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Socialists call for workers to have control over how society is run. Marx said it best: “Democracy is the road to socialism.” In that vein,...

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Today, Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary voted to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination to be U.S. Attorney General to the full Senate.

Stand Up America’s Managing Director of Policy & Political Affairs, Brett Edkins, issued the following statement on Blanche’s confirmation:

“Every Senate Judiciary Republican just endorsed Todd Blanche’s extreme agenda for the Department of Justice: politically motivated prosecutions of the president’s perceived enemies, defending and giving taxpayer-funded settlements to January 6th insurrectionists, burying the Epstein files, and shielding Trump and his family from the IRS.

“Now it’s up to the full Senate. Are there still Republicans willing to stand up to the president—willing to say they’re against weaponizing the Justice Department, against shielding Trump and his family from accountability, and against protecting predators in the Epstein files? The Senate doesn’t need unanimous courage to block Blanche—it needs a few Republicans willing to put country over party.”

This article How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

It was on the third day of the revolution that the mood changed. Once again, many thousands of Albanians had descended on Tirana’s central square after work. Once again, the speeches and banners were focused on stopping a wild and legally protected coastline from being razed for a luxury resort. But this time the vibe was tense. Some people had entered the crowd who were angry, screaming abuses and trying to set fire to the placards. 

Ilir Kaso, an artist and lecturer at Tirana University of Arts, stood nearby with his two daughters, aged 11 and seven. “My daughters were very frightened. My youngest asked to leave the protest, and so we did,” recalled Kaso. But as they emerged from the crowd, they found themselves facing what Kaso describes as “the flamingo group,” a collection of a hundred or so protesters wielding pink flamingo banners and a few pink polystyrene flamingos on poles. “‘Papa look, flamingos, let’s go there,’ said my youngest, and immediately I understood what we had to do.”

The flamingo group was a loose coalition of artists and environmental activists based in Tirana. The partnership had first formed more than a decade earlier under the banner of “Friends of Vjosa,” a movement to stop one of Europe’s last wild rivers from being splintered by 45 hydroelectric dams. Kaso became a part of what proved to be a very successful campaign. It birthed Europe’s first Wild River National Park, and on a personal level, it transformed Kaso’s art, pulling him away from abstraction and towards nature. He and his wife named their first daughter after the river.

When trucks and bulldozers suddenly rolled into a protected part of the river’s delta in late April, and started fencing off a large section of the coastline, the coalition quickly remobilized, meeting in person and via WhatsApp groups to work out how to stop the destruction. Kaso attended the first small protests along the fence line, photographing the flattening of ancient sand dunes where turtles nested, and the laying of concrete over wetlands that host hundreds of migratory bird species, many of them endangered.

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Kaso had followed but not posted in the WhatsApp debate over which bird should be the symbol of their campaign. The environmental activists wanted one of the more threatened species to be made prominent — the Dalmatian pelican, the Northern lapwing — but the artists had decided on the flamingo, an easily recognizable bird with an iconic color and shape. After seeing how the bird had become a refuge for his frightened children, Kaso quickly started tapping out a message in the chat.

“I wrote about what happened and how we could create somewhere stationary, a shelter where we flamingos can stay all together and bring in the children, to protect them but also to expand the good vibes,” he said. “Because children have such good energy, they don’t have doubts or traumas like us. And we cannot wait for this protest to be damaged and become violent. This bad energy is going to destroy everything. We have to fight this with good energy, but by going out of the crowd.”

Kaso had experience setting up a shelter like this. During the pandemic he had helped to open and run a community school for his daughters and other young children in his area. The experience had a profound effect on how he taught his art students. After the pandemic, he rejected rigid lesson plans and formulas to be more curious and open to their ideas. “The children taught me a lot,” he said with a smile.

The artists and activists in the WhatsApp chat immediately embraced Kaso’s idea. Not only was there a shared fear of violence derailing this uprising, but the surging size of the crowds was clearly straining families. Every evening, between the speeches on the square, messages were going out over the microphone about lost children who needed to be found. On the chat, artists started offering to bring coloring pens and run drawing sessions. The next day, 20 feet of paper was laid out beside the Pyramid of Tirana, a tree-lined landmark between the square where protesters gathered and the prime minister’s office that they marched to. It was instantly flooded with grateful parents and curious children.

The Children’s Corner during an evening of protest, Tirana, July 2026. (Trivet)

The Children’s Corner, as it is now called, has become an established feature of the revolution, entertaining children for approximately three hours every evening. On busy days, more than a hundred children will sit on the ground drawing their favorite birds, singing into megaphones, or playing with flamingo placards, while a dozen adults strive to monitor activities. It has become a hub not just for families but the flamingo group itself, who use the space to synchronize their chants, strategize about their movements, and pass out their pink foam placards to fellow revolutionaries.

Kaso describes the Children’s Corner as the sun of the protest, always radiating with light, fun and good vibes. And the flamingo group has taken on the role of dispersing those vibes to the rest of the protest. When a speech has been particularly aggressive or divisive, a flamingo parade will take flight, weaving into the crowd, and then chanting, drumming and dancing to relieve the tension. Then they will return to the Children’s Corner to recharge.

“The Children’s Corner is very important for keeping this protest peaceful,” Kaso said. “I think it is our most important weapon, like a Trojan horse, against the people who want to end this protest and make it a mess. It means the police cannot throw their gas and create aggressive situations. Also for the people — we are telling them we are here with our children and our families, so we have to be careful.” 

The space has triggered an outpouring of generous donations, though much has had to be turned away. Food from strangers was considered too risky, while taking money might give the impression this was a commercial childcare service. But offers of more coloring pens and art materials have always been readily accepted.

Not everyone has welcomed the corner though. Some have accused it of diluting the revolution, of reducing it to a kind of theater, while nationalist groups have taken exception to anything connected to the flamingos, screaming “we are eagles!” (Albania is literally called “land of the eagles” in Albanian, and its flag features a double-headed black eagle.) On particularly busy days, Kaso and other volunteers have had to form human chains to stop the surging crowds from accidentally trampling the children. But each time there has been a confrontation or danger, the corner community of flamingos and parents have collectively stepped in to diffuse it.

After some 60 days of continuous protest, featuring many hundreds of thousands of Albanians packed within a few square blocks, there has been remarkably little violence. Some eggs were thrown at the cars of politicians as they entered the nearby parliament building, and some windows were broken at a local police station after six egg-throwers were pepper-sprayed, arrested and held there before being released. 

With the help of art materials and studio space from NGOs and private donors, many hundreds of pink foam flamingo banners have been produced and handed out. In the city, they’ve started to function like a pride flag, a marker stuck outside bars and cafés to show solidarity with the revolution. “Most of the time we connect revolution to war and destruction and going back,” Kaso said, “but this is a big lesson for us about how we can think about a revolution. And the children are the most important part to teach us this.”

Corporate aggression backfires

Besjana Guri is tired. She started our interview by getting a date wrong by a decade and then laughing. The environmental activist has attended every day of the revolution so far, using a projector to screen rousing flamingo-themed videos on the wall of the prime minister’s office. “If you ever think of not going once, you feel you are betraying the protest. You have to go,” she said.

Guri co-led the award-winning campaign that turned the river Vjosa into a national park, and a year ago she founded Lumi (which means river in Albanian), a small organization focused on empowering women and children to protect their local environment. Two days before the Vjosa’s delta was turned into a construction site, Guri had been meeting with women in the nearby village of Zvërnec to discuss the threat to the region and organize a response.

The real flamingos, enjoying the shallow lagoons of Vjosa-Narta. (PPNEA)

The delta region where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea is mesmerizingly beautiful — a delicate tapestry of salt marshes, lagoons and forests. Known as Vjosa-Narta, the government awarded the coastal area full protection status in 2017. But over the last decade, as Prime Minister Edi Rama has cemented his grip over Albania’s politics, that protection has been stripped back and caveated to the point of being meaningless. 

In 2018, Vjosa-Narta’s protected status was downgraded to allow an old military base within it to become a (still unfinished) airport. “The airport was the tip of the iceberg,” said Xhemal Xherri, a project manager at Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, or PPNEA. “We always knew that somehow this airport would bring resorts to the area.”

Then in 2024, the law enforcing the protection was amended to allow the government to essentially overrule it if an opportunity was lucrative enough. A month later, Jared Kushner, son-in-law of the U.S. president, shared designs on Instagram for a huge luxury development along the coastline. Then in January of this year, the villagers in Zvërnec found themselves under virtual house arrest while Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, toured the area with a troupe of architects, business associates and security guards.

But when the trucks rolled into Vjosa-Narta in late April, it was still a shock. Albanian law required public consultations, an environmental assessment and various government permits to be awarded before construction could begin. The law no longer appeared to matter. Within a week, a coalition of environmental organizations had sent representatives to document the damage as access roads were crudely carved into the pristine coastline. A week after that came the first protest. 

By the time Guri and a hundred other activists and villagers had converged on the vast construction site, it had been enclosed by a fence which ran right into the sea. Watching them from the other side of the fence was one elderly security guard, and a few bored police officers. The men eventually agreed to open a gate and let the protesters inspect some of the damage. “They thought we were just ecoactivists, we were harmless,” Guri remembered.

Before the protest finished, some villagers insisted on toppling over a small section of the fence — a symbol of their disgust. For them, this was not just about land destruction but land ownership. Their community had lived on this coast for generations, yet the land had been sold to Kushner by a Florida-based real estate mogul with links to cocaine-trafficking and document forgery. Some families had spent 20 years in court battling over the ownership of the land, and despite there being no legal resolution, they were suddenly being denied access to it. For now though, the fence was flimsy. It could be pushed over using body weight alone. 

When the protesters returned the next Saturday, the fence and the whole mood was different. Now the barrier was concrete-based, and topped with thick curls of barbed wire. Looking through it were dozens of muscular private security guards, dressed all in black, faces obscured by sunglasses, baseball caps and masks. As the protesters marched along the fence they were shadowed by a column of police officers. “The feeling was not good,” Guri said. “It felt like there were terrorists here, people who wanted to scare and intimidate us.”

