. We then linked these changes to the plasma scale height, which controls how fast plasma density decreases with altitude. The results show that the ionospheric profile is becoming narrower with time, especially at middle and high latitudes. This suggests that long-term climate-related changes in the upper atmosphere are also affecting the vertical structure of ionospheric plasma.
Disrupted Skies: How Offshore Wind Farms Alter Flight Behavior of Breeding Seabirds, Liang et al., Ecology and Evolution
Offshore wind farms are expanding rapidly as part of global climate mitigation efforts, but their effects on seabird movement behavior remain incompletely understood. While collision risk has received substantial attention, less is known about how turbines may alter flight routes through evasive behavior and meso-avoidance, particularly near breeding colonies where repeated commuting flights may accumulate energetic costs. We investigated flight responses of breeding Bridled Terns (Onychoprion anaethetus) to offshore wind turbines near their colony using high-resolution satellite tracking data collected at 1-s intervals and lower-resolution data collected at 1-h intervals. We quantified within-trajectory flight traits, including mean redirection, number of turns, flight speed, and flight altitude, in relation to turbine exposure. We assessed avoidance using both proximity-based and direction-sensitive metrics. At the near-colony scale, we tested whether flight behavior changed with increasing alignment between the trajectory bearing and turbine bearing from the colony. At the broader breeding-range scale, we tested whether behavior differed inside and outside wind farms or with distance to turbines, while accounting for colony distance, wind, and landscape variables. Bridled Terns showed increased mean redirection and lower flight altitude when trajectories were more closely aligned with turbine directions from the colony, suggesting localized route alteration in obstacle-facing directions. However, flight behavior was not significantly associated with turbine proximity, nor did it differ significantly inside and outside wind farms. These findings suggest that offshore wind farms may influence seabird movement through localized, direction-dependent route alteration rather than simple distance-dependent responses, highlighting the value of movement-context metrics and within-trajectory traits in wind farm impact assessments.
From this week's government/NGO section:Interim heat mortality monitoring report, England: May and June 2026, UK Health Security Agency
During the May and June 2026 heat events there were an estimated total of 2,877 heat-associated deaths, an estimated 753 heat-associated deaths occurred during the May heat episode; an estimated 2,124 heat-associated deaths occurred during the June heat episode, and the mortality burden is already close to the highest annual totals previously recorded by UKHSA. Although these estimates remain provisional and are subject to revision as more complete mortality data becomes available, the magnitude of the impact is already comparable with some of the highest annual heat-associated mortality estimates previously reported through UKHSA’s heat mortality monitoring programme. For context, UKHSA estimated 2,295 heat-associated deaths during the whole of summer 2023, 1,311 during summer 2024 and 1,504 during summer 2025. The highest annual estimate recorded to date remains summer 2022, when 2,985 heat-associated deaths were observed across 5 heat episodes.
Climate change increases likelihood of compounding drivers of severe wildfire conditions in France and Spain, World Weather Attribution
The authors perform a super rapid analysis of trends in fire-conducive weather conditions in the two affected areas in France and Spain, analyzing observations only. In both study regions observations show strong trends of increasing likelihood and severity with global warming. 99 articles in 50 journals by 827 contributing authorsPhysical science of climate change, effects
Climate modes synergistically influence marine heatwaves in the North Sea, Lin et al., Ocean science Open Access pdf 10.5194/os-22-2287-2026
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Uncertainties too large to predict tipping times of major Earth system components from historical data, Science Advances, 10.1126/sciadv.adl4841 40 cites.
Observations of climate change, effects
Climate warming and atmospheric deposition jointly accelerate the Antarctic Peninsula atmosphere–glacier–land–ocean mercury loop, Zhou et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2613472123
Climate warming preconditions Himalayan slopes for post-earthquake cascading hazards, Gao et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03885-2
Impact attribution of anthropogenic forcing on lake surface temperature, Wang et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76221-z
Long-term observed changes in air temperature extremes over Romania (1901-2023), Amihesei et al., Weather and Climate Extremes Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2026.100941
Long-Term Trends in the Ionospheric Equivalent Slab Thickness as a Proxy of Climate Change in the Ionosphere, Pignalberi & Alberti, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl123868
Pan-tropical ocean warming drives record-breaking rainfall in South China in April 2024, Xing et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-026-03894-1
Threefold increase in atmospheric–riverine compound heatwaves under climate change, Zhou et al., Nature Geoscience Open Access 10.1038/s41561-026-02040-y
Understanding the Climatology and Characteristics of Arctic Moisture Intrusions, Woods et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres Open Access 10.1029/2025jd044159
Winter warm spells in the pyrenees: synoptic drivers and snowmelt impacts (1960–2024), Bonsoms & Serrano-Notivoli, Atmospheric Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.atmosres.2026.109245
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Summer Monsoon Drying Accelerates India's Groundwater Depletion Under Climate Change, Earth s Future, 10.1029/2024ef004516 38 cites.
Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects
Enhanced detectability of forced signal in monthly precipitation changes, Duan et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03684-9
GLBD-FED: a global first-hand in-situ daily temperature dataset preferentially with a 00:00–24:00 UTC 24 h window (1981–2024), Yang et al., Earth system science data Open Access 10.5194/essd-18-5739-2026
Post-Season Review of Rapid Attribution of 2025 Summer Extreme Heat in China, Sun et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.014
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The ERA5 global reanalysis from 1940 to 2022, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 10.1002/qj.4803 290 cites.
Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects
Climatic Impacts of a Warmer Mediterranean Sea Simulated by the Fully Coupled Community Earth System Model, Version 2 (CESM2), Toker et al., Journal of Climate 10.1175/jcli-d-25-0540.1
Compound climate hazards revealed by global modeling of drought, heatwaves, and land degradation, Liu et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105637
Intensifying Short-Interval Heatwave-To-Rainfall Compound Extremes and Associated Exposure in the Indus Basin, Wen et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70534
Multi-model ensemble mean shows accelerating global below-ground warming, Ju et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111382
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The radiative feedback continuum from Snowball Earth to an ice-free hothouse, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-50406-w 14 cites.
Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection
Advective, adiabatic and diabatic contributions to heat extremes simulated with the Community Earth System Model version 2, Röthlisberger et al., Weather and Climate Dynamics Open Access 10.5194/wcd-7-1363-2026
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Accurate assessment of land–atmosphere coupling in climate models requires high-frequency data output, Geoscientific model development, 10.5194/gmd-17-1869-2024 32 cites.
Cryosphere & climate change
Delayed freeze-up in the western Arctic Ocean fueled by subsurface heat release, ZHOU et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.018
The Modèle Atmosphérique Régional – Intelligence Artificielle (MAR-IA): surface meltwater over Greenland, Tedesco et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-4235-2026
The recent enhancement of the surface melt over the Antarctic Peninsula dictated by thermodynamics, Zhang et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76310-z
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Recent tropical Andean glacier retreat is unprecedented in the Holocene, Science, 10.1126/science.adg7546 27 cites.
Sea level & climate change
Coastal Flood Risk Governance in Newfoundland, Canada: A Multidimensional Analysis of Assessment, Management, and Communication, Parvez & Akter, Risk Analysis 10.1111/risa.70327
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The influence of realistic 3D mantle viscosity on Antarctica’s contribution to future global sea levels, Science Advances, 10.1126/sciadv.adn1470 23 cites.
Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry
Calcium isotopes link ocean acidification to Aptian–Albian foraminiferal extinctions, Chen et al., Science 10.1126/science.aed9359
New classes of climate model emulators to improve paleoclimate reconstructions, Gaudin & Khodri, Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-7135-2026
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Plant, insect, and fungi fossils under the center of Greenland’s ice sheet are evidence of ice-free times, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10.1073/pnas.2407465121 6 cites.
Biology & climate change, related geochemistry
Climate Change Predicted to Trigger an Upward Altitudinal Range Shift and Boost the Abundance of a Montane Rock Face Specialist, the Wallcreeper (Tichodroma muraria), Luisier et al., Open Access CRIS of the University of Bern Open Access 10.48620/99848
Declining coccolithophore blooms in the North Atlantic and Western Barents Sea, Yu et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.adw5268
Distribution of suitable habitats and bloom risk assessment for Sargassum horneri in the China Seas under global climate change, Mo et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108325
Ecological Transformations of Coastal Wetlands of the Conterminous United States in Response to Contemporaneous Sea-Level Rise, Neville et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef006836
Sustained transpiration masks weakened canopy cooling and emerging carbon constraints during heatwaves in a riparian poplar plantation, Li et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111390
The synoptic meteorology of coral reef high water temperature events in the Gulf of Eilat (Aqaba), Israel, McGowan et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-65507-3
Underestimated climate contributions: Dynamic attribution of vegetation changes in China incorporating soil moisture and vapor pressure deficit, Zheng et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111395
Warming associated with forest integrity loss in global wildland-urban interfaces, Huang et al., Anthropocene 10.1016/j.ancene.2026.100569
Warming Drives Large-Scale Shifts in Post-Disturbance Vegetation Dynamics and Expansion of Deciduous Trees in the Boreal Forest in a Dynamic Vegetation Model, Layritz et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access 10.1029/2025jg009176
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
High heat tolerance, evaporative cooling, and stomatal decoupling regulate canopy temperature and their safety margins in three European oak species, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17439 46 cites.
GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry
Climate Constraints on the Methane-Carbon Efficiency of Global Wetlands: Spatiotemporal Drivers and Future Projections, Zhu et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef008003
Communicating Climate Change in Africa: Role Perception and Role Shifting among Environmental Journalists in Nigeria, Oduolowu et al., Environmental Communication 10.1080/17524032.2026.2711229
Compound Effects of Warming and Wetting Enhance Soil Respiration on the Earth's Third Pole, Shen et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles 10.1029/2026gb009376
Detection and quantification of agricultural methane plumes using MethaneAIR through targeted scene selection, wavelet denoising, and divergence-integral analysis, Smale et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access 10.5194/acp-26-10661-2026
Drought stress on the global vegetation carbon sink: Capacity decline in nearly 70% of regions, LIU et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.020
Ecological Transformations of Coastal Wetlands of the Conterminous United States in Response to Contemporaneous Sea-Level Rise, Neville et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef006836
Elevated Spring Methane Emissions in a Sub-Arctic Peatland Fen, Montemayor et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access 10.1029/2026jg009699
Estimating carbon storage and flux in sea urchin barrens following kelp forest collapse, Rogers-Bennett et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108297
Quantifying Methane Emissions From a Rich Fen With Uncrewed Aircraft Systems in Boreal Alaska, Tomlin et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd046424
Quantifying national, state, and oil/gas field methane emissions and trends in the US (2019–2024) through high resolution inversion of satellite observations, Estrada et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-26-10629-2026
Responses of Riverine Dissolved Organic Carbon to Global Warming and Permafrost Thaw on the Tibetan Plateau, Pan et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles 10.1029/2026gb009157
Urban CO2 flux characteristics observed at an eddy-covariance tower in northeastern Seoul, An et al., Atmospheric Environment 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122252
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Towards an ecosystem capacity to stabilise organic carbon in soils, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17453 55 cites.
CO2 capture, sequestration science & engineering
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The politics of carbon management in Austria: Emerging fault lines on carbon capture, storage, utilization and removal, Energy Research & Social Science, 10.1016/j.erss.2024.103697 6 cites.
Decarbonization
Assessing strategies to decarbonise embodied carbon impacts of residential buildings in Indian cities: case of Ahmedabad, Trivedi et al., Environmental Research Infrastructure and Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1088/2634-4505/ae87c7
Disrupted Skies: How Offshore Wind Farms Alter Flight Behavior of Breeding Seabirds, Liang et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access 10.1002/ece3.74089
Hydrogen supply chains across Chinese provinces for production and transportation, Bi et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03869-2
Peak coal electricity under rapid electricity demand growth conditions: A case study of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, Dzikrurrokhim et al., Energy Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115532
Sceptical, pragmatic, and innovative teleworkers: Exploring commuting carbon footprints and subjective well-being, Vu et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104894
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Integration of Renewable Energy in Microgrids and Smart Grids in Deregulated Power Systems: A Comparative Exploration, Advanced Energy and Sustainability Research, 10.1002/aesr.202400088 88 cites.
Geoengineering climate
Climate benefit and ecological cost trade-offs for ocean iron fertilization, Yu et al., Nature 10.1038/s41586-026-10795-y
Heatwaves and particulate matter increases: An Italian case study, Faggi et al., Atmospheric Environment Open Access 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122246
Invisible Ship Tracks Produce Mean-State Cloud Microphysics Perturbation in Tropical Trade Cumulus, Wright, Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.20076712
Climate change communications & cognition
Challenges and next steps in climate disaster communication, Houston & First, Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02714-w
Finding Gaia: exploring climate change through gamification, Gargiulo et al., Geoscience Communication Open Access pdf 10.5194/gc-9-331-2026
Local stories in climate change communication, Cheng, Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02694-x
Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence, Herberz et al., Open MIND Open Access pmh:10.17605/osf.io/qp76t
Psychological inoculation against climate doom, O'Boyle et al., Open MIND pmh:10.17605/osf.io/74cgf
Social influence shapes climate attitudes and action, Hampton et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02711-z
Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects, Bergeron-Boutin et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.adz6502
‘Towards electric vehicle misinformation communities: Shared narratives, networked validation, and reassurance among Australian consumers, McEwen et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104902
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change engagement of scientists, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02091-2 45 cites.
Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change
Climate Change Shows Inverse Effects on Grain Yield and Protein Concentration in West Africa, Abigaba et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008409
Discovery of a covalent FGFR2-selective inhibitor overcoming clinically-acquired resistance mutations, Huang et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76339-0
Engaging farmers with climate projections: integrating long-term climate risk into farm business resilience planning, Malakar et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100859
Food system contributions to future planetary boundary transgressions: a multiscale modelling assessment of scenarios, Luchtenbelt et al., The Lancet Planetary Health Open Access 10.1016/j.lanplh.2026.101492
Halochromic modulation of amorphous calcium carbonate crystallization driven by pH-responsive bioinspired pigments, Sardhalia et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-75888-8
Leveraging climate-smart agriculture for improved resource-use efficiency: evidence from rice farmers in Kwara State, Nigeria, Ajiboye et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1878309
Relearning with the Land: Intergenerational food literacy pathways for resilience in a changing climate, Adelodun et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104462
Vulnerability to high temperature shapes global warming impacts on rice yield, Jian et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aed9226
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The centennial legacy of land-use change on organic carbon stocks of German agricultural soils, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17444 26 cites.
Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change
Greenhouse warming exacerbates El Niño-induced Indian monsoon droughts, Zhao et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76049-7
Improving Daily Streamflow Forecasting under Nonstationarity with a Physics-Informed, Decomposition-Enhanced Deep Learning Model, Jiang et al., Journal of Hydrometeorology 10.1175/jhm-d-25-0166.1
Reservoir Drought Resilience Under Future Warming Scenarios: Regional Disparities Across Heavily Regulated US Basins, Eldardiry et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007984
Understanding the Climatology and Characteristics of Arctic Moisture Intrusions, Woods et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres Open Access 10.1029/2025jd044159
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Understanding Climate Change and Anthropogenic Impacts on the Salinization of Low-Lying Coastal Groundwater Systems, Earth s Future, 10.1029/2024ef004737 20 cites.
Climate change economics
Global trade-offs between consumption, carbon prices and equity, Li et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-75815-x
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Estimating economic losses from perceived heat stress in a global south country, Bangladesh, Urban Climate, 10.1016/j.uclim.2024.102072 11 cites.
Climate change mitigation public policy research
Environmental taxation and biofuel production in the EU: Heterogeneous effects across producer scales, Auteri, Energy Policy 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115525
From corporate net-zero pledges to credible climate action, Gudipudi et al., Nature Sustainability 10.1038/s41893-026-01908-6
From project participants to policy shapers: How communities influence renewable energy governance, Eitan, Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104906
Pathways towards social license for offshore wind energy: Modelling strategies to reduce conflict and increase acceptability, Condie et al., Energy Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115523
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Renewable energy transition and regional integration: Energizing the pathway to sustainable development, Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2024.114270 65 cites.
Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research
Aspirations in a warming world: Modeling migration and education decisions under climate risk in Senegal, Choquette-Levy et al., Global Environmental Change 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2026.103215
Back to the future: A mixed-methods approach for developing event-based participatory storylines to advance climate risk assessments, Casartelli et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100865
Climate-resilient infrastructure and the future of the SDGs, Zaqout et al., Environmental Research Infrastructure and Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1088/2634-4505/ae900b
Coastal Flood Risk Governance in Newfoundland, Canada: A Multidimensional Analysis of Assessment, Management, and Communication, Parvez & Akter, Risk Analysis 10.1111/risa.70327
Global vulnerability assessment of mobile telecommunications infrastructure to climate hazards using crowdsourced open data, Oughton et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76197-w
Traditional, indigenous and local knowledge for climate adaptation: trends, themes and governance implications (2000–2025), Zhang et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.019
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Rare and highly destructive wildfires drive human migration in the U.S., Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-50630-4 28 cites.
Climate change impacts on human health
Rapid Increase in Tropical Humid Heat Stress and Its Predictability in a Warming World, Saha et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd046437
The GHEMMS checklist: design, conduct, and reporting guidance for studies modelling climate mitigation actions and their health cobenefits, Reynolds et al., The Lancet Planetary Health Open Access 10.1016/j.lanplh.2026.101474
The past and future impact of climate change on childhood malaria in Africa, Carlson et al., Nature Open Access 10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w
Welcome to the Calentón: How Puerto Rican Community Leaders Respond to Extreme Heat, López et al., Environmental Communication 10.1080/17524032.2026.2711233
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change could fuel urinary schistosomiasis transmission in Africa and Europe, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17434 19 cites.
Climate change & geopolitics
Energy transition and climate vulnerability: Energy policy in an era of geopolitical fragmentation, Chen et al., Energy Policy 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115536
The immediate impact of crises on energy transitions: Policy responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Finland, Germany, and Poland, Haukkala et al., Energy Research & Social Science 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104881
Coupled air–sea interactions drove and sustained the 2013–2016 North Pacific marine heatwave, Jiang et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76096-0
Mid-2000s reversal of North Atlantic warming pattern reshapes hemispheric circulation and Eurasian cold extremes, Wu et al., npj Climate and Atmospheric Science Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41612-026-01492-8
The cooling paradox: Rising air conditioner adoption in Bangladesh as a driver of energy insecurity and compounding climate risk, Rahman et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104886
Unveiling Future Individual and Compound Heat and Air Pollution Extremes in China: Insights for Mitigation, Zhang & Gao, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 10.1175/bams-d-25-0333.1
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Expansive learning of climate scientists towards transdisciplinarity, Climate Risk Management, 10.1016/j.crm.2024.100642 3 cites.
Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives
Managing climate overshoot: a risk-based strategy for climate stabilisation, Taylor et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1872846
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions critical to limit climate tipping risks, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-49863-0 71 cites.
