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More of Germany’s electricity came from wind and solar power than fossil fuels for the first time ever in 2025.

Together, wind and solar power generated 225 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity – accounting for 44% of the total in 2025 – with just 217TWh (43%) coming from fossil fuels.

Solar and onshore wind have grown rapidly under Germany’s “Energiewende” strategy over the past two decades, as the nation transitions away from both coal and nuclear power.

Renewables have recently faced mounting opposition from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the current coalition government has been trying to develop new gas-power plants.

Nevertheless, Carbon Brief analysis of Energy Institute data – shown in the chart below – illustrates how wind and solar have continued growing, emerging as the nation’s largest power source.

The success of renewables in Germany mirrors the EU as a whole, which also saw wind and solar overtake fossil-fuel power generation in 2025 for the first time.

“Other renewables” includes hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal and other renewable sources not otherwise stated. Source: Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy, 2026.

Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. 

The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.

Despite Germany’s rapid decline in coal power generation, the nation still relies far more on coal than most other European countries. It aims to decarbonise its electricity entirely once coal power has been phased out, which has a deadline of “no later than” 2038.

(The renewables targets also include electricity generated from hydropower and bioenergy. The latter produces a relatively large share of Germany’s power – roughly a tenth in 2025.)

Germany has to rely on renewables more than neighbours, such as France and the UK, to achieve its climate goals. This is due to its phaseout of nuclear power, which is a key part of the “Energiewende” strategy.

Nuclear power has long faced widespread public opposition in Germany. This year, the centre-right chancellor Friedrich Merz described the nuclear phaseout as a “strategic mistake”, but the government has ruled out a return to conventional nuclear power.

The country has an official coal phaseout date of 2038, but experts say the country is on track to eliminate coal from its power supply years earlier. This is despite some pressure to temporarily slow the transition away from coal during the recent energy crisis.

(Very few outside the AfD are calling to scrap the coal phaseout altogether, but the government will publish a review of the timelines in August.)

While coal generation has fallen quickly, even as nuclear was being phased out, some argue that coal could have been cut more quickly if nuclear had remained. 

Gas-power expansion has also been framed by the government in recent years as an essential component of Germany’s transition away from coal and nuclear power, to support a renewables-heavy grid.

The current government under Merz has tried to boost gas and recently adopted a law to provide state support for new gas-fired power plants. The plan is for these plants to be converted to run on “green hydrogen” by 2045, in order to meet the climate-neutrality goal.

Germany aims to install 115 gigawatts (GW) of onshore wind by 2030 and approved a record 20.8GW of new capacity in 2025. 

Meanwhile, solar generation has reached unprecedented levels during the hot summer of 2026.

However, the government’s planned grid reforms have been criticised by the renewables industry for risking slowing down the energy transition. Under the proposals, renewables developers would only be granted automatic grid connections in areas with limited grid capacity if they waive compensation for future curtailed generation.

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Most countries failed to meet a 2025 target to identify all of their subsidies that could be “harmful” to biodiversity, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

The findings also reveal that 32 countries spend an estimated $270bn on biodiversity-harming subsidies and other incentives each year.

This is the “tip of the iceberg”, one expert notes, with “trillions” spent globally.  

In 2022, almost every country in the world agreed on a set of “goals” and “targets” aiming to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. 

One of these targets asked countries to identify all subsidies that damage biodiversity by 2025, before phasing out or reforming at least $500bn of these incentives by 2030. 

The subsidies can be found in a range of sectors, including fossil fuels, agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing.

Just 21 countries appear to have met the 2025 goal, Carbon Brief finds, based on analysis of 134 national reports submitted to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) by 1 July 2026. 

Five of the world’s 17 megadiverse countries were among those that met the deadline.

Country progress 

Carbon Brief’s analysis looks at the number of countries that have met the 2025 target to identify their use of nature-harming subsidies.

However, the metrics to determine which countries have “met” this target are not explicitly defined. 

Carbon Brief included any country that says it has completed the process of identifying its subsidies. In almost every case, these countries also included a total figure for the value of those subsidies. 

The analysis finds that 21 countries say they have identified their harmful subsidies, as shown in the map below (yellow). This amounts to 16% of the countries that have submitted national reports so far. 

A further 11 countries, plus the EU, have provided figures for some of their subsidies, such as only those in a specific sector (dark blue). 

Of the 134 national reports submitted to the CBD, 66 make reference to beginning the process (medium blue), while the remaining 68 do not (light blue). The final 62 countries party to the CBD have yet to submit a national report (light grey). 

(Every country in the world participates in the CBD, except for the US and the Holy See – the governing body of the Catholic church, which is seated in Vatican City.)

Countries that have identified all of their harmful subsidies (yellow); provided figures for some sectors (dark blue); begun the process, but not provided any numbers (medium blue); not begun the process (light blue); and not submitted a national report to the CBD (light grey). Credit: Carbon Brief analysis

The 32 countries that have identified some or all subsidies spend almost $270bn on nature-harming incentives annually, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis. 

This is based on a tally of the figures for the most recent available year listed in countries’ national reports, in US dollars using conversion rates at the end of the given year and adjusted for inflation. The analysis also includes figures from other reports cited in the country submissions.

The $270bn reported in country submissions to date is “just the tip of the iceberg”, notes Eva Zabey, the chief executive of Business for Nature. The global figure could be as high as $1.8tn, according to a 2022 estimate from non-profit group, the B Team. 

The figures identified by Carbon Brief are a “warning” that the “world is not moving fast enough” to tackle harmful subsidies, Zabey says, adding: 

“The positive news is that some countries have shown it can be done and this should embolden others to follow suit…Subsidy reform should be treated as an economic necessity, not an environmental checklist.”

Harmful subsidies are expected to be among the key priorities at the upcoming COP17 UN nature summit, being held in Armenia in October 2026. 

Subsidy target

There is no single definition of a “harmful” subsidy. (See: ‘Harmful’ subsidies.) 

The aim to identify these subsidies stems from target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) – the global agreement containing a series of goals and targets for nature. 

Target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Credit: UN CBD (2022)

Target 18 calls on countries to identify subsidies and other incentives that are harmful for biodiversity by 2025. 

It also says that nations should “eliminate, phase out or reform” these subsidies in a “proportionate” way, reducing them by at least $500bn per year by 2030. 

It says countries should first target the “most harmful” incentives, while simultaneously scaling up positive incentives for nature. 

All 2030 targets in the GBF are global –  with countries each expected to outline how they will contribute nationally. So far, 169 countries have submitted these national targets. 

Only 38% of countries addressed the 2025 aim to identify harmful subsidies in their national targets “to some extent”, according to a draft version of an upcoming progress report.

Countries’ national reports do not “provide a sufficient basis to determine” whether the 2025 milestone was met, says the report, but available evidence “suggests” that it was not.  

‘Harmful’ subsidies  

There is no universally agreed-upon definition of a “biodiversity-harmful subsidy” – or how it differs from an environmentally harmful subsidy.

In general, “harmful” environmental subsidies impact humans’ surroundings, whereas those harmful to biodiversity directly affect species and ecosystems. Paul Elton, a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, tells Carbon Brief:

“If you were to do a study that focused on biodiversity-harmful subsidies versus one that focused on environmentally-harmful subsidies, there’d be a Venn diagram where a large percentage would overlap.”

A 2022 working paper on identifying subsidies harmful to biodiversity published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) depicted biodiversity as a subset of the environment, with climate and air falling outside the scope of “biodiversity”.

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However, the report also noted that climate change is one of the five key drivers of biodiversity loss, adding: 

“As such, subsidies that lead to larger greenhouse gas emissions, for example, will also indirectly impact on biodiversity.”

Distinction between the “environment” and “biodiversity”, according to an oft-cited working paper on identifying and assessing biodiversity-harming subsidies. Credit: OECD (2022)

Prof Jessica Dempsey, a political ecologist at the University of British Columbia, tells Carbon Brief that she would “absolutely” consider fossil-fuel subsidies to be biodiversity-harming – not only as a driver of climate change, but also because the extraction of fossil fuels can cause localised harms to biodiversity. She adds:

“I do think probably it is true that all harmful subsidies are not necessarily biodiversity-related. Some care in that is important, but subsidies to the sectors that are known drivers of biodiversity loss feel very obvious to me.”

Biodiversity-harming subsidies can be either direct or indirect. 

Direct subsidies refer to government expenditures that go towards a project that harms nature, such as construction of a new gas-fired power plant. Indirect subsidies could include tax exemptions that encourage a certain behaviour, such as lower tax rates on fuels for agricultural machinery. 

Subsidies in agriculture, fishery and energy sectors are most commonly deemed “harmful”, but damage can also be caused by support for forestry, infrastructure, transport, construction, water and other sectors. 

One recent estimate of the global total of biodiversity-harming subsidies put the figure at $1.7-3.2tn annually. An estimate of environmentally harmful subsidies put the figure at $2.6tn.

Elton tells Carbon Brief:

“It’s useful to contextualise the $500bn ambition of the GBF against those global estimates of how big [the total] actually could be, because that underscores the fact that so far, you’ve only got a subset of nations reporting about $250bn by your analysis, which is only half of the [phase-out target].

“It’s a significant lack of accountability.”

The chart below compares the $2.6tn estimated value of harmful subsidies to the $500bn phase-out target set in the GBF and the value of the subsidies identified so far in national reports.

Comparison of the harmful subsidies identified by countries in their national reports (light blue), the phase-out target for subsidies outlined in the GBF (medium blue) and a global estimate of environmentally harmful subsidies (dark blue). Credit: Carbon Brief analysis Sectoral breakdown

Many subsidies can have both negative and positive impacts on biodiversity, according to the 2022 OECD working paper. 