The first protest by the fenced-off construction site at Vjosa-Narta in May. (PPNEA)

It was during the protest on the third Saturday that the intimidation turned to violence. The protesters had marched along the barrier to the beach, and with the tide low, an area of sand had been exposed that was blocked only by barbed wire. A lone villager ignored the warnings of the guards and carefully stepped over it. He was instantly pounced upon by the men in black, who wrestled him to the ground, punched him in the face and dragged him away by his arms across the beach. Another masked guard then fired pepper spray into the angry crowd, blinding both the protesters and the strangely passive line of police officers between them.

Guri was not able to attend the protest that day, but like hundreds of thousands of others, she watched a video of the assault on social media a few hours later. “Everyone that saw that moment, it was really a feeling that they were the ones being dragged,” she said, her eyes closed. Online, the video was being paired with rallying songs and nationalist poetry, and it was spreading like wildfire, well beyond the networks of activists, artists and villagers who were attending the protests. By the next day, a poster was circulating alongside it, headlined “Albania is not for sale!” It called for a protest in Tirana’s central square at 6 p.m. that evening.

Kaso arrived at the protest early so he could take photographs as people arrived. “I was physically trembling when I saw this huge group of people approaching,” he recalled. “It was amazing. A mix of responsibility and euphoria. A feeling that another chapter is coming. I never imagined all these years of fighting for nature and the river could be so helpful.” Guri was late, after spending her Sunday in a village outside Tirana, then hitting heavy traffic. “When I got there, I saw — I cannot count how many people. But for sure 600 people and more. I haven’t seen a bigger protest in the last 10 years for an environmental issue,” she said.

Guri was so inspired she later spoke to the crowd: “I said it took us 10 years to protect the Vjosa river and finalize the national park, but if we continue like this, we will only need 10 days to cancel this project and save the Narta.” With the speeches wrapped up, and the protest coming to an end, a chant built up among the crowd: “See you tomorrow, tomorrow more.” The template for a revolution had been set. 

The flamingo group brings the prime minister a concrete birthday cake in Tirana in July. The sign on the top: “Long Prison Sentence For You!” (Trivet)

“The protest kept growing every day. For the first few weeks it was only growing. Not only ecoactivists but all types of people. And the majority was young people,” Guri said. “They came with banners and funny memes and interesting quotes. Then we added the element of the flamingos. That’s when the creativity began, and the creativity has really kept this protest alive.”

Building an anti-corruption revolution

Xhemal Xherri of PPNEA, along with all the activists I’ve spoken to, is adamant that the Flamingo Revolution has no leaders, that it is a spontaneous and amorphous movement featuring a patchwork of groups unified by a love of nature. The closest it comes to forming an agenda is when the crowd cheers or jeers after a speech. But PPNEA has been quietly instrumental in preparing the soil from which this revolution has bloomed, and building the relationships that could lead to its eventual success.

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PPNEA was the country’s first environmental organization, established as it was transitioning away from communist dictatorship in 1991. The group took the government to court over irregularities in the airport construction contracts (the case is ongoing), and has been organizing protests against the exploitation of Vjosa-Narta for years. As Albania’s politicians were voting in the law change that meant Kushner’s luxury resorts could turn from CGI dream to reality, a hundred PPNEA activists were protesting outside parliament to condemn them.

The day before the first protest outside the construction site, for which PPNEA brought in bus-loads of Tirana-based activists, the organization invited a delegation of EU diplomats to witness the destruction firsthand. A month later, a PPNEA representative was in Strasbourg, France as the European Parliament voted in a resolution condemning the change to Albania’s law on protected areas, and making its repeal a non-negotiable condition of Albania’s accession to the EU. 

Six Green members of the European Parliament then attended the protests in Tirana at the end of June, making stridently pro-revolution speeches that were adored by the crowds. Just days earlier, Prime Minister Rama had explained to a Euronews journalist how officials in his government were “fanatics of the EU faith” who would do “whatever it takes” to gain membership. The country has been seeking candidature and tirelessly negotiating its way into the bloc since 2009. 

Despite this powerful endorsement from the EU, the fanatical Rama has not softened his stance on the protesters. From the beginning he has dismissed their concerns as delusional, the product of a coordinated online disinformation campaign by Iran, which he claims has simultaneously targeted both Albania and Israel as the two countries deepen their diplomatic ties.

But for Xherri, the reason social media algorithms have been promoting the Flamingo Revolution is not because of foreign interference, but simply because everybody in the capital is going to the square and posting about it. This includes many Albanian social media influencers, who have been privately requesting briefings from PPNEA on Vjosa-Narta, and amplifying the organization’s posts to new audiences.

A flamingo parade moves through the crowd dispensing positive vibes in Tirana in July. (Trivet)

Construction of the resort has been quietly paused, and the barbed wire fence has been removed, but so far the government has conceded nothing. Even if Rama were to repeal the law change that triggered this revolt, and consign Kushner’s project to the dustbin of history, it is unlikely to be enough to placate the people now surging through the city every evening. As the crowds have grown, so too have their demands. Today the protesters are just as likely to chant for both Rama and the leader of the opposition to be put in jail for corruption, as they are to call for nature to be protected. 

Over the last few weeks, the numbers out protesting have stabilized, with a few thousand marching each week night, and the crowds ballooning again at the weekends, especially now that Albania’s sizable diaspora is returning to be a part of the revolution. The activists I talk to are all confident that the government will eventually yield, and the law will be repealed. 

But when it comes to winning wider political changes, Kaso references a so far isolated incident, early in the revolution, where a group of protesters spontaneously marched out of the city and blocked a highway leading to the country’s main airport for several hours. 

“The people have shown the prime minister how this protest can be escalated. Maybe one or two hundred people, which is nothing for this protest, could block the entrance of the highway which connects the city to the airport, and stay there for 24 hours, which is going to be a big loss for travel companies,” he said. “​​I don’t want to see everything escalate in a dangerous way, but if necessary we don’t only have to be creative in aesthetic ways — with posters and colors and children. We can do it in other ways.”

For now though, the flamingo group are continuing to power this protest with pink placards, good vibes and children drawing their favorite birds. And no matter what happens next, Kaso is happy. “For me the revolution has already been successful,” he said. “It’s already changed a lot. If tomorrow we are not going in the road anymore, I know very well that life in Albania is not going to be the same.”

This article How creativity — and children — have kept Albania’s revolution alive was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Heatwaves are becoming more likely and more intense due to climate change, impacting sources of power generation around the world as they work to meet increased demand.

When temperatures soared past 40C in parts of Europe in June and July 2026, nuclear reactors shuttered, gas plants’ efficiency fell, wind speeds dropped and electricity networks sagged.

Yet, while all types of electricity generation are affected variously by extreme heat, some commentators are quick to point the finger at “intermittent” wind and solar, while downplaying the impact on sources such as gas or nuclear power.

Extreme heat also drives up electricity demand, as people turn on air conditioning and fridges work harder. 

For example, in France, daily electricity demand rose by almost 20% during a two-week heatwave in June 2026. 

This often leads to an increase in power prices, as generation strains and demand rises, putting a premium on electricity. 

Below, Carbon Brief – amid a slew of misleading claims – explains how key power sources cope with extreme heat. 

• Nuclear
• Gas
• Wind
• Solar
• Storage

Nuclear

The impact of heatwaves on nuclear power generation is well documented, with a plethora of headlines often accompanying record temperatures in nations that rely on the technology. 

For example, around 70% of electricity is generated by nuclear power in France, leaving it vulnerable to the impacts of heatwaves. 

During the July 2026 heatwave, three of France’s 57 nuclear reactors had to shut down. Generation was reduced at another seven, causing an almost 9% dip in power production. 

(This is a well-known phenomenon – France has seen reductions in nuclear generation due to heatwaves in 2003, 2006, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025.)

A similar story is true across various countries in Europe. Low river levels on the Danube have hit nuclear reactors in Romania and Hungary this summer, while a Swiss nuclear reactor shuttered due to high river temperatures.

It is nuclear plants using river water to cool their reactors that are most significantly affected by heatwaves and droughts. These make up 14% of the global fleet. Around 60 of the world’s 440 reactors use once-through river cooling, of which eight are in France.

Nuclear power plants use fission to generate heat, which is used to create steam. This steam spins the blades of a turbine that is connected to a generator to create electricity. 

Following this process, the water is cooled to allow it to be recycled back through the system as steam again. Nuclear power plants generally use water from rivers or the sea to help cool and condense this steam. 

As such, when water temperatures rise due to a heatwave, their cooling capacity is reduced and the overall efficiency of the nuclear power station is affected. Similarly, if there is less water available due to drought, they cannot be cooled as effectively. 

Michael Tadrous, a researcher at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business in Canada, tells Carbon Brief that the “impact [of heatwaves] is real, but it is far smaller than many headlines suggest” and that the “effect [of heat] is gradual”. He adds: 

“Warmer intake water makes a reactor slightly less efficient. [But] even an extreme 15C rise in cooling-water temperature would cost a large reactor only about 6% of its output. 

“The real pressure point during a heatwave is usually legal rather than technical. Plants return their cooling water to the river a few degrees warmer than they drew it and the law limits how warm that water may be in order to protect aquatic life.” 

Henry Preston, a spokesperson for the industry body the World Nuclear Association, adds that reactor shutdowns due to high river temperatures are “typically an automatic response to comply with regulations to protect local ecosystems, rather than a technological fault”.

He notes that in some extreme heatwaves, these regulations are waived given the “essential need for electricity and taking a proportional approach to climate risks”. 

While nuclear power plants can generally return to standard operation quickly if they have been affected by high water temperatures, drought can cause a more significant impact. 

Preston tells Carbon Brief: 

“In contrast to high river temperatures, which can quickly return to acceptable levels once a heatwave passes, low river levels can persist for much longer, if drought conditions continue. As a result, low water levels may have a more prolonged impact on plant operations than elevated water temperatures.”

This is set to be the case in the current European drought, where multiple reactors in Hungary and Romania have shut down or reduced their output due to low water levels.

The Danube is not expected to return to normal water levels for “days or even weeks as no significant rainfall is forecast”, reported the Associated Press on 3 August 2026. It said this was “push[ing] some countries in eastern Europe to the brink of energy emergency”.

According to data company Montel, on Monday 3 August, around 2.44GW or 40% of south-east Europe’s nuclear capacity was offline due to drought in the Danube.

Similarly, on Monday, as much as 12% of the French nuclear fleet was offline due to heat-related reasons, although that had been expected to drop to 7% by Tuesday. 

While heatwaves and drought can produce significant short-term effects, their impact on the availability of nuclear power across a full year is generally minimal. 