Groundwater Supply East of Interstate 95 (Virginia), Virginia Department of Environmental Quality
As directed by Senate Joint Resolution No. 25, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) completed a study of the groundwater supply in the Commonwealth east of Interstate 95 (I-95). This area generally encompasses the Virginia Coastal Plain (VCP) aquifer system. Under current conditions, the VCP aquifer system has limited capacity for significant new withdrawals. The estimated capacity for new withdrawals varies by region, from a maximum of 360,000 gallons per day in the eastern Northern Neck to less than 30,000 gallons per day in some western regions near I-95. Only the upper end of this range would support a significant new withdrawal for industrial use. The confined Potomac aquifer is the largest and deepest in the VCP, accounting for 70% of total reported and estimated groundwater withdrawals in the Eastern Virginia Groundwater Management Area. The confined Yorktown-Eastover aquifer system accounts for 95% of total reported and estimated groundwater withdrawals in the Eastern Shore Groundwater Management Area. Combining the two regulated areas, the major uses of groundwater are industrial (35% of total), private domestic (34%), and public water supply (26%).California New Car Dealers Association Releases Q2 2026 Auto Outlook. Q2 2026 CA Auto Outlook: Hybrid Market Share Climbs to Highest Level on Record in California, California New Car Dealers Association
Hybrid vehicles accounted for 22.1 percent of California’s new vehicle market through June, the highest share in the report’s data series and up from 19.5 percent for all of 2025. Hybrid share has now increased in each of the past four years. Quarterly share climbed from 20.9 percent in the first quarter to 23.2 percent in the second. Hybrid registrations totaled 191,000 units in the first half of the year, and every one of those vehicles was sold through a franchised new car dealership. Franchised dealerships accounted for 75.7 percent of combined hybrid, ZEV, and plug-in hybrid registrations statewide. Gas powered vehicles remained the largest single segment of the market at 57.6 percent of registrations, up from 54.0 percent in 2025.Characterization and Screening-Level Risk Evaluation Report. Vicinity of Moss Landing Power Plant, Moss Landing, California, Terraphase Engineering, Vistra Corporation
On January 16, 2025, a lithium-ion battery fire occurred within ML300 at the Moss Landing Power Plant (MLPP). The fire was confined to the ML300 structure and did not spread to other on-site facilities. Emergency response actions were implemented promptly, including precautionary evacuations that were lifted the following day based on air monitoring results. The authors evaluate whether releases associated with the fire event pose a potential threat to human health or the environment and whether additional investigation or response actions are warranted. Chemicals measured in the sampled off-site soil, sediment, and surface water do not indicate lasting conditions expected to pose an unacceptable risk to people or ecological receptors. For purposes of the risk evaluation, health-protective assumptions and treated measured chemical concentrations are considered as if they were related to the fire. Some nickel concentrations in sediment exceeded ecological screening levels in Hester Marsh and the Mosquito Abatement Observation Area. The authors attributed these results to natural variability and marsh conditions rather than lasting fire-related impacts. No further human-health or ecological-risk evaluation, off-site investigation, or response action is warranted at this time for the sampled locations and environmental media.Colorado River Basin Water Security Survey, Morning Consult, Walton Family Foundation
Nearly 9-in-10 voters across key states are very concerned about wildfire risks, threats to clean drinking water, and lowering water levels in the Colorado River Basin. Four-in-five voters across all seven states and in the Colorado River Basin counties say addressing the drought effects from the Colorado River is an important priority to them personally and the majority say it is important for the federal government or their state government to make addressing water security a priority this year. Nine-in-ten voters support restoring wetlands to help protect communities from fires, increasing agricultural efficiency to reduce water use, boosting municipal water conservation, and managing forests to limit wildfire damage. Support is broad across the political spectrum, ranging from more than eight-in-ten Republicans and Independents to more than nine-in-ten Democrats. Similar shares say each approach is an important priority, with more than half saying forest management and boosting municipal conservation should be a top priority. About half of voters across the seven states prefer strategies to address water conservation that are both long-term and short-term, to help manage the drought into the future. Ensuring reliable water supply is a top priority for voters.Thirsty Power. Coal and gas will leave us high and dry, Sonoda et al., Sierra Club, Wisconsin Chapter
Wisconsin’s current dirty energy power fleet– including coal, gas, and nuclear plants– withdraws 1.34 trillion gallons of water annually. This is more than 7 times all of the municipalities in Wisconsin combined, and 18 times more than agricultural irrigation. Meanwhile, solar and wind use so little water that the U.S. Energy Information Administration does not even track their use. Five new gas plants, known or assumed to be proposed for data centers, would use 142 million gallons of water a year on average– the equivalent of the annual drinking water for 284 million people– and the majority of which would be needed during summer months when energy and water use has been strained by drought and heat.The 50 States of Solar: Q2 2026 Quarterly Report, North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center
This report series focuses on cataloging and describing important proposed and adopted policy changes affecting solar customer-generators of investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and large publicly owned or nonprofit utilities, i.e., those serving at least 100,000 customers. In the second quarter of 2026, 45 states plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico took a total of 284 actions related to distributed solar policy and rate design. Of the 284 actions cataloged, the most common were related to distributed generation compensation rules (53), followed by community solar (48), and residential fixed charge or minimum bill increases (45).Interim heat mortality monitoring report, England: May and June 2026, UK Health Security Agency
Suring the May and June 2026 heat events there were an estimated total of 2,877 heat-associated deaths, an estimated 753 heat-associated deaths occurred during the May heat episode; an estimated 2,124 heat-associated deaths occurred during the June heat episode, and the mortality burden is already close to the highest annual totals previously recorded by UKHSA. Although these estimates remain provisional and are subject to revision as more complete mortality data becomes available, the magnitude of the impact is already comparable with some of the highest annual heat-associated mortality estimates previously reported through UKHSA’s heat mortality monitoring programme. For context, UKHSA estimated 2,295 heat-associated deaths during the whole of summer 2023, 1,311 during summer 2024 and 1,504 during summer 2025. The highest annual estimate recorded to date remains summer 2022, when 2,985 heat-associated deaths were observed across 5 heat episodes.Climate change increases likelihood of compounding drivers of severe wildfire conditions in France and Spain, World Weather Attribution
The authors perform a super rapid analysis of trends in fire-conducive weather conditions in the two affected areas in France and Spain, analyzing observations only. In both study regions observations show strong trends of increasing likelihood and severity with global warming.Risks of Lithium-ion Battery Facilities to Workers and Communities in Reno, Nevada - A Case Study Supporting Community Right-to-Know, Moon et al., GAIA
The authors report examines the environmental and health implications of lithium-ion battery recycling in Nevada’s rapidly expanding “Lithium Loop” and is designed not only to document current conditions but to equip communities, policymakers, and other stakeholders with the information and frameworks needed to strengthen transparency and accountability across the sector. This case study marks the launch of GAIA’s Community Right-to-Know Initiative for Battery Recycling, a multi-year effort to establish industry-wide transparency and accountability benchmarks among battery recyclers regarding transition mineral claims; support frontline communities in accessing, interpreting, and acting on environmental data; and align battery supply chain stakeholders, policymakers, researchers, and advocates, in Nevada and throughout the US, around enforceable disclosure standards.The Pace of Solar Progress: How Preexisting Land Use Shapes Permitting Timelines for Utility-Scale Solar in California, Johnson et al., The Nature Conservancy
California’s future hinges on its ability to rapidly and responsibly develop significant amounts of utility-scale solar. Yet the pace of deployment is increasingly constrained by permitting complexity. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, the authors examine over 15 years of permitting data and includes interviews with county officials, a state agency, and solar developers to understand the drivers of permitting timelines and to identify how California can accelerate clean energy deployment while protecting important landscapes.Annual Report to the Legislature on California Climate Investments Using Cap-and-Invest Auction Proceeds, California Air Resources Board
The California Air Resources Board released a new report showing the state’s Cap-and-Invest program has generated $36.2 billion for climate investments, $15.5 billion of which have been implemented through over 600,000 projects. With billions yet to be implemented and $8 billion in additional proceeds estimated through 2030, these funds are expected to continue reducing emissions and supporting jobs across the state for years to come. 36.2 billion generated by Cap-and-Invest auctions. $15.5 billion implemented across 122 programs into over 600,000 projects delivering cleaner air, stronger communities, and more affordable options for Californians. Of that money, $11.4 billion, or 76%, is benefiting disadvantaged and low-income communities. 130.5 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent of estimated greenhouse gas reductions over project lifetimes, equivalent to avoiding the consumption of over 12.6 billion gallons of gasoline. 16,386 affordable homes under contract, helping address California’s housing needs. $44.4 billion in expected cost savings from reduced fuel use, lower transportation costs, and lower household energy bills. 143,000+ jobs supported across the economy through project spending, supply chain activity, and induced economic activity over project lifetimes.How Important is Clean Energy to Utahns?, Elizabeth Brunner and Stacia Ryder, Utah State University
Data from the 2024/25 Utah People and Environment Poll estimates that a majority of Utahns support carbon-free energy. Over half of Utahns are willing to pay more for clean energy. Nuclear and geothermal energy sources draw the most consistent support across rural, transitioning, and urban communities Rural, transitioning, and urban communities are most divided on support for natural gas, coal, solar, and wind energy sources. The Utah Office of Energy’s Strategic Energy Plan may not prioritize clean energy in the same way its residents do. Future research should explore the links between Utahns’ views of energy and data center development.Energy Transition Monitor: Momentum Is Still Insufficient for the Expansion of Renewables, Electrification, and Storage, Von Wolf-Peter Schill, DIW Weekly Report
The expansion of solar and wind energy is progressing, but it is not fast enough to meet the 2030 statutory targets. The heating transition is stalling: Heat pumps make up half of all newly sold heating systems, yet many fossil-fuel heaters are still being installed. Electric vehicles are gaining ground in all categories, but internal combustion engines continue to dominate new registrations. Electricity price trends show that the flexibility of the power system is growing more slowly than electricity generation from renewables. The expansion of large-scale battery storage is gaining momentum, nearly doubling in the first half of 2026.China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2026 H1, Christoph Nedopil, The University of Queensland Business School, Brisbane, Australia in collaboration with the Green Finance & Development Center (GFDC) at FISF, PR. China
China’s energy related engagement in 2026 H1 reached record levels with about USD36.3 billion – almost double the energy engagement in any first half year since 2013 except 2025. 56% of China’s energy engagement was green – a new record both in absolute and in relative terms. More than USD20 billion in H1 2026, same level as green energy engagement in all 2025. More than 20 GW of green electricity projects confirmed through investment and construction – more than in all of 2025.Organizations and Climate Action. Accelerating Climate Solutions Through Organizational Change, Amel et al., American Psychological Association & ecoAmerica
The escalating effects of climate change are already reshaping lives, livelihoods, and communities. A large majority of people recognize this reality and express concern. Yet awareness alone has not translated into the scale of action the moment demands. The authors address that gap by examining one of the most powerful and underutilized levers for climate action: organizations. Drawing on peer-reviewed research from organizational psychology, behavioral science, and sustainability studies, this report presents an evidence-based case for why organizations — understood as structured collectives of people — are uniquely positioned to accelerate climate solutions. Although much of the research reviewed in this report is based on workplace settings, the principles it identifies are broadly applicable across diverse organizational contexts, from corporations, associations, and nonprofits to educational institutions and places of worship. At its core, any collective is shaped by universal human dynamics: culture, leadership, and motivation. The authors examine the cultural and behavioral foundations of organizational change and offer practical, role-specific recommendations for advancing climate action.Communities Centered: Frontline Perspectives on Hyperscale Data Centers in Washington State, Mengal et al., Front and Centered
Hyperscale data centers represent an emerging threat to climate and environmental justice. New articles or reports are constantly being released detailing the negative health, environmental, energy and economic effects of data centers on communities across the nation, and too often it is frontline communities who bear the brunt of these effects. As a coalition of frontline community-based organizations advancing climate and environmental justice in Washington State, we know that our communities are continually overlooked in conversations about how to address data centers and their impacts, despite holding distinct and multiple forms of expertise and lived experiences. The authors provide the first statewide report to combine original geographic analysis with interviews from frontline organizations to examine how the growth of AI data centers is affecting communities across Washington. In addition to documenting community concerns, the authors outline a series of policy recommendations, including passing a statewide moratorium on new data centers and the expansion of existing hyperscale facilities. About New ResearchClick here for the why and how of Skeptical Science New Research.
