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For more than a decade, Sue “Seabird Sue” Schubel’s lifelike decoys have anchored a global seabird restoration effort built on “social attraction,” luring colony-nesting birds back to lost or safer habitats, a strategy that has aided about a third of the world’s seabird species, including some of the most endangered.

Resilient, self-reliant food systems. A new IPES-Food report says they’re key to addressing food price volatility amid rising geopolitical tensions.

CALGARY — A new report Demand as a Utility Resource from the Pembina Institute finds that demand-side management (DSM) programs are widely used across electricity systems to reduce peak demand and manage overall system costs by influencing...

Former US science envoy calls out Australia's push for gas, but is amazed that renewables have succeeded at all, given the wall of money arrayed against it.

The post “We’re afraid to make that transition:” Ex-Biden official goes toe-to-toe with big Australian gas players appeared first on Renew Economy.

Solar energy just provided more electricity in the United States than coal for the first time on record — marking a milestone for the rise of renewables in America. 

While gas and nuclear plants still lead the country’s energy mix, solar contributed 12.8 percent of the nation’s electrons in May, according to an analysis of government data by Ember, an energy think tank. Coal, meanwhile, provided just 12.2 percent. Just five years ago, solar was less than half of its current levels and coal was at 20 percent. 

“Overtaking coal for the first month on record shows just how far solar has come, from a niche contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of power in the U.S. electricity system,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember, in a press release. “From Texas to California, markets across the U.S. are betting on solar to meet rising power needs.”

The turnaround comes even as political headwinds have shifted against renewable energy. 

Last summer, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which rolled back enormous swaths of former President Joe Biden’s landmark climate change legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. And President Donald Trump has actively sought to hinder renewable energy development, even offering to pay at least one oil company $1 billion to stop building its offshore wind projects. 

The latest electricity data comes the same month that the Trump administration announced $700 million in funding for investments in the coal industry. It included money for what would be the country’s first new coal-fired power plants in 13 years — sourced from funds previously dedicated to reducing the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, not deepening it. 

“Today we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” said Trump, who campaigned on the coal-friendly slogan ‘dig, baby, dig.” 

Ember’s analysis found that coal generation in May was actually up slightly from April, when it hit an all-time low. Its share of the grid will also likely tick up in the summer, as cooling needs peak. But the steady downward trend over the last several years suggests that even all the president’s men might not be able to put the coal industry back together again. 

“Spending $700 million to bail out the coal industry is like throwing a lifeline to a ship that has already sunk,” Lena Moffitt, executive director of the environmental group Evergreen Action, told the Associated Press. Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association disagreed, telling the AP that coal generation helps shield consumers from the impacts of volatile energy prices and supply challenges exacerbated by AI.

Regardless of what coal does, experts believe the solar market will continue its upward march. While installations dropped in 2025 compared to 2024, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association, it still accounted for more than half of all newly installed electricity capacity. Even MAGA influencers are promoting it. 

“We’re going to just keep seeing more and more renewables brought onto the grid,” said Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy at the Sierra Club. “That’s good for people’s wallets, it’s good for their health, it’s good for the planet.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal on Jun 10, 2026.

Mayor Mamdani’s executive budget added $95.9 million in new money to build out pedestrian and bike greenways over the next five years — an infusion welcomed by advocates who nevertheless cautioned that the funds are not enough to fulfill New York’s growing need for car-free paths.

The city routinely takes more than a decade to roll out new greenways, which serve both as recreational spaces and key transportation corridors. When those greenways finally open, however, the city often allows them to slowly deteriorate by delaying or entirely foregoing basic maintenance, such as fixing sinkholes and repairing cracks.

“Projects that were funded many, many years ago, it takes such a long time to actually implement them,” said Hunter Armstrong, executive director of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. “We just cut the ribbon on a project a couple of weeks ago that was years in the works,” he added, referring to a project on Sunset Park’s waterfront.

Significantly, the new money for the Department of Transportation will pay for capital construction of greenways, which refers to projects that involve hardened infrastructure — not the usual paint and flimsy plastic bollards. The transportation-focused mayor also gave the agency some $200 million over the next four years to quickly build out bus and bike lanes and public realm upgrades as part of the Streets Master Plan.