A subsidy on constructing dams for new hydropower can harm local biodiversity by disrupting water flows and flooding certain areas, for example. But it also reduces fossil-fuel dependence, lowering emissions and leading to a decrease in global warming. 

Ronald Steenblik, a subsidies expert and co-author of the report estimating $2.6tn of harmful subsidies, tells Carbon Brief:

“What’s harmful is somewhat in the eye of the beholder.”

Most experts agree that a few sectors receive the bulk of the world’s biodiversity-harming subsidies: fossil fuels, agriculture and infrastructure, with much smaller contributions from other sectors, such as forestry, mining and fisheries. 

Of the subsidies reported to the CBD, almost half were for the fossil-fuel sector, and around one-quarter for agriculture and fishing. 

Sectoral breakdown of identified subsidies. “Multiple” means a country either did not distinguish between sectors or reported one number encompassing several sectors. “Other” refers to specific sectors not named in the chart. Credit: Carbon Brief analysis.

Dempsey says it is “surprising” that mining “didn’t show up” in these figures. (Of the 32 countries that provided subsidy data, only one mentioned mining as an industry that received harmful subsidies.)

Limitations

One limitation of Carbon Brief’s analysis is the lack of standardisation of subsidy data.  

The methodology underlying the national reports lists several definitions of environmentally harmful subsidies, adding:

“[T]here is no standardised, globally agreed methodology for assessing the value of subsidies…nor is there a single global dataset providing this information.”

It adds that it is “important” for countries to identify harmful subsidies “within their national context”. Steenblik says:

“When you get down into the details, you can have lots of arguments of where you draw the line. And, so, the big question on this spreadsheet is where countries drew that line.”

For example, China’s national report says the country has already identified all biodiversity-harming subsidies and reformed them entirely.  

In Australia, a 2026 study – led by Elton from Australian National University – identified biodiversity-harmful subsidies worth $26.3bn over 2022-23, a number that amounts to just over 1% of the country’s GDP.

However, in its national report, Australia identified $155m worth of subsidies, largely in the agricultural sector. (The national report says that the identified agricultural subsidies are those that are “potentially most harmful to the environment”.)

Elton tells Carbon Brief that this discrepancy underscores the necessity of an independent assessment of harmful subsidies, “rather than this just being seen as a tick-the-box reporting exercise by officials in the environment department”.

When it comes to actually phasing out harmful subsidies, Dempsey says, focusing on the quality of the subsidy – and who benefits from it – is just as important as focusing on the numbers. She adds:

“If we don’t take this lens of understanding the beneficiaries and we only focus on the [numbers], we really risk having policy changes that then lead to increased affordability problems for everyday working people, and backlash.”

Methodology 

Carbon Brief analysed national reports submitted to the CBD by 134 parties – 133 countries and the EU – to assess which ones had identified all of their biodiversity-harmful subsidies and therefore met the 2025 deadline. 

The reports were submitted in 2026, with the analysis including those submitted by 1 July 2026. 

The figures for each country can be found in this spreadsheet. More than three-quarters of reports did not list any figures. 

To get the full tally for the amount listed, Carbon Brief used the figures for 2025 (or the nearest available year) and converted the local currency into US dollars, based on conversion rates in the given year using the currency exchange rates calculator from the US Treasury.

These figures were then adjusted for inflation to the year 2025. Numbers were rounded to the nearest $1,000.

In total, this amounted to $269,856,769,000 in subsidies across 32 countries.

Many countries listed the sector that each subsidy is going towards. Carbon Brief standardised these inputs using the following categories: 

• Agriculture and fishing
• Energy
• Forestry  
• Fossil fuels 
• Infrastructure
• Transport 
• Other
• Multiple sectors

“Multiple sectors” was assigned when a country provided only a partial sectoral breakdown of their subsidies or none at all. 

“Other” was selected to encompass sectors that were named more infrequently, including water, mining, tourism and construction.

The designations employed and the presentation of the material on the map in this article do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Carbon Brief concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo  15.07.2026 Nature Q&A: What England’s new ‘land-use framework’ means for climate, nature and food 20.03.2026 Food and farming Analysis: Half of nations meet UN deadline for nature-loss reporting 02.03.2026 Nature policy Brazil’s biodiversity pledge: Six key takeaways for nature and climate change 16.01.2026 Nature policy

The post Analysis: 84% of nations miss deadline to identify ‘nature-harming’ subsidies by 2025  appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh has spent the last decade trying to figure out how the plants feeding millions across Niger can better withstand the unpredictability of a warming planet. Extreme heat waves and severe droughts that alternate with heavy rainfall and flash floods are imperiling the many millet, rice, and sorghum farms throughout the Sahel region, where temperatures have risen much faster than the global average. 

Yet the biggest threat to those farms is neither heat, droughts, nor floods, but the infestations unleashed with their arrival. The millet head miner is one of the most notorious of these hordes. The destructive moth lays eggs directly onto the flowering heads of the pearl millet crop, which hatch into larvae that feed voraciously from within the plant’s florets. Drought, sandy soils, and certain farming practices, such as sowing fields too early, only worsen infestations. 

“In a bad year, it can wipe out a large part of a family harvest,” said Boubacar Gaoh. Domestic agriculture, he noted, is both the West African nation’s economic backbone and the foundation of most families’ access to food. Roughly 2.4 million people throughout Niger face acute food insecurity and 1.6 million children suffer from acute malnutrition. “When you’re talking about a crop that feeds the household, that isn’t just lost income. It’s less food on the table,” he said. 

Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh (center) and another researcher talk with a farmer in Konni, Niger, about the pest challenges he faces in his field.
Courtesy of Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh

Boubacar Gaoh’s grandparents were millet farmers, so as a plant breeder in Niamey specializing in staple crops, he’s personally invested in developing on-the-ground solutions to help protect growers from pests like the millet head miner. In November 2024, he launched a program that sought to equip local farmers with the tools they need for crop disease surveillance and pest control. In partnership with an agricultural research hub hosted by Pennsylvania State University, the work was funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future Innovation Labs program.  

From the start, he and his team set out to visit farmers across Niger, offering hands-on training on how to fight pests and disease affecting their harvests, teaching them not only how to use free technologies like PlantVillage, an AI-powered mobile platform for pest and disease forecasting, but how to confront infestations. Solutions for containing infestations vary, but farmers first must spot the bugs behind them — a tricky feat, especially in the case of the millet head miner, which can do some real damage undetected. That’s where monitoring tools, said Boubacar Gaoh, can make all the difference. “Timing is everything. … It only strikes during a short window as the grain forms,” he said. “The real reduction in crop loss comes from acting on that warning at the right moment.” 

Last January, they were preparing to roll out the use of natural predators to eradicate the millet head miner, along with a multitude of other agricultural menaces. They’d even just met with officials at Niger’s Ministry of Agriculture to negotiate use of their data to inform the government’s understanding of crop health and national surveillance systems. 

Then, without warning, it was all over. On January 24, 2025, days after his inauguration, President Donald Trump issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs, before dismantling the agency entirely. In the months that followed, nearly all of the 17 core Innovation Labs, anchored in American universities with a network of international partners, received funding termination notices. 

Boubacar Gaoh stayed on part time, drawing on a small stipend provided by a donor to the Penn State lab, but the rest of his team in Niger was let go. In the year and a half since, he has pivoted to chasing funding sources in an increasingly fraught and competitive philanthropic landscape. He’s had little luck. 

“I was surprised when it was stopped — because, why? Everyone knows that with climate change, pests are moving around. The conditions are so that these pests can grow and develop in the region where previously they couldn’t develop and affect food supply,” said Boubacar Gaoh. 

Boubacar Gaoh’s team conducted diagnostic visits all over Niger, including at a watermelon plot (left) and a vegetable farm (right). Then, without warning, it was all over.​ ​Courtesy of Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh​

A statement by the White House on the funding cuts issued last fall, when it formally cancelled the $72 million funding the program, described USAID’s spending as “woke, weaponized, and wasteful.” By then, the administration had gutted all but one lab. The Climate-Resilient Cereals Innovation Lab at Kansas State University was given the go-ahead to continue its research. (The lab has since rebranded itself as the “Innovation Lab for Cereals.”) Because Congress appropriated the funds, questions surfaced on the legality of Trump’s power to withhold the funding, but then the Supreme Court ruled that the president had the discretion to do so. 

“Why were all the other labs terminated?” Timothy Dalton, then-interim director of the Kansas lab, asked at the time. “When they’re doing such critically important work as we are doing, in order to combat global food insecurity and to generate scientific advances that can be harnessed by the U.S. agricultural community?” A university spokesperson for the cereals lab declined Grist’s request for an interview. 

This March, the State Department issued a new call for proposals for Feed the Future Innovation Labs, inviting any U.S.-based university to submit a statement of interest in an open competition for the resurrected program. The call for applications described the labs as mechanisms “to advance global food security in alignment with U.S. policy through targeted research.” Approximately five to seven awards were anticipated, the listing noted, ranging from $20 million to $40 million. To the scientists watching their labs get dismantled a year earlier, the announcement raised an obvious question: resurrected for whom, and to do what?  

Although the labs’ stated goals on hunger and food security haven’t changed much, where the work happens could look very different under the Trump administration’s redesigned version of the program. Former USAID officials and innovation lab directors told Grist that they are concerned that lower-income African regions, which had always been the focus of the program, have now been deprioritized in favor of countries in the Western Hemisphere.