On average, heatwaves cut annual nuclear generation by 0.6% between 2003 and 2022, according to a recent study that Tadrous co-authored.

He adds that, across the whole period studied, the only time a national nuclear fleet lost more than 1% of its nuclear power over a year to heat- and drought-related curtailments was France in 2003, which lost 1.3%. 

According to an article in Forbes, for every additional degree Celsius in temperature, a nuclear power plant loses around 0.6-1% in cycle efficiency. 

However, nuclear power’s exposure to heatwaves can prove particularly challenging given the large capacity of individual plants and the central role it plays in certain nations’ energy systems. 

For example, Romania’s only nuclear power plant, at Cernavodă, is responsible for 20% of the nation’s electricity generation. Therefore, the impact of low river levels in the Danube is having a particularly acute impact on Romania’s energy security.

To minimise the impact on both energy security and costs, governments and nuclear companies are looking at a range of solutions to adapt to heatwaves.

For example, French nuclear-plant operator EDF is looking at additional cooling towers for its sites that are the most exposed to the impacts of a warming climate, reported Bloomberg recently.

Tadrous says the nuclear power industry is already adapting to heatwaves that are “more frequent and more intense”, adding:  

“France’s river-cooled fleet lost 5.5 terawatt hours (TWh) of output to the 2003 heatwave. By 2022, one of the most severe heat-and-drought summers on record, losses had fallen to 0.5TWh, a reduction of roughly 90%, as utilities upgraded cooling systems, refined operating practices and scheduled maintenance around periods of extreme heat.” 

There remain challenges for adapting nuclear power – and the wider electricity systems in which it sits – to heatwaves. However, Tadrous notes that this is less about “technical feasibility than of economic prioritisation and timely implementation”. 

Gas

Gas power plants have a reputation for being reliable and able to switch on at any moment, sometimes referred to as “firm, dispatchable” capacity.

Yet, as a type of thermal generation, they are subject to many of the same stresses during heatwaves as nuclear power. 

An article by the science advocacy organisation Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) notes that the “purported ability of gas plants to be available at all times to generate electricity, particularly when the grid needs it most, is increasingly under scrutiny” due to heatwaves.

As a matter of physics, the efficiency of gas power plants drops as temperatures rise. At 40C, a gas-fired power station can expect its capacity to be reduced by 13% and its efficiency by 7% compared to when running at 20C, according to Electric Insights. 

Dr Iain Staffell, associate professor in sustainable energy at Imperial College London, tells Carbon Brief: 

“Simple gas turbines (the kind which turn on rapidly to meet peak demand) are hit harder [than solar, for example], with their power output falling by about 10% per 10C.”

(He adds that the transmission system struggles more than electricity generation during high temperature. Power line capacity can fall by up to 16% for a 10C rise in temperature, according to a report for the UK government.)

Several types of gas power plants require cooling as part of their process, including gas steam and combined cycle turbines (CCGTs). They usually rely on nearby bodies of water for this. 

Additionally, as the UCS article notes, hot air has a lower density than cool air. As gas CCGTs rely on burning a mix of gas and air, this lower density means air takes up more space, leaving less room for gas. 

Ultimately, this means that when the air is hot, gas power plants cannot generate as much electricity as normal. 

These effects are not just theoretical. For example, across two nights in August 2020, there were rolling blackouts in California, US, as demand exceeded supply amid a heatwave.

While a number of factors contributed to the blackouts, gas plants made up around 79% of the capacity that dropped off the system on 14 August and a similar share the following day.

Amid record-breaking heat in summer 2026, gas power plants have also seen their capacity cut in the UK, France and other countries.

Dr Staffell adds that gas power stations are thought of as “reliable, because of the way we use them” in the UK. 

Whereas  wind and solar are usually used to the maximum extent possible, he says that on average, only around 40% of the gas fleet is in use at any one time. As such, even if the efficiency of one gas power plant is affected by high temperatures, “we have a lot of slack to call on more of them to run”. He adds: 

“The issue is less that they can’t deliver, but we have to pay through the nose to persuade more to turn on at critical times, adding to sky-high energy bills.”

Wind

The impact of heatwaves on wind generation is less direct than for other technologies. 

However, wind speeds often drop during heatwaves, which tend to build during periods of sustained high pressure into extreme events such as “heat domes”. 

Dr Staffell, explains to Carbon Brief: 

“The very hottest days tend to create heat domes with very low wind speeds, which directly reduces the output that windfarms can produce. Air is also less dense the hotter it is, so it carries less energy within it, so there is a double impact on wind turbines.”

High temperatures are linked to low wind speeds across three-quarters of the globe, according to one recent study, looking at data from 1980 to 2023. 

The study found that, as a result, across Australia, northern Asia and Europe, wind power decreased by an average of 30-50% during heatwaves. 

This is inconsistent globally, however, with the Amazon, the Great Plains in North America and central Africa actually seeing a slight increase in wind during high temperatures.

As such, while the effect of heatwaves on wind generation is less direct than other generation technologies, it can have a significant impact. 

In the UK in June 2026, wind generation fell to around 15% of the electricity mix due to low wind speeds, from an average for the month of about 30%, according to Octopus. 

Low wind generation during this period was a key feature of the strain on the grid experienced during this time – in particular, as demand rose amid record-high temperatures. 

On Wednesday 24 June, for example, the National Electricity System Operator (Neso) had to pay high prices to balance supply and demand. This included paying as much as £1,400 a megawatt-hour to secure around 1.7 gigawatts (GW) of imported power, nearly 20 times the average price for electricity in June 2025. 

A Neso spokesperson said in a statement: “This is due to the impact of extremely high temperatures affecting Great Britain and the continent, and low wind.”

While reduced wind generation is common during a heatwave, it is not generally viewed as a concern for energy system operators. This is due to wind following well-established seasonal patterns – it generates less power in summer than in winter – as well as being complementary to other renewable technologies, such as solar. 

Dr Chris Rosslowe, senior energy analyst for Europe at Ember, tells Carbon Brief: 

“Power systems are less reliant on wind power in the summer months and its lower-than-average output is already expected and planned for. Heatwaves often bring still, but clear conditions, highlighting the benefit of wind and solar as a duo – poor conditions for one often mean good conditions for the other.”

As such, wind power remains one of very few technologies considered “resilient” to heatwaves by the UK government.

However, this did not stop the anti-renewables Daily Mail from attempting to blame the technology for strain on the UK grid on 24 June 2026, despite its own article acknowledging that gas plants had also been forced to cut their output by 2.5GW on the day.

Solar

Another common claim seen in the media is that solar “struggles” during heatwaves, with high temperatures pushing down the technology’s efficiency. 

Yet heatwaves tend to coincide with long, cloudless days, when solar generation is reliably above average – despite the impact of high temperatures.

While hot weather does reduce the efficiency of solar cells, the effect is relatively modest – and widely understood. Each 1C of temperature rise reduces output by around 0.4-0.5%, according to a recent study. 

This is in line with an evidence review for the UK government, which suggests the performance of solar panels falls by 0.2-0.5% for every degree of heat above 25C.

Generally, however, this effect is easily outweighed by high sunlight hours during hot spells. For example, across a four-day heatwave in the UK in June 2026, solar generated 484 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity – a 46% increase over the same period a week earlier.  

Similar generation highs were seen across Europe, amid record temperatures and dangerous heat that was pushing people towards the use of air conditioning. 

Solar generated a record 52TWh across the EU in June 2026, beating the high set just the month before of 47TWh. 

In fact, solar – especially when combined with battery storage – is a complementary technology to air conditioning, given their similar seasonal patterns. Over the course of the day, demand from air conditioning and generation from solar also marry up well. 

Dr Rosslowe says: 

“Solar, battery storage and air conditioning are a highly complementary trio of technologies during heatwaves. There’s a high overlap between solar output and demand from AC.”

For example, on the hottest day of the year so far in Great Britain (the island grid serving England, Wales and Scotland), on 26 June 2026, solar surged to 13.9GW in the middle of the afternoon, as demand also hit its highest point, as shown in the chart below. 

Generation on the 26 June in Great Britain, highlighting the match between solar power (yellow) and the demand profile for electricity (blue line). Source: Neso.

Across June 2026, homes with solar panels generated the equivalent of five hours of “free” self-supplied air conditioning, according to recent analysis.  

Despite the impact of heat on solar efficiency, the technology is, therefore, well placed to bolster energy systems during heatwaves. 

Indeed, as Dr Rosslowe tells Carbon Brief, solar suppresses power prices during daylight hours. But, even though it is predictable, there are still challenges around managing the dip in solar generation as the evening sets in. This is often compounded because it coincides with the usual evening increase in demand. 

Dr Rosslowe explains: 

“Problems arise when the sun goes down, but demand for cooling remains high. In the early evening hours, when gas power typically ramps up to replace solar, we have seen prices spike to extreme levels, made worse by high international gas prices.”

Storage

Energy storage systems are increasingly key to managing the impact of heatwaves on electricity systems. 

The category of technologies is dominated by batteries, with more than 108GW of battery storage added in 2025 alone, according to the International Energy Agency. 

Already, batteries have been used to take advantage of surges in solar generation during the daytime, amid high summer temperatures. 

This is particularly useful to meet evening peaks in electricity demand, as well as the need for air conditioning overnight when temperatures do not fall. 

In a statement, Pawel Czyzak , Europe programme director at Ember, said: 

“Heatwaves will not go away – they will only get more severe in the future. Solutions that can help mitigate their impacts, such as battery storage, interconnection, demand flexibility and dynamic tariffs, should become a key part of grid planning and power market design.”

However, batteries are not without their challenges during heatwaves. Battery performance also decreases as temperatures exceed their optimal level. 

Additionally, high temperatures can accelerate the degradation of components in lithium-ion batteries, which dominate the sector. 

Analysis for the UK government found that prolonged operation at very high temperatures could – at least in theory – “overwhelm” the cooling systems built into batteries, “posing risks such as thermal runaway and explosions”. However, it noted that in practice, these cooling systems are “routinely” designed to handle temperatures of up to 45C.

(The analysis added that “developers and manufacturers have a strong understanding of risk to [battery storage systems] from high temperature and mitigate risks through regular maintenance, design improvements, and passive cooling strategies”.)

Other storage technologies also face challenges during heatwaves. For example, pumped hydro storage can be significantly impacted by drought.