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Duke Energy to issue $10B in equity to capture gas generation growth opportunity
President and CEO Harry Sideris said the company is deploying more than $1 billion per month to meet “record demand.” Advocates in North Carolina say the utility has exaggerated growth projections to justify its spending plan.
August 6 Green Energy News
Headline News:
- “Short-Haul Electric Flights Could Be A European Reality In Less Than Four Years” • European travelers could take electric flights on some of the continent’s most popular routes by the early 2030s, thanks to rapid advancements in tech. Electric and hybrid flights would make short-haul travel more sustainable, and less dependent on imported fuel. [Euronews]
Electric airplane (Elysian Aircraft image)
- “Cause Determined In The Deadly 2025 Eaton Fire” • The Los Angeles County Fire Department and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection released a report on the 2025 Eaton Fire. It said the fire was caused by electrical arcing events that took place on a Southern California Edison tower that was out of service. The fire killed 19 people. [ABC News]
- “Climate Change Is Rewriting Europe’s Nuclear Cooling Assumptions” • Romania is redirecting the Danube to get water to one of its four nuclear reactors could keep going for at least two extra days. France had to constrain twelve of its reactors. Switzerland and Hungary have reactors offline. Climate change has effects on nuclear power. [CleanTechnica]
- “Solar Power Is Portugal’s Main Source Of Electricity In July For The First Time” • Last month, renewable sources accounted for 53% of consumption, with solar providing 19% of that energy, followed by hydro (16%), wind (13%) and biomass (5%). Solar power was, for the first time, the main source of electricity for the country. [Euronews]
- “In A First, Utah Got More Power From Solar Than Any Other Source” • Utah’s solar generation eclipsed all other electricity sources for the first time ever in May, after a slow but steady years-long shift away from coal. Energy experts are calling it a win for the environment and the state’s economy. PV panels in Utah produced nearly 1 TWh in May 2026. [Yahoo]
For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.
Quarter of countries still missing UN climate plans 18 months after deadline
About a quarter of the countries signed up to the Paris Agreement are still breaching its rules by failing to submit a new national climate plan, 18 months after the February 2025 deadline.
Forty-five nations had not submitted a plan known as a nationally determined contribution (NDC), according to the Paris Agreement Implementation and Compliance Committee’s (PAICC) newly-published report of its 7-10 July 2026 meeting. One, Oman, has published it since the meeting.
Twelve countries ignored the committee’s repeated attempts to find out why they had not yet produced a climate plan, the report said. They will be invited to the committee’s next meeting, from September 1-4, so it can identify the challenges and constraints they face.
Members of the committee are divided, as they were at their last meeting, on whether to name those countries publicly and will debate the question again in September.
The PAICC does not have any power to punish governments, as building these powers into the Paris Agreement was thought to be so controversial that it could have stopped some governments from joining, experts have previously told Climate Home News.
A key requirement of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement is that governments publish a more ambitious NDC every five years, setting targets to reduce their planet-heating emissions and outlining their policies to adapt to climate change, in order to meet the accord’s goals on limiting global warming and protecting people from its effects.
The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in 2025.
Some medium-sized emittersCountries without an updated NDC include Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina and the Phillippines, all of which rank among the world’s 40 largest greenhouse gas emitters. The rest of the countries are smaller, poorer nations, with many in Africa or the Caribbean.
Some nations have argued that they cannot put together an NDC – which requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy – because of exceptional circumstances. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC committee, seen by Climate Home News, says that the country’s civil war has led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.
The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement, although the US submitted a 2035 NDC under the Biden administration before Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN climate accords.
The committee also expressed concern that the UN’s NDC registry continued to label the climate plans of countries that are no longer party to the Paris Agreement as “active”, according to its report. The US submission has since been archived.
Since the last PAICC meeting in March, ten countries have published NDCs. The committee did not name them but they include India, Algeria, Cameroon and Guyana.
The post Quarter of countries still missing UN climate plans 18 months after deadline appeared first on Climate Home News.
4 ways the food industry fools your senses
Companies use a range of tricks to make your food taste more flavorful.
Many of these tactics come straight from the tobacco industry playbook – and they’re so effective that some ultra-processed foods, or UPF, are considered addictive.
But companies are not just targeting your taste buds. They’re tricking your other senses, too. It’s all part of a sales strategy to make their food products as appealing as possible, and most people never even realize it.
From the time you see a packaged food to the smell you get when you open it to the sound it makes when you bite into it – you’re subject to marketing ploys the food industry has spent decades and millions of dollars perfecting.
Here’s how companies use these tactics to sell ultra-processed products, from cream cheese to chips to cheese puffs.
1. Scent marketing can trigger cravingsSmell is a powerful sensory cue. Specific scents can bring up old memories, evoke an emotional response and – of course – trigger hunger.
Food companies, retailers and restaurants have figured out how to use this to their advantage.
Some grocers strategically pump bakery smells through the store to inspire impulse purchases. Sometimes the smells aren’t even real. One promotional campaign used scented diffusers to release a baked cheesecake aroma into select grocery stores in an attempt to sell Philadelphia-brand cream cheese.
Food companies will even use “scent marketing” in their packaging and labels to appeal to consumers and build brand loyalty. As Chris van Tulleken describes in “Ultra-Processed People,” some ice cream producers use caramel scented wrappers to compensate for the lack of smell in frozen foods.
2. Chips are engineered for the perfect crunchIt’s not by chance that biting a potato chip feels so satisfying. Companies that make chips and other crunchy snacks have put serious thought into the sound they make when you eat them.
One study famously asked volunteers to judge the freshness of Pringles chips based on the volume of their crunch. People who heard louder crunches rated the chips as fresher than those who heard quieter crunches. Another study found that people ate fewer potato chips when they wore headphones to cancel out the crunching sound.
PepsiCo, parent company of Frito-Lay, has 19 research and development centers that research food qualities like chip crispness. Some companies patent the processes they use to create a proprietary chip texture and crunch.
3. Food coloring can trick you into tasting more flavorsThe color of a food can influence its taste. When you see a red fruit snack or a pink yogurt, your brain expects a certain type of flavor – and that expectation can affect how you experience it. Food companies know that, which is why many artificially flavored strawberry products also contain artificial red color.
Studies consistently show that people expect more intense flavors from foods with intense colors. Research found that added food coloring can increase the perception of sweetness by as much as 10%.
When margarine was first introduced in the late 1800s, it was white. Sales increased when manufacturers started using yellow food dye to make it look more like butter – to the dismay of dairy producers, who successfully lobbied some states for “anti-color laws.”
4. Cheese puffs are designed to disappear in your mouthLight, airy snacks like cheese puffs are made to melt in your mouth. That isn’t just for texture and taste – it can actually short circuit the signals your body uses to tell you you’re full.
When food like a Cheeto dissolves quickly in your mouth, your brain doesn’t always have enough time to recognize that you’ve eaten food. The result is that you don’t experience a sense of fullness and you’re more likely to keep snacking.
This disappearing act is backed by science. A range of studies have found strategies that slow down eating speed can reduce appetite and overall calorie intake.
Don’t let the food industry fool youThe food industry’s priority is to sell products, not support public health.
This has experts asking whether it’s time to treat UPF like tobacco. But the federal government has failed to take any policy action to protect public health.
States are stepping in to fill the gaps. In recent years, dozens have proposed or enacted stricter food chemical laws. California took on ultra-processed foods directly with a landmark law to remove the most harmful UPF from schools. State lawmakers are now considering creating a non-UPF certification to help shoppers make more informed choices at the grocery store.