“A 27-page document of criteria, and Africa gets three paragraphs on the last page,” said Jim Gaffney, a former general development officer at USAID’s Bureau for Food Security. “It never says you should not work in African countries. But it’s obvious it’s not terribly important to them.” 

According to one American researcher, “We were learning from African colleagues about genetic sources of disease resistance that we could bring over. … It was a two-way street.”  Courtesy of Bassirou Sani Boubacar Gaoh

Africa just surpassed Asia as the continent with the largest number of people facing hunger, according to the annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report released last week by a cohort of United Nations agencies. Swaths of the continent are seeing temperature rises up to 1.5 times the global mean, which imperils food security, ecosystems, and economies, and has fueled mass displacement and migration. Floods, heat waves, and droughts forced 700,000 people out of their homes in 2024, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization. A growing body of research has found food insecurity, climate change, and migration to be closely interlinked with geopolitical instability.

Gaffney said the State Department’s implicit deprioritization of Africa is likely to have created a chilling effect on the number of agricultural research and development proposals focusing on the continent, which could have serious knock-on implications for the global food system. “People say, ‘Well, it’s good, it’s great that we’re doing these things for these low-income countries,’ but it’s also great for U.S. research,” said Gaffney. “We solve problems in Africa, and those same problems might hit our shores someday here in the U.S., and we’ll be ready for them.” The other major change in the call for applications was the erasure of climate-related research priorities. 

Across the country, universities followed the guidelines: They stripped their submissions of mentions of “climate change” and pivoted to “desirable” geographies. 

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David Hughes, the former director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Current and Emerging Threats to Crops at Penn State, which had supported Boubacar Gaoh’s work in Niger, said his team swapped out terms like “climate change stress” for “drought” in their application. The State Department didn’t respond to a question about their decision-making process, but, referring to the practices of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Hughes says that the Penn State team had in mind that the government had been “running these proposals through word search or AI.”

The Penn State lab also expanded its geographic range. Their application, shared with Grist, listed Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Nepal as proposed target countries. It did not mention supporting Boubacar Gaoh’s efforts in Niger. “We did, of course, maybe do a little more in this hemisphere. Although I point out that this hemisphere includes West Africa as well. I don’t think they know their geography,” said Hughes. Ultimately, the lab’s application was denied. 

In a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last June, Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who represents Mississippi, asked Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, for assurances that specific innovation labs, including a Mississippi State University lab focused on fisheries, would be protected from budget cuts. 

“The lab’s work illustrates the proverb, ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.’ This is exactly what the MSU Fish Innovation Lab is doing,” said Hyde-Smith at the hearing. “Rather than giving other countries food, we are teaching them how to feed themselves through modern aquaculture practices.”

The next iteration of innovation labs is starting to take shape. A preliminary list obtained by Grist reveals that approximately seven new project proposals have advanced to the next and final stage of the application round. The labs advancing are from institutions almost exclusively in Republican-majority states. Kansas State University, Mississippi State University, the University of Florida, two labs at Alabama’s Auburn University, South Carolina’s Clemson University, and the University of Georgia were all asked to submit a full proposal, according to multiple sources familiar with the State Department’s new program. The work led by Clemson features a collaboration with the University of Hawaiʻi, making it the only lab with blue-state representation. 

Sources told Grist that the team behind the Mississippi State proposal is from the very same fisheries lab that Hyde-Smith had publicly lobbied Vought for. The lab declined Grist’s request for an interview. 

“It doesn’t feel like, by chance, it would just be red states receiving these awards,” said a former USAID official involved with the program who asked to remain anonymous. 

Others are questioning whether the administration’s newfound version of the innovation labs will actually look all that different to the version that was culled. Carrie Seay-Fleming, an assistant professor specializing in food security and the environment at the University of Minnesota Duluth who has studied the impact of Feed the Future, found a surprisingly similar emphasis on “increasing productivity” and “market-based solutions” in the State Department’s language. “Which of course makes you wonder what the cancellation of the old programs achieved,” said Seay-Fleming. 

A spokesperson at the State Department told Grist in an email that “applications are evaluated against the published criteria in the funding opportunity, without regard to the political characteristics of an applicant’s home state.” The spokesperson declined to clarify when grant awards would be finalized or announced, nor did they comment on changes to funding criteria. However, the spokesperson did note that the agency plans to obligate funds into awards by the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30. 

The spokesperson said the Feed the Future Innovation Labs funding opportunity is evaluated to ensure it makes the country stronger, safer, and more prosperous. In order to align with national interests, foreign assistance and research investments must “directly benefit American farmers, researchers, and taxpayers, rather than being shaped by the priorities of the prior administration,” the spokesperson added.

Among those invited to advance was the Innovation Lab for Peanut at the University of Georgia, which worked with peanut farmers in roughly 13 countries but focused on Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, and Zambia, and had been a participant in the earlier version of the USAID program. After the collapse of USAID, the lab was forced to close. When the administration resurrected the funds, former lab leadership decided to apply for the funds and see if they could rebuild much of the work they had been doing beforehand. Jamie Rhoads, former assistant director at the peanut lab, wasn’t optimistic about their chances. 

“We tried to globalize it a little bit, and shifted the language a little bit toward the more safer, stronger, more ‘America First’ kind of language,” said Rhoads, who contributed to the new proposal. “We kind of made a pitch for the sake of the U.S. industry, and also the potential domestic demand happening in Africa, [that] this is a valuable investment to make in Africa.” 

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So it was a welcome surprise when, in June, the UGA lab advanced to the next, and final, stage of the State Department’s process. “It was kind of frustrating because we had to put all this ‘America First’ language into it, but a lot of what we were doing was already, in the best sense of things, using American goodwill and technology,” said Rhoads. “We were learning from African colleagues about genetic sources of disease resistance that we could bring over that are useful for our varieties potentially, or globally. It was a two-way street.” 

Indeed, American farmers would also benefit from this type of research based in Africa. That includes farmers like Josh Johnson, who runs the Old Tyme Bean Company in Elloree, South Carolina. In recent years, as rising temperatures have made it increasingly difficult to grow varieties of heat-sensitive Southern crops, Johnson has pivoted toward growing cowpeas, a drought-tolerant crop that’s regionally popular and has long been a major food commodity throughout western and central Africa. But that introduced Johnson to a whole new threat: the cowpea curculio, a destructive weevil whose larvae feed on the seeds inside the legume’s pod. Within the last two years, the curculio has taken almost half of Johnson’s acreage of the bean plant. 

Josh Johnson (right) and his sons grow crops like cowpea, a major food commodity in western and central Africa, on their family farm in Elloree, South Carolina. Courtesy of Josh Johnson

“You’ll start shelling those peas, and you’ll end up with maggots and larva coming out the shells,” said Johnson. “You can imagine how selling something like that would be terrible. … It is a booger-bear to control.” 

To fight the wily bug, Johnson sprays the perimeter of his fields with pesticides. But it only does so much. When the small weevil senses a tractor’s movement, it balls up, drops to ground, and plays dead to protect itself, also making it nearly impossible to spot. Johnson said he desperately needs a new tool or technique that would allow him to better track and stave off outbreaks well before they spread.

A solution not unlike the on-farm pest surveillance Boubacar Gaoh had been working to develop half a world away.

Climate change is only making crop infestations like these worse, forcing farmers and scientists from South Carolina to Niger to contend with new pathogens, as warming temperatures reshuffle the geographic range of pests worldwide. “Some pests that you find now in Africa, in a few years maybe you will find it in America. So I think it’s really relevant to deal with them at the source,” said Boubacar Gaoh. “Pests, they don’t need visas to travel.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the ‘America First’ makeover of a global hunger program on Jul 28, 2026.

California has spent nearly two decades relying on taxpayers to finance its high-speed rail project. Now it’s looking to private investors.

Whether any step up remains an open question.

The search for private money was always part of the plan. When Californians approved a bond measure to fund the project in 2008, they pictured a system to rival the best in the world. Sleek trains would whisk riders between San Francisco and Los Angeles in just 2 hours and 40 minutes. Using renewable energy would cut emissions by up to 3 million metric tons annually. Voters were willing to put up $10 billion to make this dream a reality.

Everyone knew that wouldn’t be enough.

The bond was never meant to cover the entire cost. State officials envisioned the federal government and private sector contributing equally toward the projected $45 billion budget. But Washington’s support ebbed and flowed with each president. After years of legal battles with the Trump administration, the state said “the federal government is not a reliable, constructive, or trustworthy partner” in advancing the project. Private capital, meanwhile, has largely remained on the sidelines. 

That may soon change. The California High-Speed Rail Authority recently announced a $25 million agreement with a consortium of companies that will explore ways to advance the project. Over the next six months, it will develop funding strategies to expand the project beyond the state’s Central Valley, potentially into San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

“This agreement reflects growing market confidence in that strategy and the long-term potential of California high-speed rail as a transformative investment in California’s future,” Ian Choudri, the agency’s CEO, said in a news release. Choudri said the agency has spent the past year taking steps to “reposition” the project around “a more commercially focused and delivery-oriented strategy.”

Most of the construction is focused in the Central Valley, where the first phase will connect the cities of Merced and Bakersfield. The rail authority chose to start there because it offered the quickest and cheapest path to getting trains running. It is also an opportunity to bring a state-of-the-art transportation system to a region long overlooked by the state. Crews have completed dozens of bridges and viaducts and laid almost 90 miles of guideway. Their efforts will soon shift to laying track.