Cycle of disrepair

Past mayors treated greenways as an afterthought and let crumbling sections languish, from the country’s first bicycle path on Ocean Parkway to the nation’s busiest one on the Hudson River Greenway.

This cycle of disrepair forces city leaders to spend costly political capital to fund overdue renovations, whose costs rise as conditions worsen over time. During those renovations, the Parks Department and DOT have repeatedly refused to repurpose excess car lanes for safe passage, and instead directed cyclists onto unsafe detours for months on end. New sections of greenway still require years to install.

For example, the city recently wrapped up a stretch of two-way bike paths along one mile of Brooklyn’s Third Avenue that took 14 years to finish – as long as it took to construct the Brooklyn Bridge in the 19th century. Another proposal has already broken that record: a two-way raised bike path on three blocks of Commercial Street in Greenpoint will finally break ground sometime in 2028 – 16 years after city officials identified the route for upgrades in 2012.

These projects, like a $217-million esplanade stretching for eight blocks along the East Midtown waterfront, carry sky-high price tags. “Unfortunately the cost of these projects does add up, so ideally there will be ways to efficiently and wisely spend this money,” said Armstrong.

The greenway bucks come as a $7.25 million federal grant for greenways is set to run out next year. Under Mayor Eric Adams, the city spent that grant on planning new routes across the five boroughs but never provided a timeline or funding for the proposals, which included paths along the Bronx’s Harlem River and the western Queens waterfront.

Federal grant money yielded this plan in 2023. to add 40 miles of greenways.

DOT said the new cash will help turn those proposals into reality. “This historic investment gives NYC DOT the largest budget in its history, including the biggest-ever funding pool for bus and bike projects,” agency spokesperson Vin Barone told Streetsblog. “That means more staff and additional capacity to deliver for all New Yorkers for years to come.”

Mamdani’s executive budget labels the new funds as “Bike Network Development 2030.” The money is dedicated to greenways now, but City Hall spokesperson Jeremy Edwards said the mayor could repurpose it for non-greenway bike lanes that are more immediately, pressing.

Still, the funding amounts to a small drop in the city’s $124.7 billion annual fiscal spending plan. The NYPD, by contrast, plans to spend nearly the same amount on overtime this summer alone, as Commissioner Jessica Tisch deploy cops on 12-hour shifts to patrol events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup and the celebrations around the United States’s 250th anniversary.

Capital woes

The Parks Department controls the majority of greenways and has its own $674-million pot of money for some longstanding greenway-related projects and spanning to mid-2034, according to agency rep Chris Clark.

But the agency does not have the staff and resources to realize its projects at a faster pace, according to the city’s greenspace advocates. Amid continuous budget cuts recent years, the agency hemorrhaged dozens of project managers, landscape architects and engineers.

“[These are] the very people who would be facilitating, if not spearheading, the capital projects that people want to see happen,” said Adam Ganser, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. “The agency has been somewhat notorious in their ability to do capital projects, but it’s hardly their fault when they don’t have the staffing to do them.”

For example, the East River Esplanade alone has a $358.4 million budget for its renovation, but it has been crumbling into the water for years. “The funding has been there for a long time, but the project just continues to languish with no leadership or urgency,” Ganser said. “They’re in a tough spot because they don’t have the resources to push forward the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have been advocated.”

Like other city agencies that perform capital work, Parks must submit new projects to an extensive design, procurement and construction process. This inevitably requires Parks to correspond and collaborate with other entities — such as DOT, ConEd and National Grid — whose infrastructural assets overlap with their own.

But most bureaucratic friction actually arises in the intermediate stage where Parks solicits and chooses third-party contractors to construct projects. This stage is layered with city and state regulations, whose architects originally designed them to prevent city leaders from corruptly favoring their cronies. In practice, these rules slow down routine work, a former senior Parks official argued.