Australia – which now has 4.3GW of large-scale battery storage capacity – saw its fleet of batteries and pumped hydro storage tested at the beginning of 2026, amid the most severe heatwave in years. 

Temperatures above 40C posed “challenges” to storage technologies, reported Energy Storage News, which explained that their output and operating times were reduced by the increased need for their cooling systems to operate. 

Despite these challenges, the use of battery storage is helping to spread the ability of renewables to meet electricity demand during heatwaves. For example, a combination of solar and battery energy storage “kept the lights on” in California amid a heatwave in 2024. 

By storing abundant power during the day, it can be discharged during evening peaks, helping to minimise generation constraints and thereby keep power prices down. 

Dr Rosslowe says: 

“The extreme price spikes that we witness during heatwaves are a blaring signal for more power system flexibility. That could come from battery storage, demand response, or increased interconnection between countries or regions.”

Related Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades 13.06.2025 Energy UK spending review 2025: Key climate and energy announcements 11.06.2025 Nuclear Q&A: How China is using nuclear power to reduce its carbon emissions 14.08.2023 China policy The Carbon Brief Profile: Russia 22.09.2022 Coal

The post Factcheck: How nuclear, gas, wind and solar power are affected during heatwaves appeared first on Carbon Brief.

In Pakistan’s Punjab province, the Chief Minister and Prime Minister recently inaugurated the Punjab Agriculture, Food and Drug Authority (PAFDA). The new agency is designed to bring food, agriculture, and drug testing under a single regulatory framework to strengthen food safety and export compliance.

One in five people in Pakistan suffer from foodborne illnesses every year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This is twice the global average and leads to an estimated productivity loss of US$1.7 billion annually. A paper published in Legal Research & Analysis points to fragmented regulatory authority as one major barrier to an effective food safety system in Pakistan. In Punjab, officials hope coordinated action under the new agency will make the food supply safer.

PAFDA is currently working to merge 23 laboratories, including food, agriculture, and health departments. They plan to collaborate closely with farmers, industry, and regulators to ensure services are practical and responsive. This includes expanding food and drug testing in areas where capabilities have been limited.

“Our focus will continue to remain on investing in our people,” Talat Naseer Pasha, Director General of PAFDA, tells Food Tank. “Our aim is to support compliance, not simply enforce standards.”

PAFDA aims to separate testing from enforcement, and to bring scientific analysis and conformance functions under one independent institution equipped with modern technology, says Pasha. They hope this transition will help them build regulatory credibility, improve compliance with international accreditation standards, and create shared infrastructure that supports exports and public health.

Pasha says that most exporters currently rely on advanced food, agriculture, and pharmaceutical testing outside of Pakistan. By making accredited testing available domestically, the agency aims to help businesses verify compliance with international standards more quickly and affordably. Local testing may also contribute to more effective policy. He believes the agency’s move towards an integrated regulatory framework can serve as a model for other regions in Pakistan.

For food safety and agricultural regulation, “PAFDA represents an important step towards an evidence-based system that can strengthen public health protection, improve regulatory enforcement, and promote confidence in trade,” Aleena Kokab, Senior Microbiology Scientist at at the agency, tells Food Tank.

The Food Testing Lab will analyze food products for safety, quality, and nutritional content to support accurate labeling and regulatory compliance. The Agriculture Testing Lab will assess agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and water quality. It will also conduct pesticide residue testing in food and water to strengthen food safety and support compliance with export standards.

A study in the journal Water finds that pesticide residues were detected in nearly all water samples collected from 15 of Punjab’s districts. The labs will examine pesticides and other contamination risks at various points in the food system, from farm inputs to end products.

As PAFDA builds its scientific workforce in Lahore, the agency is investing in a hostel for women scientists who are relocating or commuting from outside the city. “This is an important step in improving diversity and inclusion and in building the next generation of scientific leadership,” Pasha says.

Women make up around 70 percent of the agency’s scientists, and the hostel is intended to reduce barriers related to travel and housing.

“In localities like mine, talented women often step back from science due to safety concerns, long commutes, and lack of supportive living facilities,” PAFDA Food Scientist Manahil Zafar, who lives in a small district 350 kilometers outside of Lahore, tells Food Tank. “PAFDA’s women scientists’ hostel breaks these barriers by providing a secure environment where women can focus on their careers without compromise.”

Alongside the establishment of PAFDA comes the launch of Punjab’s Agriculture Lab on Wheels initiative, which will deploy mobile labs across 15 districts to provide real-time soil and water analyses. The Agriculture Department of the Government of Punjab hopes that bringing testing closer to farmers will allow them to quickly assess soil fertility and water quality, receive more timely guidance to inform crop-planning, and improve agricultural productivity.

The program will be supported by a central monitoring control room and 100 container-based facilitation centers staffed with advisers and equipped with digital tools for farmers. Mobile units will provide initial screening in rural areas, while PAFDA conducts confirmatory testing.

“PAFDA is still a young institution, but it represents a long-term investment in strengthening Punjab’s food and agriculture systems,” Pasha says. “Our hope is that it will contribute to safer food, stronger farmer livelihoods, and greater confidence in the quality of what Punjab produces.”

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

Photo courtesy of PAFDA

The post Pakistan’s Punjab Province Advances Food, Agriculture, and Drug Testing Under New Regulatory Authority appeared first on Food Tank.

We’re excited to announce that applications are now open for our November 16-21, 2026 National Native Community Organizing Training.

Apply Now

Our national trainings are for Native organizers and Tribal leaders committed to engaging our communities with organizing strategies guided by Inter-Tribal Indigenous values. The week-long gathering focuses on sharpening community organizing skills to build effective grassroots campaigns and movements to build power in our Native Nations and Native Communities. We will also focus on the changing political landscape and how we meet the challenges and opportunities before us.

The training will be held in Federal Way, Washington State. The cost of housing, transportation, and most meals will be covered by Native Organizers Alliance.

We are now accepting applications.

Apply Now

Participants spend time together envisioning how to mobilize community action to make change possible and strengthen sovereignty and self-determination.

• We explore how we have traditionally and historically used our traditional values to organize in our communities and how we continue to do so today.
• We discuss building political power for change and how Tribal and urban communities can challenge the power that denies our peoples’ inherent and sovereign rights.
• We share organizing tools and share knowledge gained from our teachings and life experiences.
• We learn from our rich history of Inter-Tribal cultural values of building community by using interactive sessions that are grounded in collective learning. And folks go home energized with a shared theory of change rooted in traditional Inter-Tribal Indigenous community building.

Our week-long, in-person Native Organizing Trainings are a part of our year-round efforts of growing a powerful ecosystem of Native leaders who will continue to build our collective community power.

We encourage Tribal and Native community leaders in rural, reservation, or urban communities — and the staff of Native nonprofits, service agencies, and Tribal entities — to apply.

Native Organizers Alliance is pleased to cover the cost of housing, transportation, and most meals. Participants are responsible for additional costs. Organizations, Tribal governments, groups, or individuals who can contribute to defraying the costs of this training will provide the opportunity to go beyond 30 participants.

The post Apply Now: National Organizing Training appeared first on Native Organizers Alliance.

Western Watersheds Project, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, on Wednesday filed a complaint in Montana Federal District Court against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for revoking American Prairie’s permits to graze bison on public lands in Montana. Revoking the permits conflicts with the plain language of controlling laws, and contradicts BLM’s own prior decisions.

In 2022, after completing a multi-year review finding that bison grazing is permissible on public lands and in fact would likely be better for prairie grasslands than cattle, BLM authorized American Prairie to graze bison on allotments. However, in a politically motivated reversal, over the course of just five months in 2026, BLM rescinded the bison permits under a brand new theory that a livestock owner must be a “production-oriented” entity, and did so without defining what that means.

“BLM’s new interpretation has no basis in law and contradicts its own findings,” said Pete Frost, attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “BLM reversed itself due to politics, not the law, nor the need to restore prairie grasslands.”

In fact, BLM’s 2026 decision directly contradicts its position in 2022, that reading a “production” requirement into federal law “would read words and requirements” into the law that don’t exist. Instead, at that time, BLM stated it can “issue permits to any stock owner.”

The BLM’s 2022 decision found that privately-owned bison are domestic livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act—a conclusion consistent with Montana state law, which treats American Prairie’s bison herd as “livestock,” by levying taxes and imposing disease testing requirements. Indeed, the U.S. Forest Service defines livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act as “…animals of any kind kept or raised for [any] use or pleasure.”

American Prairie has provided thousands of pounds of bison meat to area food banks and supplies bison to other entities for food, commercial, and cultural purposes.

“The Trump administration is kicking our national mammal off of public lands, and trying to replace bison—an ecological keystone of prairie ecosystems—with cattle which causes a huge amount of ecological damage,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “We’re heading to court to support the replacement of unnatural herds of cattle with the natural large herbivore of the Plains, the American bison. While we prefer bison to be managed as wild, free-ranging conservation herds, like American Prairie’s bison, if you’re going to raise an animal as livestock, bison are so much more ecologically appropriate than cattle that it would be a beneficial idea to convert all cattle grazing permits West-wide to bison.”

The political origins of the agency’s reversal are clear. As reported by Public Domain, the 2022 bison grazing decision was appealed by ranching groups represented by Karen Budd-Falen—now one of the highest ranking officials at the Department of Interior. Further, Sec. Burgum personally intervened to direct BLM to reconsider, ultimately producing the outcome Budd-Falen’s former clients sought.

Western Environmental Law Center and Western Watersheds Project pursued all available administrative remedies, and filed suit as a last resort to prevent the unlawful eviction of bison from these public lands.

Contacts:
Pete Frost, Western Environmental Law Center, 541-543-0018, frost@westernlaw.org
Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project, 307-399-7910, emolvar@westernwatersheds.org

The post Conservation groups to challenge Trump administration’s move to banish bison from public lands appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

Across the American West, working lands sit at the center of some of conservation’s greatest challenges. Grasslands face drought, floods, fragmented habitat, invasive species, wildfire, and...

Climate change is an extremely politically polarized topic in the United States, with Democrats generally concerned about human-caused climate change and Republicans more skeptical. But these familiar broad strokes hide both differences within parties and bipartisan agreement—as well as a broad, messy middle, according to a new analysis based on two decades of polling data.

“Americans are deeply divided on climate change, but the real story is much deeper than a simple Democrat-Republican split,” says Mayank Kejriwal of the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California.