Until the federal government adopts food policies that put our health first, there are a few steps you can take to avoid UPF and the marketing ploys that promote them.
One approach is to look past colors and other creative marketing to check ingredient lists and nutrition facts on the back of the package. Look to avoid longer lists of ingredients, including artificial colors and flavors, that you probably wouldn’t find in a home kitchen.
Take a look at EWG’s Food Scores, which provides ratings for more than 150,000 foods and drinks based on nutrition, ingredients and processing concerns. Food Scores also flags unhealthy UPF and can help with identifying healthier alternatives.
Shoppers on the go can also use EWG’s Healthy Living™ app.
Finally, follow Fed UP! – a new coalition of scientists, researchers and public health advocates dedicated to exposing the harms of UPF and showing how our food system shapes our health.
Areas of Focus Food & Water Food Ultra-Processed Foods Family Health Food Chemicals Authors Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN August 6, 2026Podcast: 2026 Quarterly Newswrap | April– June Edition
La Via Campesina’s Quarterly Podcast returns for its second edition of 2026, looking back on April–June, from the memory of Eldorado do Carajás to renewed resistance across continents.
The post Podcast: 2026 Quarterly Newswrap | April– June Edition appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
Inside the nearly 5-month labor lockout at an Indiana refinery
Jessica Skalka, 37, rounded the corner of a homemade bar in her dad’s garage, passing a framed collage of cutout newspaper clips marking the end of the 99-day strike at British Petroleum’s Whiting, Indiana, refinery in 2015. A row of championship banners for the Chicago Cubs, Bears and White Sox hung high across one wall, while a light-up “Donnie’s Man Cave” sign glowed nearby. An air conditioner hummed in the corner in the Northwest Indiana home as the first July heatwave pushed outdoor temperatures into the mid-90s.
She picked an empty blue-and-orange Bears-themed bucket from the counter, shook it, and asked, “No candy today?”
“Yeah, well, I’m not working right now,” said Donald Skalka, 62, from across the garage.
The empty candy bucket was yet another reminder of how much life had changed over the past few months. Until mid-March, father and daughter worked at BP’s sprawling plant in Whiting, Indiana, the largest inland oil refinery in North America, located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, a half-hour drive from downtown Chicago.
The BP Whiting refinery as seen in March. The facility produces approximately 440,000 barrels of crude oil every day. Erin Hooley / AP PhotoThere, Donald had spent nearly two decades working his way up to a job in the control room, where he monitored the refinery’s operations from behind a bank of screens. The plant processed approximately 440,000 barrels of crude oil every day, and Donald kept the electricity and steam-generating machinery at the plant running. Donald’s son worked there, too, as did Jessica, and Donald’s longtime girlfriend, Renee Pleitner, whom he met during his onboarding and is a third-generation refinery worker.
For the last four months, the Skalkas, Pleitner, and approximately 800 other workers represented by United Steelworkers Local 7-1, or USW, have been locked out of the refinery without pay and with no clear indication of when they’ll return to work.
Unlike strikes, in which unionized workers advocate for themselves by refusing to work, lockouts are employer-initiated. During a lockout, management can prevent workers from returning to their jobs to withhold wages. Lockouts are generally seen as a hardline tactic during labor disputes and tend to be rare, especially in the refining business, which requires continuous production and a highly skilled workforce.
Now, longtime refinery workers worry Big Oil is experimenting with a new playbook to break union power, undermine national collective bargaining, and remake its workforce. They also worry that the dispute could have ripple effects far beyond the picket line and threaten not only workers and their families, but the health and safety of the surrounding community — a concern due to four flaring events, a fire, and a major power outage in just four months.
USW Local 7-1 member Alan Leon pickets outside the Whiting refinery in July. Leon is one of 800 unionized BP workers currently locked out of their jobs. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times.BP began negotiating with the union in early January ahead of the previous contract’s expiration at the end of the month. But two months into discussions, after 98 percent of USW Local 7-1 members voted to reject what the fossil fuel company called its last, best, and final offer, it issued a lockout order. The proposal would have frozen wages, weakened safety protections, eliminated jobs, and expanded the use of artificial intelligence to monitor employees, according to the union.
In an emailed statement to Grist, BP objected to the union’s characterization of its demands. “Our proposals are not unique or novel,” wrote BP spokesperson Cesar Rodriguez. “Most of what we are seeking has already been tested and implemented elsewhere.”
The lockout also “allowed for a safe and orderly transition of operations,” Cesar said. The union’s 24-hour notice requirement to strike and disrupt refinery operations “presented safety and operational risk,” BP wrote in an earlier statement, and necessitated a continuity plan.
Oil companies have had a banner year following the onset of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil have all reported record-setting profits, making more than $36 billion over the past three months. This week, BP announced quarterly profits of $5.7 billion, more than double the previous quarter.
For Skalka, the March email notifying him that he wouldn’t be returning to work until further notice was gutting.
“The gamut of emotions when I had to face my family, it was a lot,” he said.
From left: USW Local 7-1 members Don Skalka, daughter Jessica Skalka, and girlfriend Renee Pleitner stand outside their home in Munster, Indiana. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-TimesSkalka had inspired his children to follow in his footsteps. Born and raised in the northwest corner of Indiana, known for its concentration of factories, steel mills, and refineries, most of his family had worked at industrial facilities. His father worked at cement factories and later built parts for the nearby steel mills. An uncle was a shipbuilder on the East Side of Chicago. He followed suit. After spending a few years working on the railroads, he took a job at Whiting.
He was eventually entrusted with an important role at the refinery. From the control room, he was responsible for identifying broken pumps, mechanical hiccups, and mystery leaks, all of which, if not caught in time, could mean a major fire or a multimillion-dollar headache for BP. Accidents and outages can also spike regional gasoline prices. A power interruption at the facility in April led to gas prices surging regionally by 40 to 80 cents per gallon.
Read Next New research shows there’s a simple way to protect workers. Is OSHA listening? Frida Garza“There’s a little bit of danger to it,” he said. “When you swipe in with your time card, you have to bring your A game.”
All the same, he loved the job — and his daughter noticed.
It was an exciting, breakneck-paced lifestyle, and the pay was good. She peppered her dad with questions, applied, took a qualifying test, passed, and eventually earned a spot. Donald Skalka Jr., Skalka’s son, spent approximately a decade working at a nearby steel mill. When an opportunity at the refinery came up a year and a half ago, he took it. It was a decision his father encouraged.
“He’s one of the 800 like the rest of us, and he’s going, ‘Dad, I don’t know if I should’ve listened to you.’ Well, I didn’t know at the time that was going to happen,” Skalka said. “At the time, on paper, everything seemed better; you’re trying to have a better quality of life.”
USW Local 7-1 member Don Skalka looks at photos related to his organizing framed at his home in Munster, Indiana. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-TimesThe lockout has reshaped his home life in other ways too. Jessica found temporary work. Her brother returned to a job at the mill. Donald and Renee are holding out, living on a budget that keeps shrinking. Besides leaving the candy bowl in the garage empty, they’ve swapped cable for streaming and are using rabbit-ear antennas for free local channels. They also paid their utility bills months in advance to avoid a power shutoff in the future.
“You get rid of the non-essentials right away,” Skalka said. “The thermostat stays higher, there’s less in the grocery cart, you don’t eat out obviously hardly at all anymore,
Most days they take it easy. They pass the time filling poster boards with pictures of good times on the picket line this year and during previous standoffs. Sometimes, they visit Jessica’s home, which has a pool — otherwise they picket. Among Skalka’s picketing duties is bus driver; he pilots the union’s second-hand minibus, a stout, white vehicle, shuttling picketing union members between four different entrances. Union members have been assigned shifts to protest — four shifts a day, four protesters a shift. The schedule has allowed workers to find other employment and extend their ability to hold out during the lockout.
Donald goes on his off days too, when Pleitner is on the schedule, and she does the same for him. “We just kind of make it a family event,” Skalka said.
By now, he’s used to the new routine. What he’s still wrapping his head around is a new, more aggressive tack from his employer — one that has pushed his family, friends, and coworkers to their limits. In recent months, the company and the union have blamed the other for alleged altercations. USW workers have filed police reports in two instances involving picketers who allegedly ended up pinned beneath a car. And the BP spokesperson alleged that union members committed unlawful acts. The tension has been building for months.
“This time it seems they’re in a union-breaking mode,” he said, “They’re following a playbook.”
A “fat cat” sits at a USW Local 7-1 picket site outside the BP Whiting refinery in July. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-TimesUnion leaders trace the origins of BP’s strategy to Texas. In 2021, ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest oil and gas company, locked out approximately 650 unionized workers from its Beaumont, Texas, refinery when they rejected a “last, best, and final offer,” which would have frozen wages and ended some union seniority rights. At the time, the Beaumont workers were already operating outside the framework of the National Oil Bargaining Program, a national effort dating back to the 1960s to negotiate industry-wide standards for wages, health care, and workplace safety. Today, the program covers about 30,000 refinery employees across two-thirds of the nation’s refining capacity.
The program exerts leverage by aligning approximately 200 refinery bargaining units around the same contract timelines, preventing unions from being pitted against each other, and establishing a national standard. Without that collective leverage, the Beaumont refinery workers were at a disadvantage. The Texas lockout lasted 10 months and ended in March 2022. When workers returned to their jobs, they did so under a weaker contract that gave Exxon authority over all job assignments, stripping the union of its previous role in determining a quarter of them. In the course of the 10-month lockout, approximately 20 percent of workers left the refinery for good.