“Procurement sucks. So much of it is out of the agency’s hands. It’s really hard to reform procurement on a simple agency level,” said Sam Biederman, who was the agency’s chief of staff during the late de Blasio administration and now runs a communications consultancy. “I get the point of not wanting this thing to be corrupt – I’m from Chicago – but the effect of all these decades and decades of laws … is to catastrophically slow down the procurement process.”

Former Mayor Eric Adams convened a task force to improve the capital process, and the new administration should look into reforms, and fund planning staff at Parks to be able to advance projects, according to Ganser.

“It is fixable and it would require both that the agency just decide that this is going to be their top priority… and then having the mayor and the administration focus on the procurement and capital process citywide,” he said.

Parks’s greenway repairs heavily rely on the goodwill of local elected officials to allocate their own discretionary funds for projects. In 2019, the agency finally began renovating a mile of the historic Ocean Parkway malls. That project cost more than $4 million over five years, after officials secured funds from then-Council Member Mark Treyger and Eric Adams, who was still Brooklyn’s borough president at the time.

The agency lacks the budget to maintain its vast portfolio of greenways, playgrounds, pools, boardwalks and miscellaneous greenery in a state of good repair, so officials have relied on lengthy and expensive capital projects rather than routine maintenance.

“Because the agency doesn’t have the money to maintain, it almost becomes part of a strategy,” Ganser said. “The only way they get these things repaired is if they become capital projects. It’s the most expensive way to do this. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The circumferential loops of Central Park and Prospect Park offer two vivid counterexamples. These drives are relatively well-maintained because they fall under the jurisdiction of DOT and its robust road resurfacing program — a legacy of those paths allowing car traffic until 2018, when former mayor Bill de Blasio banned motor vehicles from both.

Consequently, advocates have repeatedly urged the city to reassign greenway maintenance to DOT. Conversely, some advocates have argued for Parks to take over trimming greenery along DOT’s greenways, a task with which the latter agency has struggled.

The missing one percent

On the campaign trail, Mamdani vowed to increase Parks’s budget to one percent of the city’s overall spending plan, but he has allocated only around 0.55 percent, or $685.4 million, in his annual budget.

“I am going to take the mayor at his word that he is going to get to one percent in his first term,” said Ganser. “It’s a difficult budget year. At the same time, the Parks Department budget is a tiny fraction over the overall city budget, so there’s no reason we can’t make significant progress.”

The city should select a few projects to show how they can speed up implementation, said Jon Orcutt, a safe streets advocate and former DOT policy director under the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations. “Pick a couple of projects already in the pipeline… and try to make them models for speeding them up,” he said.

The city should finally link three existing greenways in southern Brooklyn, Ocean Parkway, Shore Parkway, and the Jamaica Bay Greenway, by installing a bikeway on overly-wide Neptune Avenue and the Cropsey Avenue bridge.

How about filling in this gap in southern Brooklyn’s greenway network?

“Let’s use some of the Mamdani political capital honeymoon period to finally connect these three routes that have sat there with this big gap in the middle since the time of Robert Moses,” Orcutt said.

• One reason why American roads are so deadly is that we let habitually bad drivers keep driving no matter how many wrecks they cause. (Everyone Is Welcome)
• One way to keep such drivers off the road is passive drunk driving detection technology that, if it detects alcohol on the driver’s breath, won’t let them start the car. A provision in the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill required all new cars to have it within five years. But now Congress might block its implementation. (Love of Place)
• A new Federal Transit Administration dashboard will measure how “family friendly” transit systems are. (Metro)
• Crowdsourcing can help cities find broken sidewalks and fix them. (Next City)
• An NYU study found that bike lanes increase bikeshare ridership, especially among riders over 60. (Planetizen)
• Beloved Chicago bike planner Riley O’Neil was killed by a truck driver while riding his bike when he swerved out of an unprotected bike lane to avoid being doored. (Tribune, Streetsblog Chicago)
• Austin businesses are preparing to relocate to make way for light rail construction (KVUE). But the project still faces financial headwinds even after it was cut back from 20 miles to 10 (Free Press).
• High-speed rail would generate billions of dollars in property tax revenue for Arlington and Fort Worth, Texas. (KERA)
• Portland transit agency TriMet could be entering a doom loop. (Willamette Week)
• Jersey City is doing 100 quick-build traffic safety projects, while Hoboken is creating 25 all-way stops (NJ.com). Famous for going nine years without a traffic death, Hoboken did it in part simply by using cheap plastic bollards to daylight intersections (Carscoops).
• Kansas City is beefing up transit service for the World Cup. (KCTV)
• Celebrities are popularizing bike dates in New York City. (Times)
• Yes, it is possible to move an entire apartment’s worth of furniture by bike. (streets.mn)
• Dentures, wedding gowns and an ankle bracelet are among the strangest things people left in an Uber over the past year. (Mashable)