Past studies have provided hints that other socio-demographic factors such as income, age, and education may also shape climate attitudes. But the new study employs a methodology that enabled researchers to assess a comprehensive set of factors at the same time to see where the fault lines truly lie.

Kejriwal and USC engineering graduate student Yidan Sun analyzed responses to an annual Gallup Poll survey that queried U.S. adults on various environmental topics from 2000 to 2020. They assessed climate attitudes and looked at how support for 14 different climate-related policy proposals varies both within and across parties.

As expected, party identification is the strongest factor influencing climate beliefs, the researchers found. The partisan divide on climate has long existed, but it deepened after Donald Trump was first elected to the presidency in 2016.  In the 2017 poll, climate concern jumped among Democrats and Independents like a collective eyebrow raise, while remaining at a flat, relatively low level among Republicans.

But people aren’t just blue or red, they’re individuals. And their opinions are shaped by more than just their political party, the researchers discovered when they dug into the influence of age, income, ethnicity, and education.

 

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“Climate opinion is polarized, but it is not uniform, and understanding those internal differences matters if we want to understand where public support for climate policy may grow,” says Kejriwal.

The biggest divide within the Republican party is by age. Republicans under age 35 are more likely than older Republicans to support renewable energy and oppose fossil fuel development.

Yet the devil is still in the details: Young Republicans might support renewable energy development, but they tend to oppose a carbon tax right along with their elder partisans. Meanwhile, young Democrats show high support for both policies.

In general, Republicans tend to be more open to technology- and market-oriented climate policies, suggesting that future climate communication efforts could frame policies in these terms rather than emphasizing regulations that are unpopular among conservatives.

Among Democrats, education is the most important factor shaping climate attitudes, with higher levels of education linked to greater support for various climate policies. Education moves Republican beliefs to a much lesser degree.

“One striking result was how consistently policy support depended on the design of the policy, not just on general concern about climate change,” says Kejriwal.

For example, policies to limit household energy use are unpopular across the political spectrum, in line with people’s general preference for climate carrots over sticks. And some policies like government investment in solar energy and development of alternative fuels enjoy broad support regardless of political party.

Another pattern seen across the political spectrum is inconsistency: a substantial proportion of Democrats (26.8%), Independents (42.6%), and Republicans (36.3%) alike fall into what the researchers call the “mixed middle”—people with complicated, sometimes contradictory views on climate, rather than pure skepticism or concern. Messages that link climate policies to economic or public health benefits could help sway this group, the researchers suggest.

Source: Sun Y. and M. Kejriwal. “Modeling complex associations between socio-demographic factors and climate policies using Conditional Inference Trees.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine (based on Adobe Stock/Julia)

The Cobbs Creek Park Ambassadors are a grassroots and volunteer-run West Philadelphia organization dedicated to transforming our local green spaces. Founded in 2018 by neighbors Rich Guffanti and Andrew Wheeler, the initiative grew from weekly cleanups into a dedicated network of volunteers who adopt and maintain specific sections of Cobbs Creek Park.

We’re proud to say that in 2026 alone, we’ve hosted 50+ cleanups, removed over 6,000 pounds of trash, and engaged hundreds of volunteers. Beyond picking up litter, we work to cultivate community pride and environmental stewardship. Through events like our annual Summer Festival, we bring hundreds of neighbors together to celebrate the park.

We invite you to join us in keeping Cobbs Creek Park beautiful because our park thrives when our community steps up to care for it. Ambassadors host cleanups every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and volunteers are welcome to attend whenever they can.

Upcoming cleanups:

*please use the registration form found on our website and monitor your inbox in case of a cancellation

• Wednesday, August 5, 8-9 a.m. at S 61st and Baltimore Ave.
• Sunday, August 9, 2-4 p.m. at Little Whitby Meadow
• Wednesday, August 12, 8-9 a.m. at S. 61st and Baltimore
• Sunday, August 16, 2-4 p.m. at Woodland Ave. and Cobbs Creek Parkway
• Wednesday, August 19, 8-9 a.m. at S. 61st & Baltimore
• Saturday, August 22, 9-11 a.m. at Mt. Moriah Cemetery and Cobbs Creek Parkway
• Sunday, August 23, 2-4 p.m. at Catharine St. and S. 63rd St.
• Wednesday, August 26, 8-9 a.m. at S. 61st and Baltimore

Please use the registration form found on our website and monitor your inbox in case of a cancellation

Additionally, our 4th annual Summer Festival is coming up on September 12 at Whitby Park from 11a.m. – 3 p.m. Join us for a bounce house, horseback riding, fishing lessons, a birding walk, free watermelon, and more! Thank you to Clean Air Council and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for financial support of this work. 

Email cobbscreekparkambassadors@gmail.com with questions or to join our listserv. Find us at cobbscreekparkambassadors.org and @cobbscreekambassadors.

The transition away from diesel in remote communities is widely supported and becoming increasingly more urgent in the face of growing energy needs, climate change, and volatile and rising costs. In recognition of these challenges, considerable...

In March, the world passed a major energy milestone, adding its third terawatt of solar power. Increasingly, poorer countries are leading the shift to solar, analysts say.

Read more on E360 →

As governments at the UN seek ways to prevent the US from unilaterally mining the deep ocean floor for critical minerals, the latest UN seabed talks launched “long” processes that would seek to challenge Washington’s approach.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body regulating the deep ocean floor, held annual three-week talks ending on Friday. The discussions come as the US – which is not a member country – moved forward in its unilateral deep-sea mining push, and as mining companies applying for American permits fought back a UN inquiry into their behaviour.

The Trump administration and mining frontrunners, among them Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC), want to mine a huge area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Although it holds deposits of mangenese, nickel and rare earths – key for military use and clean energy components – it is also an unexplored ecosystem with thousands of unnamed species.

The meeting, held at ISA headquarters in Jamaica’s capital Kingston, ended with no immediate breakthroughs. Instead, it started long processes that seeks to hold mining firms and the US accountable, according to ocean governance expert Pradeep Singh, from the Oceano Azul Foundation.

“It shows some level of maturity as well as understanding from member states that this is a long process that requires policy discussions that might not be resolved by acting right away without considerate thought” he said.

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Countries have begun consultations on whether to request an advisory opinion from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which would seek to clarify the legality of the US-issued permits in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and whether other states should recognise them.

The ISA will also move forward with an inquiry into its contractors, including The Metals Company (TMC). The company tried to prevent this inquiry by suing the ISA at the ITLOS for allegedly acting in bad faith, an argument that the world’s top maritime court rejected.

ISA secretary-general Letícia Carvalho said in her closing remarks that the past year “presented both significant challenges and noteworthy achievements”. Earlier in the talks, she said the agency’s role is “more important than ever” and that resources in the deep seabed are “the common heritage of humankind”.

Advisory opinion on legality of US mining push

Towards the end of the ISA assembly, Carvalho submitted a draft text to countries proposing they request an advisory opinion from the ITLOS, clarifying the legality of the US deep-sea mining push.

Brazilian oceanographer Letícia Carvalho is secretary-general of the ISA (Photo: IISD ENB/Andrés Felipe Carvajal Gómez)

The initiative proposed questions to the court, including whether international law backs the principle that the deep seafloor cannot be appropriated by any single country, and whether other governments should avoid recognising any similar effort.

Several nations including the African group, New Zealand, Norway, France, Singapore, Jamaica and Canada argued that while they could back such a proposal, it required careful legal consideration. Some regretted that the note was not sent earlier in the talks.

Russia and China backed the request for an advisory opinion. The Chinese delegation suggested asking whether unilateral actions by non-member states – such as the US – would break international law, and what the consequences of such actions would be.

Egypt seeks to unlock renewable potential to power regional clean energy hub

By the end of the talks there was no consensus on this proposal. The assembly decided instead to hold consultations led by Malta, and decide on whether to request an advisory opinion by next year’s meeting.

“They are not rushing into this,” Singh explained. “It also seems that they are not feeling immediately threatened at this stage, and that there are still some things that could be done to find a way forward and perhaps persuading the US from acting unilaterally.”

Growing call for deep-sea mining moratorium

Activists were also critical of the ISA deciding to renew one of TMC’s exploration licenses in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which expired last month. Haldis Helle, ocean campaigner at Greenpeace, said this was a “reward” for TMC despite “their clear disregard for international law”.

But Singh argued that the renewal was “not an endorsement to act unilaterally” but an effort from countries to make the “whole decision-making including the inquiry process robust”, without showing signs of any bias.

Instead, campaigners highlighted a growing call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, which seeks to halt all activity until enough scientific evidence can show that it is not harmful for marine wildlife. The initiative is now backed by 46 governments, with Mauritius, Mozamboque and the Republic of Congo becoming the latest supporters.

“The lesson from the past three weeks is clear: only a pause on exploitation, now backed by over a quarter of ISA member states, can deliver the legal certainty this moment demands and rein in a situation being driven out of control by a handful of reckless companies“, said Sofia Tsenikli, global campaign director at the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC).

The post Governments weigh response to US going alone on deep-sea mining appeared first on Climate Home News.

Headline News:

• “Tiger Shark Caught Off Massachusetts Could Be Sign Of Warming Waters” • Two brothers from Massachusetts caught a juvenile tiger shark from a beach on Cape Cod. The five-foot shark is far more common in such waters as the Caribbean. Scientists said its appearance off Cape Cod is an indicator that climate change is warming the sea. [ABC News]

Tiger shark (Albert kok, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped)

• “Extreme Heat Grips Southern Europe As France Shuts Nuclear Reactors” • Emergency services in Southern Europe are operating at peak capacity as severe heat and environmental hazards continue to trigger crises in Spain, France, and Greece. Extreme high temperatures in France forced nuclear operator EDF to take major reactors offline. [Euronews]
• “RWE Signs Google Oklahoma Solar PPA” • RWE and Google have signed a 15-year power purchase agreement covering the full output from the 155-MW Crooked Creek Solar project in McCurtain County, Oklahoma. RWE said that construction is scheduled to begin later this year, with commercial operation expected in 2028. [reNews]
• “England And Wales Record Driest July On Record, Met Office Says” • England and Wales recorded their driest July on record this year, according to the UK’s national weather agency. England had 10% of its usual rainfall. Southern England experienced its “driest month ever recorded” in July, the Met Office said, noting that records date back to 1836. [Euronews]
• “China Sets Green Power Usage Benchmarks” • China took a landmark step in its green transition with its first mandatory minimum usage target for renewable energy. Experts say the move represents a paradigm shift from supply-driven expansion to demand-led integration in the country’s pursuit of its carbon peak and neutrality goals. [China Daily Global Edition]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

What to know about the new wave of biotech beauty Anthony Lacey August 4, 2026

Cosmetics ingredients once discussed mostly in dermatology clinics, research labs or professional spas are now widely available. And biotechnology, or biotech, for personal care products is a rapidly growing part of the industry.