Linking San Francisco and Los Angeles is expected to cost $126 billion, with service slated to begin in 2040. Even the first phase alone will likely require tens of billions of dollars. Last year, the state committed $1 billion annually to finance the project through 2045. 

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Genevieve Giuliano, a professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Southern California, said the rail authority’s announcement doesn’t mean an influx of private capital is imminent. It is simply an agreement to explore how that might happen. “Until I see something that says, ‘Company X is going to put up $10 billion under the following conditions,’ I don’t see that as we’re getting private money in here,” she said.

She also doesn’t see the private sector taking on any risk until it has a guaranteed revenue stream and is confident the project will be profitable. 

Others see opportunities for private investment, but not necessarily in financing the railway.

“I do not believe there will be any at-risk private investment in expanding the system,” said Lou Thompson, who chaired the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group from 2012 until 2024. 

Instead, he sees investors finding opportunities in merchandising, such as T-shirts, caps, and model trains, and residential and business development around stations. The rail authority sees that potential, too. It could allow cable companies to install fiber optic lines alongside tracks, for example, or produce surplus energy for utilities. The agency expects to have an agreement in place with power companies later this year to consider opportunities.

Whether those opportunities lead to significant investments remains uncertain. But establishing a business consortium to find out shows California is willing to get creative, said transportation expert Joe Schwieterman.

“They’re not settling for a go-slow approach that pushes key decisions off to the next generation,” said Schwieterman, who leads the Sustainable Urban Development Project at DePaul University. He conceded that “there’s still gigantic financial hurdles ahead,” not the least of which is that the funding needed to finish the project “has yet to be identified.”

Andy Kunz sees reason for optimism. He sees private capital helping the rail system reach the more profitable cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. “Having private sector groups show up just gives us more confidence that it’ll be done more quickly,” said Kunz, head of the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association. That’s important, given the meager federal support the project has. 

“Because our public sector is not really leading the charge, this is really exciting,” he said. “We now have a private sector group stepping in to help get these first couple of projects going.”

Choudri has been pursuing that exact strategy since taking the helm at the California High-Speed Rail Authority in 2024. He told Grist the timing is right, given the state’s promise of annual funding and the project now owns all of the land needed to complete the first 119 miles.

“We need to turn this project into a business,” he said. “We need to build this corridor having rail as primary service, but then use it for other economic development and growth in order for us to be self-sustainable.”

Correction – An earlier version of this story misstated the initial projected budget for the project and the amount of guideway that has been laid.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Next stop for California’s high-speed rail: Finding private investors on Jul 28, 2026.

Rapid decline in Arctic sea ice Channel News brendan 28th July 2026 Teaser Media

Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org and David Hillman is director of Stamp Out Poverty.

This coming week, as record-breaking heat has morphed into killer wildfires, major oil and gas companies will report their second-quarter earnings and are widely expected to announce profits that have doubled or even quadrupled in the last three months. The obscenity of that contradiction is impossible to ignore. 

Oxfam analysis, released as the Q2 earnings season gets underway, shows that the world’s six largest fossil fuel corporations – BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – are on course to nearly double their combined net income compared with the first quarter of the year, from $23 billion to around $45 billion.

• Jul 22, 2026 Politics Will new UK PM’s green measures at home cause climate finance pain overseas? Andy Burnham cuts bus fares and household electricity tax in a boost for climate action – some of it paid for by switching the UK’s contribution to a new global forest fund from a grant to a loan Read more
• Jul 21, 2026 Comment Energy transition policymaking must evolve to fit an age of rupture Economic competitiveness, energy security and green industrialisation are driving real-world change – but will this damage our collective mission for a fair green shift? Read more

Their projected full-year profits of $147 billion would exceed everything the six firms made combined over the previous 21 months. Chevron’s profits alone are expected to have quadrupled to $1,200 a second over the last three months; ExxonMobil’s have roughly tripled to $1,800 a second. The juxtaposition of profit on that scale, arriving in the same weeks that communities are counting the cost of deadly heatwaves, forest fires and high energy bills, is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Covering the cost of climate damage

Not long ago, the idea that fossil fuel companies should contribute directly towards the cost of climate damage was dismissed as activist rhetoric. Today it is reflected in legislation, litigation and mainstream policy debate.

Several US states have passed “Climate Superfund” laws requiring major fossil fuel companies to help fund climate adaptation and disaster recovery. Courts are hearing cases seeking compensation for climate harms, while governments across Europe continue to debate the future of windfall taxes on outsized energy profits.

Comment: Major emitting countries knew of climate risks decades earlier than claimed

These developments may appear disconnected, but they reflect a broader shift in public thinking: if societies are paying an ever higher price as our climate warms, should the excessively profitable fossil fuel companies whose products have substantially caused those costs not bear more of the burden of paying for them?

Europe’s heatwaves fuelled by emissions

The events of this summer have only sharpened that question. Europe has experienced repeated heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding 40°C across parts of Spain, Portugal, France and Germany. England recorded its hottest June on record, while wildfires have affected communities across southern Europe and, increasingly, parts of the UK.

According to researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, more than 2,300 heat-related deaths occurred across twelve European cities during one recent ten-day heatwave alone, with climate change estimated to have roughly tripled the number of deaths.

Separate Oxfam analysis of academic data published in Nature goes further, finding that the emissions of just five of these corporations – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – were sufficient to cause around one in four of the heatwaves reported globally between 2000 and 2023: heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible without human-made climate change. 

WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in

Nor is Europe unique. There is looming famine in Uganda and India endured prolonged pre-monsoon temperatures above 48°C earlier this year. North America has faced successive heat domes, while smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires has periodically produced some of the world’s worst urban air quality, affecting millions of people across Canada and the United States.

Scientists have become increasingly confident in attributing many of these extremes to human-caused climate change. Rapid attribution studies, pioneered over the past decade, now routinely assess how much more likely or more intense individual weather events have become because of greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Polluter pays’ principle in law

Against this backdrop, the “polluter pays” principle is a basic standard of responsible behaviour: if you cause damage, it is on you to pay for it. It is a longstanding concept in environmental law and economics  that those responsible for creating pollution should bear a proportionate share of the costs it imposes on society.

In 2025 a survey found that 81% of people supported increased fossil fuel taxes being directed to help communities most impacted by extreme weather. And it is no longer just a hypothetical prospect.

A mandatory surtax on highly polluting industries is gaining support as part of the UN Convention on International Tax Cooperation, alongside robust measures to prevent jurisdiction-shopping and anchor taxing rights in real economic activity. Governments meeting in New York next month to negotiate the framework convention should seize the moment to get behind both.

Campaigners from Fossil Free London dressed as firefighters while others poured a black liquid resembling oil over their heads, during a protest outside Shell’s global headquarters ahead of its Q2 results announcement, on July 29 2026. (Photo: Fossil Free London) Campaigners from Fossil Free London dressed as firefighters while others poured a black liquid resembling oil over their heads, during a protest outside Shell’s global headquarters ahead of its Q2 results announcement, on July 29 2026. (Photo: Fossil Free London)

The stakes are high because the economics of the energy transition are increasingly clear. Renewable electricity is now among the cheapest forms of new power generation in much of the world. Yet many countries with abundant renewable resources continue to face prohibitively expensive borrowing costs, limiting their ability to invest at the speed required. Meanwhile, massive fossil fuel profits remain only lightly taxed or entirely avoided in many jurisdictions.

Analysis by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and partners estimated that a 20% surtax on the profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than US$1 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

Time to design mechanisms for justice

Whether governments choose that particular mechanism is ultimately a political decision. But the analysis illustrates a broader point: claims that public investment in climate resilience or clean energy is unaffordable sit uneasily alongside the scale of profits regularly generated by the fossil fuel industry, profits that, this quarter, are on course to nearly double in three months.

There are legitimate debates about the design of windfall taxes, competitiveness, investment incentives and international coordination. But the wider principle – that those who have benefited most from fossil fuel extraction should pay more towards managing its consequences – is no longer confined to campaign groups.

Extreme heat costing India’s poorest workers 2% of GDP, survey finds

It is increasingly part of mainstream discussions among policymakers, economists and legal scholars and, if well designed, such mechanisms will incentivise investment where it’s needed and strengthen international coordination.

This summer has made that conversation harder to avoid. The question is no longer whether fossil fuel giants should pay for the enormous economic and human costs being suffered by communities every day due to our rapidly warming climate. It is when will governments step up and make them pay, for the damage already done and to build the resilience we need going forward?

The post The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sunset at the Gualala River on July 21, 2026
Photo courtesy of Michael Coustier

In April, when the Trump administration first announced it wanted to open the Greater Chaco Canyon region in New Mexico to oil and gas drilling, we asked you to speak up. Following an initial scoping period that generated over 100,000 comments in support of maintaining broad protections for this remarkable place, the Department of the Interior has doubled down on its plans and released a formal Environmental Assessment with a brief 14-day public comment period.

Please take action today and help defend the Greater Chaco Region

After decades of advocacy by Tribal Nations and conservationists, federal protections in the greater Chaco region were finally put in place in 2023 with the establishment of a 10-mile buffer zone shielding the Chaco Culture National Historical Park from new oil and gas leasing. The administration is now considering two options, neither of which is acceptable: revoking protections entirely or shrinking the buffer to just 5 miles.

In either scenario, thousands of cultural sites would be exposed to drilling. Although only 15-20% of the area has been surveyed, archaeologists estimate that as many as 12,000 cultural sites lie within the areas the Trump administration plans to open to leasing and exploitation. Indigenous communities already living with the health impacts of over 37,000 nearby wells would face even more industrial development at their doorstep. 