According to Eric Schultz, president of the USW Local 7-1, BP hired the architect of the Exxon negotiations, Jordan Marcks, as a director of employees and labor relations, while that lockout was ongoing. Schultz sees similarities between BP’s proposal and Exxon’s plan for the Texas refinery. For one, BP is pushing a contract term that would put the Whiting refinery out of step with the National Oil Bargaining Program. It is also looking to eliminate jobs and union oversight.
“They obviously liked that playbook,” he said. “They’re trying to bring that flavor up here to Northwest Indiana,” Schultz added.
When reached for comment about Marcks’ employment history and alleged tactics, the BP spokesperson said the company “does not comment on personnel matters.” Marcks did not respond to a request for comment.
USW Local 7-1 members picket outside the BP refinery. Unionized workers have been assigned shifts to picket. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-TimesBP has brought in an unknown number of temporary workers — some from as far away as Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas — to replace the locked-out workers, according to Schultz. They’re being paid handsomely. Union wages run on average at about $54 per hour, but a union spokesperson said the new workers are being paid up to $127 an hour plus benefits for a six-month stint.
BP did not comment on how many temporary workers it’s currently contracting at the Whiting refinery. “Compensation is a personnel matter, and BP typically does not comment on personnel matters,” said Rodriguez.
Mike Smith, the chair of the National Oil Bargaining for the United Steelworkers, said it’s not totally clear yet whether the lockouts reflect a new tack for Big Oil. “Whether this is an individual’s idea who happens to have been involved in both of those lockouts, or if this is a strategy — that’s still to be determined,” he said.
Union members have been taking turns to picket, allowing them to find other work while the fight with BP plays out. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-TimesWith the workers locked out, the squat union hall has transformed into an all-hours crisis center. Makeshift shelves in a corner carry everything from simple groceries like canned food and pasta to diapers and baby formula. The formula and diapers are typically the first to go, according to Michelle O’Shaughnessy, a union member who has been helping run the improvised pantry since the lockout started.
A lot of the goods available for union members on a daily basis are there thanks to community donations. Amazon boxes arrive daily. So too do notes of support from across the country. The brother of a retired Whiting USW member mailed in a $20 bill all the way from Arizona to contribute to the strike funds.
The local community has also rallied behind the refinery workers. “We have some faithful restaurants who are very good to us,” O’Shaughnessy said. Beggars Pizza in Whiting has been dropping off 10 pizzas to the union hall every Monday, as do Aurelios of Hammond on Tuesdays and Center Lounge, which has been bringing in meals on Wednesdays.
Union members can also get help filling out unemployment applications at the center. The union has a strike fund that helps pay some bills, but members do not receive cash payments or salaries. Other organizations have also stepped up to assist with mortgage payments and help apply for SNAP benefits.
A check-in table at the USW Local 7-1 office in Whiting in July. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-TimesLast month, Hammond Mayor Tom McDermott announced he was returning $20,000 in BP sponsorship money for the local Festival of the Lakes celebration. Not long after, Pierogi Fest in Whiting announced they would also return BP’s sponsorship money and set up donation boxes throughout the festival to collect funds for members to pay their bills. And the Lake County Council and Lake County Board of Commissioners passed resolutions announcing their support for the locked-out workers.
The backlash against BP is far from local. State treasurers from Illinois, California, Colorado, and Connecticut signed onto a letter in April urging BP’s Chief Executive Officer, Meg O’Neill, to consider the national implications of the ongoing lockout. “The costs of prolonged disruption will not be contained within this dispute,” the letter said. “They will be borne by households, workers, and communities across the country, including those that sustain BP’s long-term presence and success in the U.S.”
While the fight plays out, Skalka is hunkering down, preparing for a long road back to work. He’s not sure if he’ll get to put his BP uniform on next month or in three months. What he does know is that he, his family, his nearly 800 USW brothers and sisters, and the rest of Northwest Indiana are determined to win.
“We’re still going to keep living our lives; it’s not gonna deter the hardworking people in Northwest Indiana,” Skalka said. “They’ve got a good fight on their hands, and we’re gonna give it to them.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the nearly 5-month labor lockout at an Indiana refinery on Aug 6, 2026.
In a first, Utah got more power from solar than any other source
Utah’s solar generation eclipsed all other electricity sources for the first time ever in May, the culmination of a slow but steady years-long shift away from coal. Energy experts are calling it a win for the environment and the state’s economy.
Photovoltaic panels in Utah produced nearly 1 terawatt hour in May 2026. That represented nearly a third of all electricity generated in the state that month, according to data from Ember, a global energy think tank. Natural gas generated 32 percent, coal generated 28 percent, and wind 2 percent.
“The trend of more and more solar in Utah is wonderful news for air quality, it’s wonderful news for the climate, and it’s wonderful news for jobs and the economy,” said Dan Schroeder, a physics professor at Weber State University who regularly checks energy data.
Schroeder attributes the trend to several large solar farms coming online in recent years. The 2,500-acre Green River Energy Center in the central part of the state became operational this spring, and includes 400 megawatts of solar generation and 400 megawatts of battery storage. Excelsior Energy Capital’s Faraday Solar project in Utah County, the state’s second-largest county, started providing up to 685 megawatts for the Meta data center there last fall. The Elektron Solar Project, an 80-megawatt photovoltaic farm, began sending electricity to Salt Lake City, Park City, and Summit County in June 2024.
Solar also supports nearly 8,000 jobs in Utah, according to the latest information from the Solar Energy Industries Association. The state is home to 132 solar companies, including 54 solar developers and 23 solar manufacturers. Investors committed $1.5 billion to Utah’s solar market in 2025 alone.
Oil and gas extraction, by comparison, accounted for 1,291 jobs in the state in 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coal mining accounted for 1,059 in 2023, the most recent year the bureau has data for that industry. Utah had another 1,905 jobs in coal and petroleum product manufacturing last year.
The rise of solar power has helped the state wean itself off a dependence on coal. In 2017, coal generated between 64 percent and 78 percent of electricity in Utah, depending on the month. By 2023, it started accounting for less than half of the state’s power sources in certain times of the year. This spring, it was less than a third.
(function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})();Electricity generation is complicated, however, and solar won’t represent a third of Utah’s portfolio every month. But with its sunny, dry climate, “Utah still has room to grow its solar percentage,” Schroeder said.
He pointed to California, which saw nearly 51 percent of its electricity generation come from solar panels in May, the most recent month that Ember has data — showing Utah has much more room to grow.
“We’re going to see milestones like this increasingly happen,” said Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and energy analyst with Utah Clean Energy.
About 51 percent of the new utility-scale electricity generation added to the country’s grid is expected to come from solar this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The country is likely to add another 43.4 gigawatts of solar, 24.3 gigawatts of battery storage, and 11.8 gigawatts of new wind power in 2026, compared to just 6.3 gigawatts of natural gas generation and zero new coal capacity.
Some of Utah’s electricity gets exported to other states, and some of its solar farms serve a single customer, like the project in Utah County that has a contract with Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.
Mitchell pulled the numbers from the state’s largest electricity provider, PacifiCorp, which is the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power. Turns out, another renewable energy source has seen a surge in generation in the region — wind power.
Wind blew past all other energy sources in PacifiCorp’s portfolio for Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho in December and January for the first time, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“Wind plus solar is on a tear right now,” Mitchell said. “We may have achieved liftoff.”
Read Next Here’s how offshore wind helped New England beat record heat Maria GallucciAnd the two power sources complement each other, Mitchell said, since wind generation is highest in the winter months, and solar produces the most electricity in the summer.
Most of PacifiCorp’s wind generation comes from facilities in Wyoming, according to Jona Whitesides, a spokesperson with Rocky Mountain Power. He said the recent sweep in wind power likely comes from the company’s investment in new turbines, including 400 megawatts added to the grid last fall at PacifiCorp’s Rock Creek II facility.
“A lot of days we are using more wind,” Whitesides said. “There are no fuel costs there; it’s essentially free.”
The Trump administration is phasing out tax incentives for wind and solar projects, however, calling them “expensive and unreliable.” But renewables combined with battery storage increasingly produce some of the cheapest, cleanest, and most consistent energy sources in the country, Mitchell said, and are not subject to the price spikes and uncertainty brought by global politics. What’s more, burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, which is mostly composed of methane, creates pollution and contributes to a warming planet.
Mitchell said he keeps a running list of the ways a warming West is hurting Utahns at home. A record-hot spring followed by a cold snap caused fruit farmers to lose their crops, for example. Utah also saw virtually zero snowpack over the winter, setting the stage for an explosively bad wildfire season and uncertainty about the state’s future water supply. Emergency room visits from tick bites are also on the rise in the West, Axios reports, as milder winters and earlier onset of warm temperatures help the insects thrive.
“In order to reduce those impacts in the future, we need to be reducing our emissions,” Mitchell said. “And we need to be doing it faster.”
Still, the shift in priorities at the federal level caused PacifiCorp to abandon plans to build more wind and solar projects in the next two decades, according to its latest Integrated Resource Plan update. The pivot has earned the utility criticism from renewable advocates like Utah Clean Energy.
Whitesides called the plan a “snapshot in time” that is constantly revised depending on energy costs, along with federal and state policies.
“It didn’t make financial sense to move forward with new renewable resources at this given time,” Whitesides said. “In two years, we could have a different administration. It may bring back more renewables.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a first, Utah got more power from solar than any other source on Aug 6, 2026.
Ecology to an Anarchist Beat
From Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin to Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin, and André Gorz: the anarchist tradition understands ecology not as top-down conservation, but as a practice of cohabitation. Simon Guyomard and Édouard Jourdain trace this overlooked lineage through to today’s ZADs and Rojava, and ask what it means to inhabit the world without dominating it.
Although a consensus is forming as to the necessity of an ecological approach, ecology has been politically neutered and, in many cases, appropriated by state and commercial worldviews. As a result, there is an urgent need to reexamine the critical traditions that have theorised the relationship between nature and society, not as a matter of management or expertise, but as a fundamentally political question.