Demand-side management (DSM) programs are widely used across electricity systems to reduce peak demand and manage overall system costs by influencing electricity consumption. As electricity demand grows and grids evolve, many jurisdictions are...

The Lock the Gate Alliance is calling on the NSW Government to act urgently on coal, after a new report from the NSW Net Zero Commission revealed that climate change could lead to 290,000 fewer jobs in NSW by 2070.

Australia's huge and growing fleet of home batteries are delivering "enormous benefits" to grid, even without being connected to VPPs, AEMO chief says.

The post Passive home batteries deliver “enormous benefits” to the grid, says AEMO – even if not orchestrated in VPPs appeared first on Renew Economy.

Malaysia infrastructure giant buys into one of the biggest solar and battery hybrids in Australia, with a view to making it even bigger to accommodate data centres.

The post Malaysia giant buys solar and battery project in coal country, with eye on data centres appeared first on Renew Economy.

Oil companies said project would capture 68 megatonnes of CO2 a year. Now that number has dropped to 16.

Source

Batteries – big, small and in-between – are "fundamentally changing" the electricity system – while also changing the outlook for AEMO's grid blueprint.

The post Big and small batteries “fundamentally changing” the grid, and its planning blueprint, says AEMO boss appeared first on Renew Economy.

Registered nurses and caregivers at Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding, Calif., will hold a strike vote and picket on Thursday, June 11, to protest management’s refusal to address patient care and safe staffing issues. Nurses and health care workers at Shasta Regional, a Prime Healthcare facility.

The world’s first undersea data centre has begun operating off the coast from Shanghai, powered by offshore wind and using seawater for cooling.

The post China opens world’s first undersea data centre, powered by offshore wind turbines appeared first on Renew Economy.

Australia has become the ultimate global testbed for decentralised energy. Indian energy tech giant Kimbal is leveraging this unique environment to deploy its Edge Intelligence platform.

The post The smart choice: How the energy transition made Australia the perfect option for this technology innovator appeared first on Renew Economy.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler

You have likely seen a headline like this: 62,000 people died from record-breaking heat in Europe:

link

It’s a striking number. It’s also not clear what it means. Is this the number of people killed by extreme heat? Or climate change’s contributions to the extreme heat? Or the number of deaths above what we would expect in a normal summer? Or something else.

This matters a lot. If we want to accurately communicate the impact of climate change on human mortality, we need to be precise about what we’re actually counting.

A graduate student and I just published a paper on this in GeoHealth (link), using heat-related mortality in Texas to demonstrate the issue. Here’s what we found.

the basic picture: a u-shaped curve

The relationship between daily average temperature and daily mortality is a U-shaped curve. The temperature at which the minimum number of deaths occur, often called the optimal temperature (abbreviated OT)1, is around 20°C (70°F) in most places. Mortality goes up as the temperature departs from the OT towards either hotter or colder temperatures.

This temperature-related mortality curve is calculated statistically by looking at how total (non-accidental) deaths vary with temperature. This produces curves like the one above.

By convention, the number of deaths occurring at the OT provides an estimate of the baseline (non-heat-related) deaths. At any other temperature, deaths above this baseline are assumed to be heat related.