Comments are due this Wednesday, July 29. We encourage you to make your voice heard by using the advocacy action from our friends at New Mexico Wild; they also have a web page where you can learn more about the threats facing Chaco Canyon.

Click here to take action now!

The post Another Chance to Speak Up for Greater Chaco Canyon appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Union Jack, which has interests at Wressle and West Newton, has recommended shareholders vote against a proposal to remove the board.

The company has called a requistioned general meeting for next month (August).

This follows a resolution by two investors holding more than 14% of voting rights to remove the three current directors: David Bramhill, Joseph O’Farrell and Zac Phillips.

The investors, described by Union Jack as requisitioners, are former board members, Craig Howie and John Americanos. They have also tabled a resolution for their reappointment as directors.

In a statement today, Union Jack said:

“The Company will today post a circular to shareholders convening the Requistioned GM [general meeting] and outlining the unanimous recommendation by the Company’s board to directors to vote against all the resolutions to be proposed at the Requisitioned GM.

The statement added:

“The Board believes that the Requisition is misguided, ill-timed and destined to lead to a destruction in value for the Company’s shareholders.”

The requisition notice was dated 7 July 2026, less than a week after a takeover offer by Reabold Resources.

Union Jack’s statement continued:

“by proposing the Resolutions just six days after the announcement of the all share offer by Reabold Resources plc, the Requisitioners are simply being opportunistic by seeking to replace the Board during the Offer process without providing the Company’s shareholders with the opportunity to realise a control premium.”

Union Jack also announced it had reconvened the previously postponed annual general meeting. This was adjourned on the day it was planned, 26 June 2026, because of the Reabold takeover offer. The AGM will now be held after the requistioned meeting.

The requisitioned meeting will be at 11am on 24 August 2026 at the offices of Keystone Law, 48 Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1JF.

The reconvened AGM will be held on the same date and place, at 12 noon, or as soon as the requisitioned meeting has ended.

Farm Service Agency County committees are a critical component of the day-to-day operations of USDA/FSA and allow grassroots input and local administration of federal farm programs.

The post 2026 FSA County Committee Elections appeared first on RAFI.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

A graph has been making the rounds on social media showing the average number of days per weather station above 95F, 100F, and 105F across the contiguous US since 1895. It comes from CFACT analyst Chris Martz, drawing on raw data from NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network daily dataset (GHCNd), and it shows the 1930s towering over everything since. The implication is that extreme heat in the US is nothing new, and that all the recent fuss about record temperatures is overblown.

It is a compelling figure. The 1930s Dust Bowl really was an extraordinary period of extreme heat in the US, and no amount of correction for changes in measurement techniques over time makes it go away. But the graph is also a case study in why you cannot naively count threshold exceedances in raw daily station data and call it a climate record. Its results rest on two well-documented thermometer problems that artificially depress modern hot day counts, plus a station network that happens to be oversampled where the Dust Bowl happened.

Reproducing the viral chart

To start with, let’s reproduce the figure properly. Rather than averaging whatever stations happen to be reporting in a given year (the station network grew from a few hundred stations in 1895 to many thousands today, with big shifts in where they are located), I selected the 543 GHCNd stations in the contiguous US with long, near-continuous maximum temperature records over the full 1895-2025 period,1 gridded them to 2x2 degree cells, and computed an area-weighted national average.

Average number of days per year at or above 95°F, 100°F, and 105°F over the contiguous US, 1895–2025, from 543 long-record GHCN-Daily stations (raw, unadjusted TMAX), averaged on a 2°×2° grid with cos(latitude) area weighting.

Here we see the same basic story as the viral version: a huge spike in the 1930s (1936 alone averaged 33 days at or above 95F across these stations), elevated values through the mid-1950s, and nothing since that comes close. So the Martz figure is not fabricated, and its shape is not an artifact of the changing station network. To be fair to its author, counting hot days in raw data really does produce this picture.

The problem is what “raw” means here.

Two thermometer problems, both pointing the same way

Raw sounds virtuous, like unfiltered honesty. But the US cooperative observer network has changed in two important ways over the past century, and both changes bias hot day counts downward in recent decades relative to earlier ones.

The first is time of observation bias. Volunteer observers read and reset their max/min thermometers once a day. In the early 20th century most did so in the late afternoon, near the hottest part of the day. An afternoon reset means a very hot afternoon can get counted twice: once for the day it happened, and again the next day if the following afternoon is cooler, since the thermometer still holds yesterday’s peak. Over the 20th century the network gradually shifted to morning observations (better for measuring precipitation), which does not double count heat. Vose et al (2003) documented how this shift alone imparts a spurious cooling trend of a few tenths of a degree in US records, and the double counting directly inflates hot day counts at afternoon-observing stations.

The second is the thermometer switch. In the mid-1980s NOAA replaced liquid-in-glass thermometers in wooden Cotton Region Shelters with electronic maximum-minimum temperature sensors (MMTS) at most cooperative stations. Quayle et al (1991) showed the new sensors read maximum temperatures around 0.4C (0.7F) cooler than the old shelters. This produced a one-time step change at thousands of stations that landed right at the start of the modern warming era. When your threshold is a hard cutoff like 95F, a step down of nearly half a degree C removes a lot of days.

Homogenization algorithms (like NOAA’s pairwise method, Menne and Williams 2009, or the Berkeley Earth approach, Rohde et al 2013) detect and correct these breakpoints by comparing each station to its neighbors. Our 2016 paper validated these adjustments against the pristine, purpose-built US Climate Reference Network and found they perform well. While NOAA does not have daily homogenized data (they only provide monthly homogenized data), Berkeley Earth does. So let’s compare the raw hot day count to the same metric computed from Berkeley Earth’s homogenized daily maximum temperature fields.

Days per year at or above 95°F over the contiguous US. Top: raw GHCN-Daily data from 543 long-record stations, gridded and area-weighted. Bottom: Berkeley Earth homogenized daily TMAX (1°×1°, area-weighted over CONUS), with the dashed line showing the same calculation restricted to the grid cells containing the long-record stations. Absolute values differ because gridded fields smooth out local extremes; the shapes are the meaningful comparison.

The two datasets agree that the 1930s were exceptional. Where they disagree is the modern era: in the homogenized data, recent decades rival the Dust Bowl years CONUS-wide, with 2011 (16.1 days) actually edging out 1936 (14.0 days) as the biggest year in the Berkeley Earth series.

We can make the comparison cleaner by putting each series relative to its own 1951-1980 average:

Days ≥95°F, 11-year running means, with each series shown relative to its own 1951–1980 average. Red: raw GHCN-Daily long-record stations. Blue solid: Berkeley Earth homogenized daily TMAX over the full CONUS. Blue dashed: Berkeley Earth restricted to the grid cells sampled by the long-record station network.

The raw and homogenized series track each other closely for the first 85 years, through the Dust Bowl peak and the cool 1960s and 70s. Then, right around 1980 (just when the MMTS transition began), they split. The homogenized data rises to around 1.4 times its mid-century baseline while the raw data stays flat at roughly 1.0. The raw data does not exaggerate the 1930s, but rather erases the last 40 years of increases in extreme heat.

The dashed and solid blue lines in the figure are also worth a closer look. The dashed line averages the Berkeley Earth data over only the 130 grid cells where our long-record stations actually sit; comparing it to the raw series is the fair like-for-like test, since the places are the same and data adjustments are the only difference. The solid line averages over the whole country, and the gap between the two exposes a sampling problem rather than a data problem. Century-old stations cluster in the Midwest and East, which is precisely where the 1930s heat was centered and where extreme daytime heat has increased the least since. Averaged over the long-lived station locations, even in homogenized data, puts the 1930s roughly 45% above the last two decades. If we average over the full contiguous US, however, that gap shrinks to about 10%.

Locations of long-lived weather stations used in the reproducing the viral Martz figure. Note that these tend to oversample the Midwest region where dust bowl temperature extremes were most pronounced. A Dust Bowl story, not a national one

There is a second, subtler issue with interpreting the viral graph: geography. Long-record stations are heavily concentrated in the Midwest and East (only 116 of our 543, around a fifth, sit west of 100W), which happens to be exactly where the 1930s heat was centered. Let’s break the country into NOAA’s nine US climate regions and look at each one separately, using the spatially complete Berkeley Earth data.

Days per year at or above 95°F for each of NOAA’s nine US climate regions, 1895–2023, from Berkeley Earth homogenized gridded daily TMAX (1°×1°), area-weighted within each region. Thin lines are annual values; bold lines are 11-year running means. Note that the y-axis scale differs by region.

The Dust Bowl turns out to be a story about three regions. In the Upper Midwest the 1930s averaged around 15 times as many 95F days as the last two decades (3.4 vs 0.2 per year), in the Northern Rockies and Plains around 9 times (2.8 vs 0.3), and in the Ohio Valley around 4 times (8.7 vs 2.1), with 1936 the record year in all three.

Everywhere else the present rivals or beats the past: the South is essentially tied (22.4 days in the 1930s vs 22.7 over 2000-2023, with 2011 the biggest year in the record), while the Southeast (14.7 vs 11.1 days), Southwest (4.9 vs 3.9), and West (4.6 vs 3.6) all see more 95F days now than in the 1930s, with the two western regions peaking in 2020. (The remaining two regions, the Northeast and Northwest, average less than one 95F day per year throughout the record, too few for meaningful comparisons.)