Among these traditions, anarchism’s unique contribution is often overlooked. Yet it was one of the first approaches to think about human emancipation and the preservation of the environment as two inextricable dimensions of the same societal project. This link can be traced back to the very first formulations of anarchist thought in the nineteenth century.
Anarchism thus enables us to think about ecology in a different way: not as top-down conservation policy, but as a founding practice of cohabitation, in which questions of power, ways of inhabiting the world, and the legitimacy of authority play out.
Ecology without mastersFrom the very early stages of Europe’s industrial revolution, radical criticisms were made of the effects of industrial civilisation on the environment and on human beings. Utopian socialists like Charles Fourier were quick to critique the ravages of capitalism on nature. Dominant socialist lines of thought, particularly Marxism, did not dwell on ecological issues.
It was the anarchists who developed the first real arguments connecting the conditions of emancipation to the preservation of the environment. While this crucial conception can be read into the works of the early anarchist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, the true theoretical foundations of the convergence of anarchy and ecology were laid by two anarchist geographers towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) was a French geographer exiled as a Communard. He was the author of the monumental Nouvelle géographie universelle (1875–1894) (published in English as The Universal Geography) and L’Homme et la Terre (1905–1908). Reclus’s geography and anarchism were intrinsically linked: understanding human societies, he believed, required an understanding of how they fit into their natural environment. This led him to develop the concept of mesology, which took account of the settings in which various organisms interact.
Anarchism was one of the first approaches to think about human emancipation and the preservation of the environment as two inextricable dimensions of the same societal project.
His magnum opus L’Homme et la Terre is considered one of the first formulations of political ecology avant la lettre. Reclus could already see the ravages of industrial agriculture and of capitalism on environmental balances. The quality of human life, he wrote, depends on our societal choices regarding the earth: “The truly civilised man, understanding that his own interests are bound up in the common interest and with that of nature itself, acts in a completely different fashion. He repairs the damage committed by his predecessors, helps the earth rather than brutally attacking it, and works to beautify as well as improve his land … Having become both ‘the conscience and consciousness of the earth’, the man who is worthy of this mission thus takes on a share of responsibility for the harmony and beauty of the nature that surrounds him.”1
Reclus’s concept of the relation between humans and the environment was thus inseparable from an ideal of social justice. Being aware of the interconnected nature of different forms of domination, he was also a vegetarian and a feminist. His influence was later rediscovered by the libertarian ecologists of the 1970s, who saw him as their forerunner.
At the same time, the Russian prince-turned-anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was developing a naturalistic approach to social theory. Like Reclus, Kropotkin was a geographer by training and had explored Siberia. He was struck by the cooperation he observed in nature. In 1902, he published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, a work of popular science in which he opposed the Social Darwinism of his time. Kropotkin highlighted the importance of cooperation and mutual aid in the animal and human worlds, seeing it as a natural law just as fundamental as laws of competition.
For Kropotkin, the spontaneous cooperation in nature acted as the empirical foundation of anarchism: if mutual assistance was a factor in evolution, he reasoned, then libertarian social structures founded on voluntary association and mutual aid were not only moral, but in accordance with human nature.
Kropotkin not only transposed natural laws onto society but also developed a critique of nineteenth-century industrial centralisation. In Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899), he suggested decentralising production by combining agriculture and industry at the local level, in order to reduce the waste and alienation resulting from large-scale capitalist industry. Foreshadowing modern ecological ideas, Kropotkin advocated for a society made up of a collection of autonomous communities that satisfied their own needs in a sustainable manner, by integrating agricultural and manufacturing work, and returning to local short supply chains.
These two writers are among the figureheads of a tradition which was remarkable among other socialist schools of thought from the middle of the nineteenth century for the way it integrated ecology into a revolutionary perspective.2 These anarchists focused primarily on practical interdependencies, which led them to see nature not as a trove of resources to be exploited but as a collection of human habitats integral to how societies worked. Rather than an anthropocentric vision of dominating nature through reason, the anarchists espoused an ethics of cohabitation, with politics rooted in ecosystems themselves.
Their radical rejection of the state, understood as a hierarchical structure of seizure, standardisation and separation, went hand-in-hand with an early critique of modern land management, authoritarian planning, and government. They saw the state as a rapacious power that destroyed the organic forms of human societies and their relationships to their surroundings. This political approach to land led them to imagine forms of ecological federalism, where each community would adapt to its own ecological conditions, as opposed to an administrative universalism that ignored the diversity of environments.
Another link between anarchists and political ecology is in their relationship to technology. Rather than a promethean fascination with mechanisation, the anarchists had a warier attitude influenced by direct experience of the alienation of workers and the dispossession of artisans. By railing against all-out productivism, they differentiated themselves from the mainstream forms of socialism that, to varying degrees, conflated human liberation with an indefinite increase in the ability to transform the material world.
Anarchism valued a frugal lifestyle, technological autonomy and self-sustainability uncoupled from the quantitative obsession with growth. The relationship between early anarchism and science was also different to the technocratic instrumentalism that prevailed in a certain strain of Marxism: rather than relying on a single foundational body of knowledge, they favoured a vernacular epistemology, including practical know-how and sensory understanding, rejecting academic science’s claims to a cognitive monopoly.
The anarchist conception of history thus differed fundamentally from linear historical materialism, in which the progress of productive forces was the key to historical development. Anarchists rejected the idea of an arrow of time leading inevitably from ancient to modern: for them, history was full of forks in the road, about-turns and situations in which the old and the new coexist. This refusal of teleological temporality opened up the possibility of an ecological conception of time, sensitive to cycles, rhythms, and regenerations.
From the 1890s to the 1910s, activists advocated for changing our way of life away from industrial capitalism: return to the land, nudity, healthy eating, etc. This movement, referred to as anarcho-naturism, gained some popularity among individualist anarchists during the Belle Epoque. In France, a grouping of libertarians known as “les naturiens” coalesced around publications such as Le Naturien, in which theorists such as Henri Zisly and Georges Butaud advocated for “deserting industrialism” and a radical return to the natural wild. Rejecting bourgeois conventions, they enthused about life in small rural communities, vegetarianism, and nudity, and denounced the modern city as artificial and corrupting.
In Spain, anarcho-naturalism was at the heart of the libertarian movement in the 1920s and 1930s. At the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (“the National Confederation of Labour”, CNT) in Zaragoza in 1936, just before the Spanish Revolution, the delegates even discussed the status of naturist communities in future society. Aware of the presence of many vegetarians and nudists among the Andalusian anarchist peasants, the CNT planned to allow these groups to live outside of industrialisation and to negotiate specific economic agreements with them. Many Spanish anarchist peasants had in-depth knowledge of their local environment, which they sought to preserve while also improving communal productivity, rejecting the brutal methods of capitalist agroindustry.3
In Mexico, libertarians such as Ricardo Flores Magón linked the fight for Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Liberty”, a popular slogan and the title of his 1916 play) to the protection of communal indigenous land from capitalist exploitation. In Argentina and Brazil, anarchists also took part in peasant demonstrations against excessive deforestation and land-grabbing by foreign companies.
Anarchists saw the state as a rapacious power that destroyed the organic forms of human societies and their relationships to their surroundings.
Peasant, vernacular, and insurrectionary ecology was not a knee-jerk conservative defence of the old ways, but rather a form of political innovation where the self-management of land, the pooling of resources, and the reclaiming of agricultural know-how were part of a broader conceptualisation of the ecological reshaping of the social world. As the anarchists got to grips with the ravages of capitalism and the exodus from the countryside, the ecological question was transplanted into the very structures of the towns and cities. As town planning began to emerge, the rejection of domination was connected with a reflection on spatial forms of liberty.
From municipalism to the ZADsFrom the 1950s onwards, early warning signs of the ecological crisis began to appear: chemical pollution, runaway urbanisation, nuclear threat, and more. Then, in 1962, the American writer Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a bestseller that denounced the destruction that pesticides wrought on nature. That same year, Murray Bookchin, an American militant anarchist, pseudonymously published Our Synthetic Environment, which attracted less attention, but offered a radical critique of industrial pollution and capitalist productivism. A worker-turned-teacher, Bookchin was one of the very first people to formulate a comprehensive ecological critique from a revolutionary perspective.
In a 1964 article, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”, Bookchin stated that ecological critique must form an integral part of social critique: the survival of humanity required a revolution to abolish not only capitalism, but also humanity’s domination of nature. His key idea, which he developed in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) and other works, was that the ecological crisis was rooted in society’s hierarchical and authoritarian structures. Thus, “what literally defines social ecology as ‘social’ is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems.”4 In other words, humanity’s domination of nature follows from the domination of humans over other humans.
In order to reach a balance between humans and their surroundings, Bookchin envisaged a society structured by cooperation between natural communities (i.e. communities not delineated by the state or a coercive political authority). This would be achieved through libertarian municipalism, in which the citizens of a community would control economic production in order to meet their basic needs and preserve the environment.
This idea led other anarchist thinkers to focus on the concept of regions. The American anarchist Peter Berg, for example, coined the term “bioregionalism”. This perspective was shared by all the libertarian thinkers engaging in political ecology (Jacques Ellul, Bernard Charbonneau, Ivan Illich, etc.), who “wanted to build, here and now, decentralised, self-administering, and self-governing societies on a human scale. Rather than a sudden, dramatic revolution, they wanted to establish a parallel structure of small, self-managing groups, brought together on an affinity model.”5
The degrowth movement that followed the publication of The Limits of Growth in 1972 also had strong libertarian underpinnings, theorised in the French context by André Gorz, who put forward a radical critique of the society of work and consumption. Gorz advocated for individual autonomy, which he saw in terms of self-determination of a sufficient standard of living, and warned against the appropriation of the ecological emergency by the state or companies in order to increase technocratic and capitalist domination. Today, figures such as Serge Latouche and Paul Ariès advocate for re-localisation, direct municipal democracy and the abolition of consumer society, positions that are very close to Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism or Kropotkin’s communalism.