Biotech beauty is fueled by consumer demand for products that promise effective, “clinical,” “regenerative” and “science backed” results at home. These ingredients usually promise to be “anti-aging” or to provide “cellular repair” or “barrier strength.” 

But biotech ingredients do not automatically make a product safe, effective or well studied. For most products, premarket tests aren’t required and claims may be backed by very little data. Consumers should look beyond marketing claims and ask what evidence supports claims about an ingredient’s safety and benefits. 

Biotech in personal care products refers to ingredients inspired by biology, medicine or lab-based innovation. It’s not a single category and can include familiar skincare ingredients like hyaluronic acid and newer ingredients like polydeoxyribonucleotide, or PDRN, and spicules. 

Cosmetics using PDRN

You may have heard of “salmon facials” and skincare using “salmon sperm.” These treatments use DNA fragments from salmon sperm to help boost collagen and reduce signs of aging. 

The ingredient behind the buzz is PDRN, which activates tissue repair. Botanical versions are also emerging in the market. 

PDRN is not entirely new. For decades, it has been approved for medical use in Italy and South Korea, including as a treatment for wounds and ulcers. 

Cosmetics that contain PDRN are available in the U.S. too. But since the Food and Drug Administration does not require pre-marketing tests of ingredients, PDRN's presence on store shelves doesn’t indicate it’s been reviewed for safety or efficacy.

In lab studies, injected PDRN has been shown to increase collagen production, which helps smooth and firm the skin. 

Topical PDRN has been shown to support skin regeneration for skin ulcers. The data about undamaged skin is limited, but topical PDRN may not penetrate deeply enough for meaningful results. 

PDRN is believed to be a lower hazard ingredient, though there is no data on carcinogenicity or reproductive harm. An animal study showed no acute toxicity and no effects to major organs, even at high doses. 

PDRN from salmon sperm can be a concern for people allergic to salmon. If you have a fish allergy and want to try products with PDRN, look for plant-based instead.  

PDRN’s pathway is also used by certain types of tumors to grow and evade immune responses. So anyone with cancer or a history of cancer should consult their doctor before use, even though no evidence currently links topical PDRN to cancer.

It can be difficult to tell whether a product contains PDRN. Product marketing may highlight PDRN, but you won't find it on ingredient labels. Instead, look for the term “sodium DNA.” 

Cosmetics using spicules

“Liquid microneedling” is also gaining popularity. 

It’s a technology based on another biotech ingredient: spicules. These are tiny, needle-like structures from marine sponges or synthetically produced using silica. Liquid microneedling is a topical treatment that creates tiny openings in the skin, triggering collagen production and helping skincare penetrate more deeply. 

Spicules are promoted as a way to help other beauty product ingredients penetrate the skin, rather than the main active ingredient. They are often paired with ingredients like PDRN, peptides and hyaluronic acid.

The data is limited, but spicules are believed to be lower hazard ingredients. A bigger concern is the other ingredients in the same product.

Spicules can help some ingredients pass through the skin barrier, making some formulas more effective but also increasing risk of exposure to potentially harmful chemicals, like certain fragrance ingredients.  

If you’re reaching for a product with spicules, consider the safety of its other ingredients. By design, spicules affect the skin barrier and can cause redness, stinging or irritation, so they’re best avoided by people with sensitive skin, rosacea, eczema, active acne or a compromised skin barrier.

But it can be difficult to tell whether a product has spicules. Marketing may call out spicules, but ingredient labels won’t. Instead look for the term “hydrolyzed sponge” on the label. 

Tips for consumers

If you’re thinking about buying a biotech-inspired beauty product, consider these tips:

• Consult resources like EWG’s free searchable database of personal care products, Skin Deep®, to make more informed choices. Skin Deep considers increased absorption when scoring products.
• When you’re out shopping for cosmetics, you can also use EWG’s Healthy Living™ app to learn more about a product, its ingredients and safety.
• Look for products bearing the EWG Verified® mark, which means it is free from EWG's ingredients of concern and meets our strictest standards for your health. 
• If you have sensitive skin, talk to a dermatologist or patch-test the product before applying it more extensively.
• If you want to avoid animal-derived ingredients, beware vegan marketing claims and check ingredients carefully, since animal-derived ingredients may not always be obvious on the label. Look for full disclosure about ingredients. 

Areas of Focus Personal Care Products Cosmetics Family Health Women's Health Toxic Chemicals Guest Authors Lilianna Gross (EWG Verified® intern) August 4, 2026

When torrential rain doused the Texas Hill Country last month, Paul Welch stayed up past his bedtime checking radar and rain gauges on RiverHub, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s new tracking website. At midnight, comforted by what he saw, he went to bed. 

Four hours later, his phone rang. It was a neighbor, the same fellow who had awakened him the previous July, just before floodwaters swamped Welch’s riverfront cabin near Comfort. “Get up. Get out. Quick,” he said, speaking calmly into the phone. The water at Center Point, 4 miles upstream, had risen 25 feet as Welch slept. A wall of water was heading his way.

Welch and his partner, Elizabeth Hastings, could hardly believe it was happening again. This time, they knew what to do: Hastings tossed the guns, jewelry, paperwork, and medication into the Sprinter van and drove through the downpour to a gas station already crowded with vehicles. Welch moved his tractor, golf cart, and other essentials to higher ground, then joined his neighbors on the same high spot near the highway where they’d gathered the last time this happened. For the second time in 12 months, they watched water tear through the valley, roiling and churning with more power than Welch had ever seen.  

Water floods a street after heavy rain in Comfort, Texas, in July. Aaron E. Martinez / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

The next morning, as Welch and Hastings picked their way through the muck, his phone rang. It was Huntly Dantzler,  a volunteer who had helped them through last year’s catastrophe. “Paul, give me some good news,” he said. “I’ve got none to give,” Welch replied.

Gone was the $130,000 RV they’d lived in as they awaited construction of their dream house — into which Welch had already sunk $80,000. Gone were the new appliances that sat in his shop, still in bubble wrap. Gone were the 200-year-old cypress trees that had survived so much. “We cried and prayed over the phone,” Dantzler said.

Read Next One year after the Texas floods, home feels further away than ever Laura Mallonee

One year after several rivers and creeks in central Texas killed 139 people and spurred a statewide push to improve flood warnings, another historic storm tested those changes. This year’s disaster brought at least 12 inches of rain — and as much as 28 — to one dozen counties north and west of San Antonio and destroyed or damaged hundreds of buildings. Yet just three people died.

“Here we are a year later, but under incredibly different circumstances,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said at a July 20 press conference. “Last year when we were here, we were grieving. We were in a pall of human loss.”

Earlier forecasts, new warning systems, and a public primed by last year’s tragedies saved lives. But the catastrophe also exposed how much work remains, leaving many Texans counting on vigilance and neighbors when the water rises. 

A law enforcement officer prays during a joint hearing from the Texas Senate and Texas House on disaster preparedness and flooding following the natural disaster in the Texas Hill Country on July 4th. Scott Stephen Ball / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Many of those caught in this year’s flood were still mourning those who died in last year’s. The torrents that swept across the Hill Country then came with such speed and ferocity that many people were still asleep as the water crashed into their homes. The scale of the devastation, which included the deaths of 25 girls at Camp Mystic in Kerr County, shocked the nation. 

It also spurred action.

Legislative hearings and investigations revealed failures by Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority that exemplified weaknesses in the state’s flood-warning and emergency management systems. Among them, the county lacked outdoor sirens, even along the most vulnerable stretch of the Guadalupe, and the authority had deferred building the warning system it knew it needed after the state denied funding. The county never activated a federal emergency alert system capable of reaching nearly every cellphone in the area and delayed some local alerts while dispatchers sought supervisory approval. 

Those shortcomings became central to lawmakers’ push for a more robust warning system across flood-prone communities. During a special late-summer session, lawmakers passed four flood-response bills. Two strengthened safety and licensing requirements at youth camps. Another launched an effort to expand flood-warning systems in 30 counties by identifying flash flood–prone areas that need warning siren systems, including sensors and gauges. The last bill provided $50 million to buy them and another $24 million for a two-year project to dot the Hill Country with more rain gauges, radar, and forecasting tools. 

Twenty-nine of the 30 eligible counties had joined the warning-system program by early July. But much of it remained under development when the flooding started.

A flood gauge marks over 4 feet of water near downtown Comfort, Texas after heavy rain caused flooding in July. Aaron E. Martinez / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

The Upper Guadalupe River Authority was the first to act. Using $1 million drawn from its reserves, it placed six sirens on 50-foot poles in western Kerr County, home to many of the region’s youth camps and RV parks. It also added a weather station and river gauge at the Guadalupe’s headwaters to give earlier notice of rising water. The agency shares that data through RiverHub — the website Welch checked hours before the flood came.

Kerr County officials sent 59 local emergency text alerts and triggered three sirens before and during the storm. A company called River Sentry said a few of the 104 sirens it had installed for landowners along the river sounded automatically, as they were designed to. Local authorities also helped dozens of people evacuate ahead of the deluge.

At the July 20 press conference, Governor Greg Abbott and Kelly cited several reasons for the lower death toll, including a storm that moved more slowly, a community and public officials with greater vigilance after the previous year’s disaster, and warning systems installed in the months since.

The first two of those things may have mattered most. 

Unlike last year’s storm, this one was larger and easier to track. That gave forecasters a much clearer signal that dangerous flooding was possible, said Robert Mace, who leads the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. 

The National Weather Service used the same models and warning procedures it used in 2025, said Jason Runyen, warning coordination meteorologist at the agency’s Austin/San Antonio office. It simply began briefing emergency officials four days before the river peaked; last year, it did so less than 24 hours ahead of the disaster.