The mid-century spike in that average comes almost entirely from three regions in the middle of the country. This makes physical sense: the Dust Bowl heat was tied to a specific regional catastrophe, a multi-year drought amplified by human-induced land degradation (Cook et al 2009), with bare, desiccated soils driving daytime temperatures to levels those same fields have not approached since. A record set during an ecological disaster in one part of the country is not evidence that the whole country, much less the planet, was hotter. The national chart is really being driven by a distinct regional anomaly.2

Meanwhile, the thermometers all agree it is warming

Finally, it is worth stepping back from the hottest afternoons of the year, which are a noisy, bias-sensitive sliver of the temperature record, and looking at what US temperatures as a whole are doing. The figure below shows annual average maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures for the contiguous US from NOAA’s homogenized nClimDiv dataset.

Contiguous US annual average daily maximum (TMax), minimum (TMin), and mean (TAvg) temperature anomalies relative to 1901–2000, from NOAA nClimDiv, 1895–2025. Thin lines are annual values; bold lines are 11-year running means.

All three are unambiguous. Since 1970, maximum temperatures have warmed at 0.52F per decade, minimums at 0.51F per decade, and the average at 0.51F per decade (all p < 0.0001), with the last decade roughly 2F above the 20th century baseline. The 1930s show up here too, but as a modest bump in maximum temperatures far below present (as the dust bowl event was largely limited to summer TMax temperatures, with a much smaller effect on the remainder of the year). Extreme daytime heat in summer is one of the places where the US warming signal is weakest (a real and interesting scientific result, related in part to agricultural intensification and irrigation in the Midwest (Mueller et al 2016), but it is not representative of the climate system as a whole.

Zooming all the way out

One last piece of context. The contiguous US covers less than 2% of the Earth’s surface, and as we saw above, even within the US the Dust Bowl signal is regional. So what does the very same chart look like for the planet as a whole? The figure below reproduces the design of the viral graph (days at or above 95F, 100F, and 105F) using the Berkeley Earth daily data over global land. To avoid mixing climate changes with changes in the locations we measure (global station coverage grew from under 40% of land area in the 1890s to essentially complete today), I restrict the average to the grid cells with continuous century-long records, covering 42% of global land.3

Average number of days per year at or above 95°F, 100°F, and 105°F across global land, 1895–2023, from Berkeley Earth homogenized gridded daily TMAX (1°×1°), area-weighted by cos(latitude) and land fraction. Restricted to grid cells with complete data in at least 90% of years over 1895–2023 (42% of global land area), so that changing station coverage does not affect the trend.

Globally there is no 1930s spike at all: 1936, the year that towers over the US record, comes in at 15.1 days at or above 95F, less than a day above the surrounding years. The Dust Bowl, extraordinary as it was in Kansas, barely registers when averaged over the world’s land. Instead, hot days hold roughly steady until around 1980 and then climb: days at or above 95F are up around 70% between the early 20th century (1895-1924) and the last decade (12.8 to 22.1 per year), days at or above 100F have more than doubled (3.0 to 7.5), and days at or above 105F have nearly quintupled (0.3 to 1.6). The hotter the threshold, the faster the rise, which is exactly what you expect when a whole temperature distribution shifts upward. All ten of the warmest years by the 95F metric have occurred since 1998, and the six most recent years in the series (2018-2023) are all among them.

The US Midwest is one of the few places on Earth where the hottest days of the mid-20th century still stand; picking it as your yardstick for global warming is, to put it charitably, a choice.

So what are the takeaways here?

First, the Dust Bowl was real, and it remains the benchmark for multi-year extreme daytime heat in the central US, in adjusted and unadjusted data alike. Anyone claiming the 1930s heat is purely an artifact of bad data is simply wrong.

Second, it was a regional phenomenon. Break the country into NOAA’s nine climate regions and the 1930s is only exceptional in only three of them (the Upper Midwest, the Northern Rockies and Plains, and the Ohio Valley, at roughly 4 to 15 times recent levels). The four regions where hot days are the most common (the South, Southeast, Southwest, and West) all match or exceed the Dust Bowl today, with record years of 2011 and 2020, not 1936.

Third, raw daily data is the wrong tool for this question. Time of observation changes and the 1980s switch to MMTS sensors both suppress modern hot day counts relative to the past, and the raw and homogenized series diverge almost exactly when the instrument transition happened. In homogenized data, recent decades rival the 1930s even averaged nationally.

Fourth, hot days above a fixed threshold are a narrow and noisy way to look at the data. The overall US warming trend (around 0.5F per decade since 1970 in max, min, and mean temperatures) is robust in every dataset, raw or adjusted, satellite or surface. And globally, days above 95F have been climbing steadily for a century, with no Dust Bowl bump at all: the central US is one of the few spots on the planet where the mid-20th century still holds the record for extreme daytime heat.

The viral chart is built from real measurements, and the heat it shows was real too. But it takes a regional catastrophe, fails to account for changes in instruments and observation times, and presents the result as a national climate verdict. Accounting for the thermometers and the geography, and the US looks a lot like the rest of the planet: the hottest days on record are increasingly the ones we are living through now.

I’ve included a more detailed writeup of the methods and code to reproduce this analysis on my GitHub here.

1 Specifically: stations whose GHCNd TMAX record spans at least 1900 through 2024, keeping station-years where at least 80% of April-October days have a valid, quality-controlled observation, and keeping stations valid in at least 85% of years over 1895-2025. Hot day counts are averaged within 2°×2° grid cells and combined with cos(latitude) area weighting over the 130 cells with near-complete records. The results are insensitive to these choices: stricter completeness screens shrink the network but leave the series essentially unchanged (details and robustness checks are available in the methods writeup on my GitHub). A map of the station network is also available in the repo; note that coverage is much denser east of 100W, a point that becomes important later in the post.

2 This also explains most of the difference between the dashed and solid blue lines in the “days ≥95°F, 11-year running means” figure. The long-record station network oversamples the region where the 1930s were most extreme and undersamples the South and West where recent warming has added the most 95F days.

3 This matters a lot. Computed naively over whatever area has data each year, the global days above 95F triple from ~12 to ~37 days per year, but much of that rise is an artifact of hot regions (the Sahara, the tropics, interior Australia) entering the dataset over time. On the fixed network the increase is a still-substantial ~75% (from ~13 to ~22 days per year). The fixed-coverage region is disproportionately Northern Hemisphere midlatitude land, so this series should be read as “hot days where we have century-long records” rather than a true global land average.

People have three weeks to comment on the controversial Rosebank development, Britan’s biggest undeveloped oil and gas field.

A public consultation by the government runs until 17 August 2026.

The Rosebank field, 80 miles north west of Shetland, was granted a licence by the Conservatives. But this was ruled unlawful by Scottish courts in January 2025.

That decision followed the landmark Finch Ruling at the Supreme Court, which established that environmental impact assessment for fossil fuel projects must account for the emissions produced when extracted fuel was burned.

These emissions, known as scope 3 or downstream, were included in a resubmitted document for Rosebank in 2025.

The new energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is expected to decide whether to grant consent for the field after the consultation. Her decision will be based on the revised environmental impact assessment.

Rosebank is estimated to hold more than 480 million barrels of oil. Some estimates suggest it would release emissions totalling 254 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent over its lifetime. This is said to be equivalent to nearly 70% of the UK’s entire annual emissions in 2024. This would make it incompatible with the UK’s legally-binding climate commitments, campaigners have said.

Opponents have argued that the field would not lower UK energy bills or improve energy security because 90% of reserves are oil destined for international markets. They have stated that the field’s small gas reserves could reduce UK gas import dependency by just 1%, if none were exported.

At the weekend, the Guardian reported that production at Rosebank, if approved, could be delayed after equipment from a rig was accidentally dropped into the North Sea in April 2026.

The field operator, Adura, now expects production would be delayed from the end of this year to sometime in 2027, the Guardian reported.

The Rosebank development is in two phases.

• Phase 1 involves drilling four production and three water injection wells.
• Phase 2, dependent on results of phase 1, involves drilling a further 3 production and 2 water injection wells.

Wells would be connected by new flowlines to a redeployed Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO). Gas would be exported from the FPSO to a new gas export pipeline connecting to the existing West of Shetland Pipeline Systems. Oil will be offloaded using tankers.

Consultation details

Official notices of the consultation were published in Shetland Times, Aberdeen Press & Journal and the Daily Telegraph earlier this month.

All representations should quote reference number ES/2022/001 and be made to:

• OPRED@Energysecurity.gov.uk
• Business Support Team Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment & Decommissioning Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, AB1 Building, Crimon Place, Aberdeen AB10 1BJ

The energy secretary’s decision will be published here (see link).

Rosebank is currently owned by Adura (a joint enterprise of Shell and Equinor 80%) and Ithaca Energy (20%). Energy Voice reported last week that Adura has called for voluntary redundancies among staff at its Aberdeen headquarters. It is not known how many job cuts are planned.

Links to government notices and official documents on Rosebank

Guide to Rosebank by the campaign organisation, Uplift

• A public consultation on the Jackdaw gas field, also owned by Adura, is due to finish on 10 August 2026. The Guardian reported earlier this month that, if approved, Jackdaw would create just 27 direct full-time jobs.

If done right, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and the data centres that support it presents a unique economic opportunity for Alberta and Canada. But, as we argue in this submission to the Alberta Electricity System Operator’s (AESO)...

A hush has fallen over the Democratic Party — a “climate hush,” to be precise. The phrase captures the push within the party to focus more on the high cost of living and less on the planetary crisis, in hopes of addressing a popular diagnosis of why Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump. Since then, Democratic politicians have been mentioning the subject less on social media and in their press releases. Candidates in this summer’s primaries might have it in their platforms, but it’s the rare candidate who campaigns on it. 