In the 1960s and 1970s, an assortment of social experiments brought together libertarian ideals and ecological issues, via rural intentional communities such as Longo Maï in France and self-managing urban projects. These collectives rejected private property, settled on land where they practised organic agriculture, developed sustainable artisanal technologies, and lived outside of capitalist systems. At the same time, local environmental battles, especially over the Larzac, forged alliances between farmers, ecologists, and libertarians, and involved radically democratic forms of civil disobedience. This transnational dynamic sketched out the rudiments of a practical eco-anarchism, anchored in the land, defying state control, and inventing eco-technological, non-hierarchical forms of collective living.
The 2010s saw the emergence of the phenomenon of zones à défendre (“zones to defend”, ZADs), the most famous of which was in Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes from 2009 to 2018, in which wooded wetlands were occupied to prevent the construction of an airport. Within an alternative microsociety of around fifty dwellings spread over 1,600 hectares, the inhabitants of the ZAD organised themselves into horizontal communities of about a dozen people. Each established comprehensive self-management of the territory they occupied: decision-making general assemblies, temporary dwellings, collective farms, bakeries, and freely accessible workshops.
Many saw the ZAD as an enduring experiment in self-sufficient anti-capitalist society, emphasising collectivity, voluntary simplicity, and care for the earth. ZADs also took root in Sivens (against a planned dam), Bure (against a nuclear waste storage depot), and elsewhere. Each of these occupations was a concrete instantiation of the intersection of the ecological struggle (preserving wetlands, forests, etc.) and the anarchist project (inventing ways of living without the state or private property).6
Nevertheless, the ZADs were controversial even within the anarchist movement, as had sometimes been the case with the free communities in the nineteenth century: Is it realistic to seek to create spaces within territory that remains under state control? Would it not be better to concentrate on more comprehensive strategies to subvert capitalism? Such debates are also found throughout the ecologist movement, as demonstrated by the foundation of Extinction Rebellion in 2018, with anarchist tracts advocating for a break away from the state and the economic system in favour of local, self-managed solutions.
The collective Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings Collective, SLT) has struck out in a different direction, with a horizontal and protean organisation inspired by libertarianism. It was created in 2021 and became a household name in France after the widely reported demonstration in Sainte-Soline in March 2023. The SLT campaigns bring together anarchist militants and ecologists, forming common cause with local social struggles while seeking to disarm those responsible for the ecological catastrophe. The collective, which practices direct action and civil disobedience (occupation, sabotage, etc.), has hundreds of local committees, all of which are active in society with the support of trade unions, political parties, and environmental associations.7
Freedom is not something that is taken from the world, but is instead part of it, allowing unique forms of life to coexist in the long term without dominating one another.
The twenty-first century has other large-scale testing grounds for the eco-anarchist ideal, although we must be careful to understand the nuances of specific situations. One of the most notable is what has been attempted in Syrian Kurdistan. In 2012, the Kurdish population began to put in place a democratic confederalist system explicitly inspired by the ideas of Murray Bookchin. The autonomous cantons of Rojava have local assemblies, agricultural cooperatives, and egalitarian people’s militias. Their goal is to establish a feminist, ecological, and democratic society, without a nation-state, in extreme conditions. Despite war and blockades, Rojava has begun reforestation, permaculture and environmental education programmes, as well as measures to reduce dependence on oil; it has also created agricultural cooperatives, communal nature reserves, and renewable energy projects, all managed by grassroots communes.
Living without dominatingWhere classical Marxism(s) subordinate ecological questions to the development of productive forces, and liberalisms naturalise the exploitation of resources in the name of progress, some libertarian thinkers have constructed an integrated critique of social domination and our domination over nature. In opposition to anthropocentric and productivist ways of seeing the world, they have developed an ecopolitical vision of autonomy, combining social justice, rootedness, an ecosystem-wide focus and horizontal institutions.
But anarchism and ecology cannot be resolved into a stable synthesis, or one treated as a simple thematic addition to the other. Instead, the place where they meet is an essential locus of tension, in which the fundamental questions of political thought play out in ever-changing forms: What is a habitable world? How legitimate is authority? What structures are fair and just for whole ecosystems and enable living beings to live alongside one another?
The major theoretical advantage of anarchism is found in its close links with ecology, precisely because it prevents these questions being answered based on the standard categorisations of modern politics. As Baptiste Morizot indicates, “It is quite another matter: it is the call of the interdependences which indicate the limits to the range of possibilities that the human democratic collective can explore.”8
Neither the abstract individual of liberalism, nor the organic community of nationalism, nor even the teleological dialectic of Marxism, offers a sufficient foundation from which to operate. The standard tools of sovereignty, law and contracts cannot encompass the entire natural world. It is thus necessary to re-politicise materiality, treating it not merely as a simple natural constraint, but as an ontological framework of which human institutions are one modulation among others.
From this point of view, anarchism, which thinks about power as a contingent relationship, is particularly well-suited to thinking about ecological normativity. It is not a question of basing norms on nature (which would descend into authoritarian naturalism), nor of constructing yet another green doctrine, but rather of making ecology a pragmatics of the communal, of sufficiency. It is a radical critique of established forms of power, capable of opening up a fresh direction in which freedom is not something that is taken from the world, but is instead part of it, allowing unique forms of life to coexist in the long term without dominating one another.
This article first appeared in Esprit, published in cooperation with CAIRN International Edition. This English version is taken from Eurozine.
- Élisée Reclus, “De l’action humaine sur la géographie physique”, Revue des deux mondes, no. 54 (1864): 763, accessed December 3, 2025, https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/article-revue/de-laction-humaine-sur-la-geographie-physique/. ︎
- See Serge Audier, La Société écologique et ses ennemis: Pour une histoire alternative de l’émancipation (La Découverte, 2017). ︎
- See Chris Ealham, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (AK Press, 2010). ︎
- Murray Bookchin, “What is Social Ecology?” in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. M.E. Zimmerman (Prentice Hall, 1993), 354. ︎
- Patrick Chastenet, Les Racines libertaires de l’écologie politique (L’Échappée, 2023). ︎
- See Sylvaine Bulle, Irréductibles: Enquête sur des milieux de vie, de Bure à Notre-Dame-des-Landes (UGA Éditions, 2020); and Margot Verdier, Le Commun de l’autonomie: Une sociologie anarchiste de la ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Éditions du Croquant, 2021). ︎
- Juliette Piketty-Moine and Noé Sotto, ‘Les Soulèvements de la Terre: Reportage dans un comité local,’ Silence 528, no. 1 (2024): 38. doi:10.3917/sile.528.0038. ︎
- Baptiste Morizot, Ways of Being Alive, trans. Andrew Brown (Polity, 2022). ︎
Exploring a series of surprising sustainability barriers
URGENT ALERT: Stop Police Harassment and Intimidation in Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya
URGENT ALERT: Stop Police Harassment and Intimidation in Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya See statement by CEC
Yes to Life No to Mining calls for the immediate withdrawal of all police personnel from KasibuYes to Life No to Mining (YLNM), in solidarity with the barricading communities of Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya, strongly condemns the continued presence of the Philippine National Police (PNP) at the people’s anti-mining barricade in Barangay Paquet and calls for the immediate withdrawal of all police personnel from the area. We also call on the international community to echo these demands through their own statements of solidarity and by boosting the statements of those most impacted.
The Center for Environmental Concerns- Philippines describes the situation in their statement:
At around 11:00 AM on 5 August 2026, more than 30 PNP vehicles arrived at the community barricades in Kasibu under the leadership of Police Brigadier General Mariano C. Rodriguez, Regional Director of Police Regional Office 2, and PCOL Paul T. Bometivo, Provincial Director of the Nueva Vizcaya Provincial Police Office. According to local organization Alyansa ng Novo Vizcayano para sa Kalikasan (ANVIK), police officers demanded the removal of the barricades, claiming they were built on a municipal road. Residents maintained that the barricades stand on privately owned and titled land. Despite this, the PNP left seven armed police officers at the Paquet barricade while police units continued patrolling other barangays within the 4,456-hectare exploration area of North Luzon Mineral Resources Corporation (NLMRC).
YLNM affirms the people of Kasibu and all communities’ right to say no to extraction on their lands and territories!
Yes to Life No to Mining affirms the people of Kasibu and all communities’ right to say no to extraction on their lands and territories. Extractive projects cannot move forward without consent and we see this as representative of a larger pattern of extractive development enforced through militarized intervention against peaceful resistance.
Environmental defenders take action at great risk to themselves and must be protected from criminalization. These defenders took up barricades in the context of a justice system that has failed to protect the environment or listen to the people of Kasibu and Nueva Vizcaya more broadly. This police harassment is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern of intimidation that we, as members of the international community, denounce. We support the right of local Indigenous peoples and farming communities to determine what happens to their land, especially as mining interferes with local land uses and visions for livelihood.
This is not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of harassment
It is especially disturbing to hear of SLAPP suits filed against community leader Lei Jin Dugay and lawyers Atty. Edgardo Balgos and Atty. Fidel Santos for their advocacy work. These are overt attempts to intimidate those who question NLMRC’s activities.
We echo the calls of the CEC and call upon the PNP to immediately withdraw all police personnel from the community, cease all acts of harassment and intimidation, and respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples and residents of Kasibu. We likewise call on other government agencies to heed the long-standing demands of affected communities by suspending NLMRC’s exploration activities and reviewing the validity of its exploration permit.
Is your community, organization, or network interested in becoming a YLNM member? Would you like to know more about us? Please send an email enquiry to membership[at]yestolifenotomining.org
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