For example, if there are 50 deaths on a day at the OT and 75 deaths at 10°C above the OT, we attribute the difference — 25 deaths — to heat.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s go over the different ways of quantifying heat-related mortality.

method 1: the optimal temperature method (OTM)

The most common approach in the scientific literature counts all deaths above the OT. In other words, for all days where the daily average temperature was above the OT, we calculate the heat-related deaths on those days and sum them. This gives us an estimate of the total number of heat-related deaths. The red shaded region in the plot below shows this graphically.

We will refer to this as the optimal temperature method (OTM).

That European headline of 62,000 deaths? That’s this method. The problem is that a lot of these heat-related deaths are occurring at temperatures like 75°F, 80°F, 85°F — temperatures that nobody would consider extreme. While the number of deaths on these days is small, those temperatures occur often, so they dominate the total number of heat-related deaths.

So most of what this method counts isn’t really about heatwaves or record-breaking temperatures. It’s just... summer. It also means that the CNN headline was wrong: most of those 62,000 deaths were not due to extreme temperatures and many of them would have occurred even if the summer had been mild.

For Texas, we estimate roughly 1,130 deaths per year (over 2010-2023) using this method — about 2.2% of all summer deaths.

method 2: the extreme heat method (XHM)

A more intuitive approach is to sum heat-related mortality occurring on days that are extremely hot — say, days above the 95th percentile daily average temperature threshold (the red shaded area in the plot below). This is a more direct metric for what the warmest temperatures are doing.

We will refer to this as the extreme heat method (XHM). Using this method for Texas, we estimate that extreme heat caused an average of 248 summertime deaths per year or about 0.5% of summertime deaths. This is much lower than the OTM because we’re not counting the large number of deaths that occur at moderately hot temperatures.

When we compare these numbers to the official death certificate numbers provided by the Texas Department of State Health Services — which counts cases where a medical examiner determined heat was the cause or a contributor to death — the agreement is good, at least in normal years. In extremely hot years like 2011 or 2023, the official death numbers appear to significantly undercount the true number.

comparison between heat-related deaths from the Extreme Heat Method (XHM) and the official number from the State of Texas (Official Deaths)

The overall agreement between the extreme heat method and the official count makes sense. A medical professional will only attribute a death to heat when the connection is unambiguous and extreme (e.g., a patient comes into the emergency room with core body temperature of 106°F). Such deaths will mainly occur on very hot days.

On the other hand, if someone has a heart attack when it’s 85°F outside, no medical examiner is going to attribute that to heat. The only way to see the impact of heat on such deaths is with a statistical analysis, so you don’t expect these to show up in the official count.

method 3: the excess death method — what climate change actually did

Neither of the first two methods answers the question most people actually want the answer to: how many people did climate change kill?

For that, we use what we refer to as the Excess Death Method (EDM). Our approach is to take today’s mortality risk curve (based on today’s population, today’s demographics, today’s level of adaptation to heat), but plug in the temperatures from a past period — in our analysis, we used 1950-1963.

This gives us an estimate of what today’s mortality would have been had we had temperatures of the mid-20th century. Then we subtract that from the same calculation using the present-day (2010-2023) temperatures. The difference is a measure of the deaths attributable to global warming.

For Texas, this comes out to roughly 900 additional deaths per year due to climate change that occurred since the 1950s, equal to 1.7% of summertime deaths. Using a typical value of a statistical life of $10 million, this corresponds to a value of $9 billion per year due to climate change, or about $300 per Texas resident.

why this matters

The optimal temperature method counts all deaths above the optimal temperature. It’s the most common method in the literature and produces the largest numbers. It’s not wrong, but you should remember that most of these deaths are occurring at mild temperatures that happen every year, so it’s not measuring the impact of “extreme heat” in any intuitive sense2.

The extreme heat method counts only deaths on genuinely hot days. It produces smaller numbers that align well with official death counts from the medical examiners. It’s the better proxy if you want to understand the impact of acute heatwaves.

The excess death method compares mortality in two periods with different climates, holding everything else constant. It’s the best answer to the question “how many people did global warming kill?” For Texas, it’s about 900 people per year or about 1.7% of summertime deaths.

The official numbers from death certificates are almost always lower than all three modeled estimates because it is genuinely hard to establish heat as a cause of death except in the clearest cases. They should be treated in most cases as a lower bound.