But it was the storm’s intensity that might have played the biggest role in minimizing fatalities, said state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon. Rain fell at a rate of 2 to 5 inches per hour, versus the 4 to 6 that fell last year, according to Weather Service data. That meant it took longer for the floodwaters to build up, giving people more time to evacuate, Nielsen-Gammon said.

A dog looks out the window of her a trailer on North Camp Street as floodwaters rise in Uvalde, Texas, in July. Sam Owens / San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images

Ryan J. Rock Logue, a Kerrville resident who led the United Cajun Navy’s relief efforts there last year, credits public awareness for minimizing fatalities. People checked on neighbors. They didn’t try driving through floodwaters. And they heeded calls to evacuate. “We were all on hypervigilant PTSD mode with this flood, so everyone was kind of hyperaware,” he said. 

Mark Rose is a former general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority, which oversees the lower Colorado River basin just north of the Guadalupe. He cautioned against drawing quick conclusions from the lower death toll. “Did we really do better because we know better and we’ve made institutional changes?” he said. “Or, did we just do better because last year we had a horrible flood that killed a bunch of people, and it’s now more on our mind? Those are the hard questions that all of the authorities should be asking and answering.”

The storm highlighted just how much of the state’s flood-warning network remains unfinished. Many counties included in last year’s disaster declaration still lack sirens, adequate stream gauges and other infrastructure. In eastern Kerr County, where Paul Welch and Elizabeth Hastings live, no sirens sounded even though their part of the Guadalupe flooded catastrophically last year. Kerr County plans to install 26 more sirens by next summer, but officials in Kerrville have estimated that a more thorough system with additional sirens, river gauges, and the like would cost at least $14 million — far more than the state’s $1 million allotment.

Tom Moser, a former NASA engineer, former Kerr County commissioner and leader of the team that’s establishing requirements for the county’s flood-warning system, said the state should fully fund such hardware up front. “There’s no reason, in my judgment, why a system like this couldn’t be put in place in probably less than six months,” he said. “We’ve seen enough emergencies and the impact of floods in the area that it ought to be full speed ahead.”

Kerr County officials did not respond to requests for comment. The governor has said the conversation is not over. 

“The systems we put in place last year proved to be successful and helpful,” Abbot said when asked during a press conference if the Legislature might provide more money for sirens. “We want to make sure we are equally successful and helpful in every region across the state of Texas. And those are the kinds of issues that we will take up in the next session.” 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott shows a signed major disaster declaration that he says he will send to President Donald Trump following a news conference about the state’s flood response in July. Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

It’s unclear how the system that officials have assembled so far would have stood up in a disaster more like last year’s storm and whether they would have resulted in a similar death toll. Too many homes, vacation rentals, and campgrounds remain in floodplains inundated both times.  “Not to be too macabre about it, but it’s possible that some of the people who died last year in their homes would have died in the flooding this year,” Nielsen-Gammon said.

But even the most expansive network of sirens won’t fully eliminate fatalities because they are reactive, Rose said. “With all due respect to those who think they have solved the problem by putting up a siren, in my opinion that’s total bullshit. And the reason is, [are] you going to hear a siren at 3 o’clock in the morning in a pounding rain, dead sleep, when you have an hour to respond? No.”

Rose believes effective flood warning begins as soon as the rain starts falling. In the Hill Country, where rivers are fed by runoff that can be difficult to track, that means monitoring the entire watershed with rain and stream gauges in creeks and tributaries, as the Lower Colorado River Authority has done. Because the Guadalupe has little flood control infrastructure, information is the first line of defense, he said, and it is only as good as the speed with which it arrives.

The fact that Welch felt safe enough to go to bed after checking RiverHub “tells you that we’re in the fledgling stages of data gathering on the Guadalupe River,” Rose said. He suspects the system probably does not yet provide enough timely, real-time information to keep a rapid rise in the water level coming as such a surprise.

“If anybody thinks that they’re done, that the job is done, it’s not,” Rose said. “It’s just starting.” 

A man stands in mud washed into his RV near Goat Creek, Texas, after the recent July floods. Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

In the end, what saved Welch and Hastings was a phone call from a neighbor — who had himself been tipped off by a friend in the fire department hearing the first emergency calls. “He saved our lives twice,” Hastings said.

The two of them fled to an Airbnb they found in downtown Comfort. Two weeks later, they had given up on the idea of living along the river and closed on a house 20 miles west, in Kerrville. It sits on a hilltop. “For the first time in a couple years, I’m going to feel safe,” Hastings said.

She has always known the Hill Country was dangerous. As a child in 1978, she watched television footage of cabins floating down the Guadalupe after 48 inches of rain fell in two days. But she never imagined the river would produce two catastrophic floods just 12 months apart.

That could grow more common. Warmer sea-surface temperatures are loading the atmosphere with more moisture, increasing the risk of extreme rainfall along the Gulf Coast, Mace said.

Still, Welch and Hastings can’t let go of their spot on the river. They love the waterfalls, the swimming hole, and the birds too much. They’ll keep coming back, but only in the van so they’re ready to get out quickly. Just in case. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What another Texas flood revealed about the state’s warning system on Aug 4, 2026.

I’ll never forget it. My family and I had just arrived in San Francisco in 2024 to begin a long tour with my podcast. I immediately reached out to Richard and was welcomed with the kindness that characterised him as much as his work.

How can one truly grasp the experience of war – “the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death” – without witnessing first-hand its violence and devastation? Through memories, recollections, and speaking to the families of Israeli victims of the 7 October attacks and Palestinians trapped under Israel’s bombs in Gaza, Tel Aviv-based musician and writer Ofer Waldman searches for help in words. An edited excerpt from the book Verkämpftes Land (2025).

Here I end my days, helpless, and nothing, nothing I could have done or not done, willed or thought, could have led me to a different goal.

– Christa Wolf, Cassandra

I would much rather tell you something else. To write something down – something proper – and then search out the life that matches the written words.

Poet Lea Goldberg believed that in times of war, it is the poet’s duty, above all else, to write about flowers and children’s laughter. She wrote that in Tel Aviv in September 1939, just after World War II had broken out. Tanja Maljartschuk, the Ukrainian poet-in-exile, says that she no longer trusts language: language that is suited both to writing down poems and writing out orders for war and murder. Somewhere between these two extremes, I would have liked to tell you something else.

What story, then, am I to tell you?

I have not been on any battlefield. My house has not been destroyed. I did not have to starve, I did not have to flee, and I was not abducted. And yet life here knows an intimacy with the thoughts of war. And it is not because one spent countless hours in a shelter, surrounded by children, family, friends, even complete strangers, thinking of the people in Gaza who have neither houses nor shelters, or of the Israelis in the Kibbutzim whose shelters on 7 October could not protect them and rather became gateways to hell. All of us here will, as Serhij Zhadan once said, never again be able to look at the sky as we did before. For war – that is, the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death – leaves behind certain traces. It is of these traces that I want to tell you. To search for them through words.

These are not words of courage, nor are they words of self-torment. Had I been in Gaza, I might not have written a sentence such as: “One cannot distinguish the smoke of the intercepted rockets from the autumn clouds.” Instead, my eyes – had I raised them to the sky – would have brimmed over with concrete dust, with ashes, and become blind. I would have written about undrinkable water and the stench of death. But I am not in Gaza. I direct my gaze there – not to please you, or to please myself, but because I know that all other gazes, including the gaze turned inward, are conditioned by one another. That is, also by this gaze toward Gaza. But I am not in Gaza. No more than you are.

In Terry Gilliam’s film Twelve Monkeys, which is based on Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, a time traveller is sent into the past to prevent an apocalyptic pandemic. The entire plot revolves around one key scene: the moment when the protagonist, James Cole (played by Bruce Willis), and his partner, who are trying to find the source of the pandemic, run into a boy, who is in fact Cole’s younger self. At the very moment they meet the boy, they realise that they have been following the wrong lead all along. But before Cole manages to warn his younger self of what is to come, the police, who have been pursuing them, shoot him.

The climax of the scene is the moment when Cole’s partner, a young, bewildered woman, holding Cole in her arms, stares at the boy with pleading terror as she grasps what is happening: Cole is bleeding to death, and it is too late to warn the boy – the young Cole, who will later be sent back into the past and will fail again and again to avert the dystopia – about his future.

(Time travel, anyhow: the drift into the surreal, a pause in the presumed logic of reality, the escape into an imaginary world to shut oneself off from the real one. To confront the insane through insanity itself, to name it. That too – and of that as well – I want to tell you.)

We all constantly try to trace the seeds of dystopia through poems, plays, essays, novels, and history books; and then, once we have found them (too late), we try to call them out. Our frequent failures make us no less secure; quite the contrary, we are sometimes bowled over by an omnipresent, almost brazen self-assurance as the sky around us darkens. These words are not self-assured. They are the gaze of the woman who knows she is doomed to fail. They are the gaze of the boy peering into his own future, fated to grasp it too late.

And yet these words are also the brief lingering over the gaze between the woman and the child. A lingering ascribed with the possibility – also arbitrary, painfully arbitrary – of recognition. Thus, along with every stratum of war laid upon this land, clinging to its people, the layer of this arbitrary possibility is laid. Lingering. Creating space, sometimes almost surreal, but nameable. Visualisable. Describable.

Stuttering

I start over again.

“I’d like to hear my new work read aloud,” says S. from Berlin, and asks me to read it together. I’m in Israel, so we start a video call. Before we begin, S. asks if it might be too much for me right now –  that is, if I can read, write, think at all about literature at this time.

“Why would it be too much?” I ask. “I thought the play was about the war in Ukraine, about family history, about your grandfather.”

“It is about my grandfather, too,” S. says. “But it’s also about 7 October. About Israel. About Gaza.”

I wave it off. When is it a good time, anyway?

“Let’s read.”

I start over again.

It’s a beautiful spring day. My brother sits in front of me on a rickety garden swing, rolling a cigarette. I hold his lighter, hand it to him.

“I thought Y. wasn’t in Gaza,” I say. Y. is my brother’s eldest son. “I thought he was at a base near the border. He’s not a combat soldier.”

“He’s a medic, serving the battalion commander. When the commander goes in to assess the situation, he has to go in too.”

The things he saw in Gaza. The air there. The sounds.

My brother looks at his hands, as if searching for words. He spreads his fingers, and the cigarette falls on the ground.

I start over again.