But a new report pushes back against the idea that talking about climate change could cause Democrats to lose votes. The 2035 Initiative, a climate policy research center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, released polling this month that suggests that emphasizing the issue could increase support for Democratic candidates. The release comes ahead of primaries for key states — including Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia — that could determine whether Democrats regain control over Congress. 

“Our data shows pretty firmly that adding climate change to the mix is neutral to helpful from a political perspective,” said Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who worked on the report. His team conducted two surveys this summer with roughly 3,500 total participants, weighted to represent the U.S. electorate with a mix of voters from across the political spectrum. He said it’s the first empirically rigorous evaluation of the “climate hush” hypothesis. 

It’s part of a growing pushback to the climate hushing phenomenon, spearheaded by longtime climate advocate Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and a collection of experts studying political science and public opinion. “This is a sort of a sign of where the conversation has moved, in that you do have this really robust effort to attempt to highlight that climate change is something that Democrats should continue to be talking about in a big way,” said Tré Easton, vice president for public affairs at Searchlight Institute, a Democratic-aligned think tank.

Last September, Searchlight argued that the “first rule about solving climate change” was “don’t say climate change,” provocative advice that’s been invoked as an example of climate hushing. Easton rejects that characterization. “It’s just very interesting to see Searchlight treated as, like, the prime climate-husher organization,” he said. “I didn’t know that’s where I worked.” He doesn’t advise never talking about climate change, but thinks candidates should talk about it in the context of energy policy, with Democrats arguing for a climate-conscious approach that balances trade-offs and guarantees the country can meet growing demand for electricity.

Mildenberger’s research, however, points to a more ambitious approach. His polling implies that climate change isn’t as politically toxic as it’s made out to be, finding that about two-thirds of respondents supported a government program to invest in solar and wind energy no matter how its goal was framed, whether that was “addressing climate change,” “developing new energy sources,” or “reducing pollution and protecting clean air.” About 60 percent of the Republicans surveyed would back such a policy, and using the word “climate” didn’t dent their support.

When respondents were asked to choose between pairs of candidates with randomly assigned priorities, they were more likely to pick those who made climate change a top priority, Mildenberger found. Among all voters, it led to a 4.5 percentage point increase in the candidate getting selected, and for those open to voting Republican, it made no difference (though it hurt a candidate’s chances among committed Republicans). The polling also found that people who support climate action are far more motivated to vote on it than people who oppose it, meaning that talking about climate change isn’t likely to lose votes.

The organizations described in the report as scolding Democrats for talking about climate change weren’t convinced the survey results undermined their case. Liam Kerr, co-founder of WelcomePAC — a center-left political action committee that has argued Democrats are “overly focused on climate change” — said in an email that “the Democrats winning Trump voters are mostly those who have followed the opposite advice of the researchers.” In the 2024 election, Representative Jared Golden from Maine advertised that he was “fighting against Biden’s electric car mandate” and “voting to increase domestic oil and gas production,” and wound up getting reelected in a district that voted for Trump by almost 10 percentage points. That same year, Ruben Gallego, a Democratic senator from Arizona, won in a state that voted for Trump by 5.5 points. He released an “all of the above” energy plan to tackle inflation last December and has called for Democrats to talk about energy affordability rather than climate change directly.

Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, speaks during a recent press conference on Capitol Hill. Finn Gomez / Getty Images

There’s one thing everyone involved agrees on: Climate change is not a top priority for voters. Mildenberger’s research found that respondents ranked climate change 12th out of 15 issues, way behind the cost of living and health care but ahead of foreign policy and AI. Where you go from there has become a point of contention. In Easton’s opinion, it’s not worth chasing a small electoral benefit on an issue voters don’t prioritize. 

“If I am an operative advising a candidate, and you’re like, ‘I get a very small benefit if I talk about this thing,’ I’m not going to tell you to talk about that thing,” Easton said. “I want to encourage you to try and find a thing that gets you the biggest benefit you can with voters, especially in these hard-to-win places.”

Between the two camps, there’s a fundamental difference in thinking about what will lead to climate action. Can Democrats achieve results by working quietly behind the scenes, keeping climate change out of partisan debates? Or does staying quiet about it reduce the general sense that it’s a vital issue, eroding the political will to do anything about it?

Mildenberger is on the second team, arguing that Democrats will lose the opportunity to act on climate change the next time they’re in power if the subject slips out of the political conversation. “We’re not going to pass a climate policy bill, or prioritize it, or do what we need to do to solve this problem if there isn’t debate and conversation and attention to the issue,” he said. He pointed to the debate over how to address climate change in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election as creating the momentum for former President Joe Biden to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, a package of green incentives that was the country’s widest-ranging climate law in history, at least until Republicans repealed most of it last year.

Others argue that climate policymaking can be “quiet” — small interventions tucked away into bigger bills without drawing the attention of the media, where it can be drawn into polarized debates. “The more that something is viewed as a pet political project of a particular political party, the more something is viewed in the partisan lens, the harder it is to achieve durable policy success on that particular thing,” Easton said. 

Easton thinks that climate change is so ingrained in the Democratic Party, it’s not going anywhere, even if politicians don’t mention it very often. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, barely mentioned climate change in his campaign, but Easton said he doesn’t doubt Mamdani’s commitment to taking action. And in the end, Democrats can’t act on climate change, or anything else, unless they’re voted into office.

“I get it — if the cause of your life is fighting climate change and this is what you’ve devoted your career to, I understand why you want to put out work like this [survey],” Easton said. “The cause of my life is making sure that autocrats and authoritarians don’t win our government again. And hopefully when the folks who defeat those autocrats and authoritarians get in power, they will do work on any host of important things, including climate change.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Climate hushing’ has swept the Democratic Party. New polling suggests it’s a mistake. on Jul 27, 2026.

Brazil’s groundwater under pressure Channel News brendan 27th July 2026 Teaser Media

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 19, 2026 thru Sat, July 25, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (11 articles)

• Insane': Republicans Push To Punish Canada For Wildfires “We will not tolerate this incompetence,” vowed Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, who may not understand how climate change works. Huffington Post, Jennifer Bendery, Jul 17, 2026.
• UN to list more sites as 'in danger' from conflict or climate change Phys.org, Simon Valmary and Celia Lebur, Jul 18, 2026.
• As mosquito ranges expand, better monitoring is key to preventing disease Monitoring is expensive and labor intensive. But it helps public health officials stop outbreaks. Ars Technica, Madeline Shaw, Jul 19, 2026.
• Climate Scientists Say The Dice Are Loaded. Here's Why "Just have a Think" on Youtube, Dave Borlace, July 19, 2026.
• Opinion: Is the Colorado River in a climate doom loop? We caused a problem, and our efforts to fix the problem make it worse Colorado Newsline, Gary Wockner, Jul 20, 2026.
• Rising seas magnify the dangers of coastal Georgia`s industrial past The state’s first Superfund research center is looking into how climate change is resurfacing industrial pollution. Grist, Emily Jones, Jul 20, 2026.
• Extreme heat morphs into a major economic shock for an unprepared Europe Europe’s status as the planet’s fastest-warming continent is becoming a serious drag on its economic prospects. The Business Standard, Laura Millan, Jul 21, 2026.
• What Happens to Our Brains in a Warming World? In this era of advancing AI, when everyone is debating the nature of 'intelligence,' we have forgotten that our brains run well only within a narrow band of temperature. What happens to the brain once that temperature threshold is crossed is often overlooked in discussions of climate change. State of the Planet, Marco Tedesco and Burcin Ikiz, Jul 22, 2026.
• The year climate change came for the Tour de France Record heat, wildfire threats, and an unprecedented stage modification highlighted the growing challenge global warming poses to endurance sports. Grist, Tik Root, Jul 23, 2026.
• Climate change to obliterate $1.5 trillion in U.S. home values Climate change will wipe out about $1.47 trillion in U.S. home values over the next three decades and hasten economic gaps in U.S. communities, a report released on Monday finds. CBS News, Kate Gibson , Jul 23, 2026.
• This El Niño is set to be the largest on record by a ‘mind-blowing margin’ Forecasters predict that the monster climate pattern will combine with global warming to push global temperatures in 2027 to new heights. Nature, James Dinneen, Jul 23, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (5 articles)

• How Companies Have Abandoned Their Climate Goals and Let Themselves Off the Hook Big business made big promises about saving the planet. Following through hasn’t been easy. New York Times, David Gelles, Jul 17, 2026.
• Trump threatens new Canada tariffs over fires sending 'filthy' air into US cities US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada after hundreds of wildfires have left much of the northern US covered by a blanket of smoke. BBC News, Nadine Yousif, Jul 18, 2026.
• Majority of US voters link extreme weather to climate crisis, study finds Top Democrat says findings show public ‘way ahead of the politicians’ as Trump dismisses global heating as ‘hoax’ The Guardian, Dharna Noor with graphics by Andrew Witherspoon, Jul 19, 2026.
• Trump Lashes Out at National Academies of Sciences Over Climate Guide For Judges Trump claimed without evidence that the manual was “fraudulent, biased, and misleading.” Inside Climate News, Dennis Pillion, July 20, 2026.
• Q&A: What the EU`s carbon market review means for climate action The European Commission has put forward new plans to cut emissions under the EU carbon market more slowly, from 2031 onwards. Carbon Brief, Orla Dwyer, Jul 20, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (3 articles)