The different ways of counting mortality from heat are fundamentally answering different things. Using them interchangeably, or reporting one without specifying which method, creates confusion about the impacts of climate change on mortality.

Because of this, the field would benefit enormously from agreeing on standard metrics. Right now, if you read ten papers on heat mortality, you may be seeing estimates from ten different methods. Getting them standardized and clearly defined matters for accurately reporting the impacts of heat to the public and policymakers.

Our paper: “Quantifying Heat-Related Mortality in Texas: A Comparison of Methods,” published in GeoHealth. Read it here.

You can also watch a talk I gave at NCAR over this material.

If you’re a reporter who wants to do a story on this, email me.

related posts

I’ve written a bunch of other posts about mortality related to extreme heat & cold:

• How extreme heat kills you

• Unraveling the debate: Does heat or cold cause more deaths? Part 1

• Unraveling the debate: Does heat or cold cause more deaths? Part 2

• Adaptation to climate change will be an absolute nightmare

1 This temperature is also sometimes called the Minimum Mortality Temperature, abbreviated MMT.

2 This is also true of ‘cold-related mortality’. Most of those deaths are occurring at moderate temperatures just below the OT.

Over 55 GW of generation has cleared PJM’s interconnection queue process and 220 GW just entered its latest review cycle, writes Glen Thomas, president of the PJM Power Providers Group.

Media Advisory

For Immediate Release

The Bonn Setback or Bonn Fast track?

Unpacking what it takes to advance climate justice at Bonn 

Bonn, Germany— The climate crisis is often described as a crisis of emissions but it is also far more. With week one of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change intersessional negotiations (SB64) in Bonn, Germany underway, governments are now getting deeper into the nuances of negotiations on critical topics such as just transition, climate finance, adaptation, carbon markets and more. 

SB64 convenes at a moment when it is impossible to ignore the US-Israel led imperialist wars and genocide  happening outside the halls of the UNFCCC and its impact around the world. Communities are not only confronting escalating climate impacts but also abuses of militarisation, debt crises, economic instability, shrinking civic space, rising authoritarianism and the continued concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of states, corporations and financial actors. In this context climate negotiations are not politically neutral spaces but are shaped by the same neo-colonial, imperial, fossil fuel driven economic system  and the global inequalities that produced the climate crisis. Every major issue on the agenda for SB64– from  climate finance and adaptation to just transition,  mitigation and false solutions– reflects a broader struggle over rights, responsibility and the future of multilateralism.

Climate justice will not be delivered– at the UNFCCC or anywhere– through tiny tweaks to an unjust and failing global system. Real action requires the Global North to stop being the primary blockers of progress and instead get serious about delivering on its historical responsibility to do its fair share, protecting human rights and pay its long overdue climate debt. It requires transforming the structures that created the crisis and building pathways rooted in justice and equity to deliver on collective survival, dignity and liberation. The Bonn climate talks can either help deliver a setback or a fast track to climate justice. 

Join members of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ) as the Bonn climate talks kick off to hear more about what governments must deliver here in Bonn.

WHEN: Wednesday 10 June 2026, 11-11.30 CEST (UTC + 2) 

WHERE: Nairobi 4, Main building, Inside the World Conference Center and webcast here

WITH: 

• Meena Raman, Third World Network
• Leon Sealey-Huggins, War on Want
• Thomas Joseph Tsewenaldin, Indigenous Environmental Network
• Aleijn Reintegrado,  Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development
• Moderated by Rachitaa Gupta, Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice

CONTACT: dcj.comms@demandclimatejustice.org 

For more detail on DCJ’s demands across all topics on the agenda for Bonn, read  DCJ’s SB64 Position Paper– Advancing Climate Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

The post Media Advisory: The Bonn Setback or Bonn Fast track? appeared first on Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice.

by Derf Johnson “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” – Rahm Emmanuel Anyone with even a dab of political sense knows the benefits of a “crisis” in terms of accomplishing administration …

The post MEIC Challenges Trump’s “Energy Emergency” EO at Bull Mountain Mine appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.