The moderator has just introduced me. I’m on stage in Frankfurt and am supposed to read from letters I wrote to a friend in the first weeks of the war. I take the microphone and look out at the hall again, at the expectant faces, at the tense faces.

Pronouncing the words becomes more difficult with every sentence. I draw in breath, shape my lips to speak the sounds I see before me: “child,” “air,” “sound,” “ashes”. But hardly anything comes out. I have to thrust the words out between my lips with increasing force. I have to tense my diaphragm with a direct command from my head, to push the air out through my mouth. At some point, it doesn’t matter whether it comes out as words, or as barking, or a scream.

I recognise this feeling from my time as an orchestral musician. Among brass players, it’s called “airlock”. Breathing in and out in time with the music, you place the mouthpiece on your tensed lips, position your tongue just behind your front teeth, and wait to play the note. As you’re about to play it, the tongue must retract to make way for the flow of air generated by your breathing muscles. But sometimes the tongue baulks at the command from your head and sticks, creating an airlock that leads to a kind of stutter when you start playing. Or the tongue does not move at all, and you have to skip the passage in whole or in part because the orchestra does not wait, it cannot wait, it must play on. Your eyes track the unsounded notes on the paper, your ears register the void of your own missing notes amidst the orchestra’s onward playing. In your mind, the world shrinks to the tip of your rebellious tongue, to the pressure building in your lungs and throat, to the blood flooding into your face. To the onrushing feeling of failure.

You want to join in the music, to fall into its rhythm. But sometimes you have to pull the instrument away from your lips. Breathe out. Try anew.

Start over again.

So I start over again.

* * *

“The music – the music helps,” says A. from Kibbutz Kfar-Aza. “The singing.”

Three of us – A., her husband, and I – are sitting in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel. She’s about to tell her story from 7 October to a group from Germany, but we still have a little time before she starts. For now, A. sits across from me, a glass of cold water in her hand, and repeats a few times that music helps.

“I have been asked,” she says – and now her eyes, her faint smile, try to break free from her face, pressing themselves as if through crusted earth  – “I have been asked,” – that crusted earth around her eyes and mouth begins to show cracks and long, deep wrinkles – “I have been asked how I felt at my son’s funeral, my mother-in-law’s funeral, my brother-in-law’s funeral, the funeral of…”

Her husband gently interrupts her, placing one hand on the back of his other hand and rubbing them: “At the funerals,” he says. “Just say: ‘At the funerals’.”

Her objectivity lies in counting off; his lies in reducing to the essential. One feels their connection, their love.

“Yes.” The encrusted earth around her mouth cracks open. “At the funerals.”

Speaking was difficult for her, A. said, but singing came more easily. And so they went from one funeral to the next, her daughter playing guitar, A. singing. I did not dare ask what she sang.

“I played music myself for a long time,” I tell her.

“What instrument did you play?”

“The French horn,” I say.

“Netta, our son, played the violin,” says A. “He loved Peter and the Wolf, and always wanted to hear it again and again as a child.” The torn, crusted earth wrinkles and cracks; the backs of the hands rub together. “He wanted to be Peter, and that’s why he chose the violin.”

I search for words in my head, what to say now. “It’s interesting,” I say (stupid word). “It’s interesting, which instrument people choose – that is, what character from the fairy tale: Peter, or the wolf, the hunters, the grandfather, the duck, the cat, the bird. What these characters say about us.”

“So you’re the wolf?” A.’s husband repeats the word again, “wolf”. I want to utter my standard line: that, as the wolf (a character whose music is played by three French horns), I have frightened many children already. Thankfully I remain silent and risk a smile.

“Netta was definitely Peter,” says A. “The hero of the story. He didn’t always follow the rules either.”

Embarrassed, I hum Peter’s melody: tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam. Hebrew has only one word for “protagonist,” “main character,” and “hero” – gibor. A. uses this word for her son only when she refers to him as Peter from the fairy tale. She does not use it when she is recounting the moment he threw himself on a hand grenade to save his fiancée, as she will soon tell the group from Germany in the same gentle, matter-of-fact voice. The cracks in the encrusted earth close, leaving delicate cobweb-like patterns around her mouth and eyes, trapping the sounds within them, tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam.

* * *

I experienced for the first time what is called an “airlock” while speaking at a solidarity event in Berlin. I was joining remotely from Israel and was supposed to say something, read something aloud. My reading included a poem by Yehuda Amichai: El male Rachamim (“God Full of Mercy”).

El male Rachamim, 

ilmale HaEl male Rachamim 

haju HaRachamim BaOlam WeLo rak bo.

God full of mercy,

were God not full of mercy,

there would be mercy in the world, not only in him.

I drew breath, shaped the first sound – “E” – and stalled. The words caught in my throat. I tried to clear it to get the air flowing again. It did not help. The audience in Berlin flickered on the screen in front of me. Had they noticed anything? Were they already irritated? I was slipping out of the rhythm of the words. Trying to counteract, to fall back into the rhythm, I started tapping my foot, an old musician’s exercise.

1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3 (breathe out), 4 (breathe in), “E”.

“E”

“E”.

El male Rachamim. God full of mercy.

1. 2. 3. (Breathe out). 4. (Breathe in).

* * *

Scarcely to be found in the Israeli newspapers are accounts of what life is now like for the people in Gaza. I know the figures – the number of dead, wounded, starving; the number of destroyed houses. I see the images of endless landscapes of ruins and dust. Yet everything feels secondhand, far away. I search for a voice behind the images and numbers; I want to hear such a voice, within my own four walls, to face it.

The few people I know from Gaza now live in Germany. So I ask a Palestinian friend from Nazareth to connect me with M., an acquaintance of his from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza that he has spoken about many times.

M. is an English teacher. He and his family are now sheltering in Khan Younis – their fifth stop since the outbreak of the war. Each time the bomb strikes draw closer, he tells me later in conversation, they flee further. But the Gaza Strip is narrow. There is no real escape and no safety.

M. sounds like someone describing what it is like to be trapped in a cage with a predator. It is about constantly trying to anticipate which corner the predator will move toward next. But beyond pressing oneself against the bars of the cage (pulling one’s own children close), there is nothing one can do.

My first attempt to arrange a conversation with him fails.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, Wednesday,” he writes.

“Tomorrow is Thursday,” I write.

“What time?” he asks. “What time is it where you are right now?”

And I think: But we should be in the same time zone – he’s only 170 kilometres away from me in Tel Aviv (I wanted to know exactly how far away he was. At first, the app responded: “Route cannot be calculated.” I switched to the straight-line function, which gave me 170 kilometres).

Later, during our call, fighter jets fly over my head, and I wonder: how long does a fighter jet take to cover a straight-line distance of 170 kilometres? How long before the thunder stops over me and starts roaring over him?

I write to him: “Same time as Gaza.”

He does not reply.

When we do finally talk, I first ask him about the sense of time. He thinks for a moment.

“It took me 15 years to build my house. It took only a few seconds to almost completely destroy it with a single artillery shell.” 1, 2, 3, 4.

I scroll through my messaging apps. Every day, dozens of appeals pile up there – for donations and acts of solidarity, for Jewish-Arab gatherings, for wounded Israeli soldiers, for protecting aid convoys to Gaza from attacks by radical settlers, for the families of the hostages, for dispossessed Palestinian communities, for internally displaced Israelis, for the bereaved, for children, widows, for lonely elderly parents.

In the evening comes a call for a rally in the north of Israel to end the war and release the hostages. It’s not too far from where I live. I put on a black shirt that says “De-Mo-Kra-Tia” (a relic from earlier times) and drive there. Since the outbreak of the war, GPS jammers have been deployed across the entire region to make it harder for enemy rockets to locate their targets, and I find the place with difficulty.

The last kilometre I cover on foot. The closer I get to the demonstration, the more people I see heading for the same place. Some wave flags, some carry banners with anti-government slogans, and others wear shirts with anti-war messages. There aren’t many of us. Onlookers in cars and on street corners follow us with tired eyes; some curse us, insult us as traitors, wish us death – but they do so with weary gazes and hollow voices. They receive no response and expect none; everything feels like a compulsory exercise, like a ritual worn thin and emptied out.

Later, at the rally, an elderly man stands at the edge of the crowd, leaning on a cane to which a limp Israeli flag is tied. He is weeping to himself, silently. He cries throughout the entire demonstration, never once looking toward the stage or at the angry speakers. Instead, his eyes, reddened by tears, gaze into the crowd without fixing on any particular point. Only when the mother of a hostage begins to speak does he briefly straighten up and turn his face toward the stage. He listens to her speak, in short sentences, of her days and nights. The demonstrators at the rally fall silent almost at once and stand as if frozen. The only sound to be heard is the flapping of flags in the light wind. The mother’s voice, carried by loudspeakers, is scattered and absorbed by the low walls enclosing the square, breaks against shop windows, police cars, and the huge billboards. She reaches the end of her speech. Around me, people open their mouths to shout. I open my mouth too, again and again, not knowing myself whether I am trying to shout or gasping for air.

* * *

Mohammed Al-Rimlawi was one of the students in the English club that M. had founded in the Jabalia refugee camp. A few weeks ago, Mohammed’s mother went with his youngest sister in search of one of the increasingly scarce power sources to charge her phone. When they returned, their house was no longer standing. Mohammed, his father, one sister, and two brothers lay buried under the rubble.

Once more a factual, objective listing. Again I search for words.

I enquire about the English club. The students in the club (boys only) are between 10 and 14 years old.

“There are hardly any foreigners here in Gaza,” M. says. So, to offer them a window onto the world, he has built an international network of mentors who practice English with the students over video calls.

“All they know is Gaza,” he says about his students. “I don’t want that. That’s not good.”

In the meantime, the school has been partly destroyed, and the students have fled with their families to sites throughout the Gaza Strip. He keeps coming across them, by chance.

“What questions are they asking right now?”

“They are not asking any questions,” he says at first. The sunburned faces of the children – the majority live in tents run by aid organisations and spend most of their time outside – remain expressionless, their mouths closed. I press him. This cannot be; after all, children ask questions; that’s what children do: they ask questions. (What questions do my children ask.)

M. thinks for a moment. Then he says:

“When.”

That is what they are asking.

When.

Exhale. Inhale.

1,2,3,4.

This text is an edited excerpt from Ofer Waldman’s book Verkämpftes Land (Wallstein Verlag, 2025). Translated from the German by Anton Baer | Voxeurop.  

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