• Why Earth is reflecting less sunlight Climate change is first and foremost an emissions problem. It’s also fast becoming a reflection problem. Climate Trunk, John Lang, Jul 21, 2026.
• The climate crisis onscreen: 14 films that made waves Climate-themed films matter more than ever as the Trump administration weakens environmental protections. Here are some of the best and most meaningful ones. Capital & Main, Alex Demyanenko, Jul 22, 2026.
• Trump calls climate change a hoax. Americans aren`t buying it New polling finds broad agreement that the climate crisis is worsening heat, floods, and wildfires. Mother Jones, Dharna Noor, Jul 24, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (3 articles)

• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #29 2026 A regular weekly survey of climate-related research from academic, government and NGO sources. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Jul 16, 2026.
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #30 2026 Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Jul 23, 2026.
• France orders total evacuation of Cap Ferret peninsula as wildfire spreads ‘Unpredictable’ blaze forces evacuation of holiday spot Cap Ferret and Spain declares emergency over fires near Madrid The Guardian, Jon Henley in Paris and Sam Jones in Madrid, Jul 24, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (2 articles)

• Lake Powell shrinks and marinas must adapt “The Colorado River is in full-blown crisis mode,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates, an environmental nonprofit. AP News, DORANY PINEDA and JOHN LOCHER, Jul 22, 2026.
• Air conditioning is not enough to keep people cool — can scientists find an alternative? Air conditioning can end up as a climate maladaptation due to installation and operation expenses as well as serious side-effects, but advances in methods to passively cool buildings hint at solutions without drawbacks. Nature, Rachel Fieldhouse, Jul 22, 2026.

Miscellaneous (2 articles)

• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #29 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 12, 2026 thru Sat, July 18, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Jul 19, 2026.
• Oil Firms Knew for Decades of Methane’s Danger to Planet, Documents Suggest The companies knew they were releasing more of the greenhouse gas than they publicly reported, according to industry files cited by the Center for Climate Integrity, an activist organization. NYT, Hiroko Tabuchi, Jul 21, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (1 article)

• Trump Attacks National Academies Over Climate Chapter in Judges` Manual The president joined Republican officials who slammed the National Academies of Sciences for a chapter about climate science in an educational guide for judges. NYT, Karen Zraick, Jul 20, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

•  Hot days, cold thermometers Why a viral graph on US days above 95F is misleading and overstates regional warmth The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather, Jul 22, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

America’s offshore wind farms have already shown their ability to keep electricity flowing during brutal winter storms. Now, the clean energy resource has proved it can also bolster the grid during major heat waves.

Earlier this month, as dangerously hot and humid temperatures settled over the eastern United States, two wind projects near New England consistently delivered hundreds of megawatts to the grid as residents cranked up their air conditioners. The influx of wind reduced utilities’ reliance on dirty, expensive oil-burning peaker plants, which operate only when electricity demand is through the roof, according to the data firm Grid Status.

Analysts compared how the regional system performed during the July heat wave and a sweltering stretch in June 2025, before much of the current offshore wind capacity came online. Oil provided nearly 10 percent of the region’s total power supply during peak-demand conditions on July 2, 2026 — that period’s hottest day — down from nearly 15 percent at the highest point on June 24, 2025. That’s a drop of more than a gigawatt in oil-fueled generation between those two days.

Part of the decline was due to slightly weaker overall demand during the July 2 peak than during last year’s event. But Grid Status said that stronger generation from the region’s utility-scale offshore wind farms was a key factor. The projects are coming online despite repeated attempts by the Trump administration to block them.

Read Next Biden’s climate law is dead. The energy transition might not be. Jake Bittle

The surge of hydropower delivered via the New England Clean Energy Connect power line, which started carrying electricity from Canada to Maine in January, also reduced peak oil use. Meanwhile, an abundance of rooftop solar installations significantly eased overall electricity demand during the heat wave.

“Even if total demand was in line with last year, we would still be hundreds of megawatts below what the total [peak oil] burn would’ve been,” said Tim Ennis, a Grid Status analyst in Boston. ​“We didn’t have to turn the oil on as hard at lunchtime because we had the wind and [hydropower line] online as well.”

Ennis noted that offshore wind is often touted by experts for its ability to bolster grid reliability during winter. New England’s power system is becoming increasingly constrained in colder months, owing to the shift to electric space and water heating systems. Ocean winds in the region are at their strongest and steadiest during the season, meaning offshore turbines can help meet some of that growing electricity demand and reduce stress on gas-fueled power plants.

While wind speeds are generally lower during summer, the recent heat wave confirms that the projects still play a meaningful role on the hottest days — more of which are headed for the region this week.

The 806-MW Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Massachusetts, finished construction in March, and its developer had activated 49 of its 62 turbines as of early May. The 704-MW Revolution Wind, near Rhode Island, started sending power to the grid in March and is set to reach full commercial operations by the second half of 2026.

Read Next The Pentagon is blocking more than 150 wind projects over drone fears Austin Corona

Ennis said data shows that the commissioned offshore turbines relieved grid stress from July 1 to 4, during periods when air conditioning use was at its peak, offsetting some of utilities’ need to turn on oil plants, a step that adds to customers’ already high utility bills. All told, New England operators produced 42.2 gigawatt-hours of oil-fired power during that four-day heat wave, down 37 percent from the total oil burned from June 23 to 25, 2025.

Outside New England, the already completed 132-MW South Fork Wind farm had a strong showing off the coast of New York. The project, which came online in 2024, operated at nearly full capacity on July 2, sending electricity into the heat-stressed grid on Long Island, Mikkel Mæhlisen of Ørsted, which jointly owns South Fork Wind with Skyborn Renewables, recently wrote on LinkedIn.

The Independent System Operator New England has previously stressed the role that offshore wind can play in supporting the grid during extreme heat events. The regional grid operator spoke out last August after the Trump administration halted construction of Revolution Wind, which was then 80 percent complete.

Read Next ‘Why take those jobs away?’: The unionized workers decrying Trump’s war on wind Michael Sainato, The Guardian

“Recent heatwaves in New England drove demand for electricity to very high levels and demonstrated that our region needs all generation resources with market obligations to be available to meet demand and maintain required reserves,” ISO New England said in an August 25, 2025, statement, noting that delaying Revolution Wind ​“will increase risks to reliability.”

A federal judge overturned the stop-work order in September. But its developer Ørsted was forced to hit the brakes again in December after Trump’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management paused the leases for all five large-scale U.S. offshore wind projects under construction. Though judges later lifted those orders as well, the delays still cost some developers millions of dollars and threatened projects’ viability.

The Trump administration has since adopted a new tactic for kneecapping America’s fledgling offshore wind industry: paying developers to abandon plans for future wind farms, using billions of dollars in taxpayer funding. The strategy makes it highly unlikely that any new projects will be built in the next few years.

However, when all five wind farms are fully up and running, they will add nearly 6 GW in clean capacity to help the East Coast navigate days of bone-chilling cold or life-threatening heat.

“The potential costs and benefits of offshore wind have been debated for decades,” said Fara Courtney, who consults on offshore wind policies and research projects for Outer Harbor Consulting, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. ​“Now we have the first projects up and producing, [and] the data is clear: Offshore wind is a new American energy sector with a big role to play in meeting this region’s skyrocketing energy demand.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Here’s how offshore wind helped New England beat record heat on Jul 26, 2026.

News & Resources Learn more about our 2026 cohort of RAFI farmer grantees. Watch the FOCN webinar on Community Crop Variety Trials. View more trainings and workshops in our Trainings & Webinar Library. Listen to Come to the Table’s new podcast, Food & Conversations. Find farm grants, loans, and relief payment programs through Farm Aid’s […]

The post Links & Information: Farmers Connection Fall 2026 appeared first on RAFI.

Christine Waugh-Fleischmann, an art teacher who said she spends up to $200 a week on gas driving to see her grandchildren, is a Democratic voter in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. One of the most competitive seats in the country, it is currently held by Republican Representative Tom Barrett and she believes the seat can be flipped, partly due to the high price of gas. 

“I do see a lot of people in my conservative neighborhood here who are very upset,” she told Reuters. “It’s gas. It’s grocery prices, it’s health care costs.”

The arithmetic of her frustration is easy to trace. After war broke out with Iran in late February, the average price of gas in Michigan jumped roughly 32 percent in three weeks, from $2.99 to $3.95 a gallon. Governor Gretchen Whitmer declared a formal energy emergency to let southeast Michigan stations sell cheaper summer-blend fuel, citing both the war and tariffs. Prices kept climbing anyway — including a 90-cent spike in a single week, among the sharpest in any midterm battleground — briefly topping $4 before coming down in recent months.

Read Next Why are so many Democrats going quiet on climate change? Kate Yoder

Crisis, emergency orders, persistent pain heading into the fall: That is the narrative spine of Michigan’s midterms, and both parties know it.

A ground shift

Republicans spent years circling Michigan as their best 2026 pickup opportunity. Now doubts are creeping in. A Democrat won a special state Senate election in May by nearly 20 points in a district Kamala Harris carried by less than one, and President Donald Trump’s economic approval fell even among Republicans, from 74 percent to 62 percent, between March and April.

In a Climate Power survey of 600 likely Michigan voters conducted in mid-June, 42 percent of those polled, including 44 percent of independents, said they would be less likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supports Trump’s energy policies, as opposed to 21 percent who said they’d be more likely. And 58 percent said Trump has made energy prices more expensive, while 63 percent rejected his claim that high gas prices are a “small price to pay” for the war in Iran. Since the war began, 45 percent said they had grown more supportive of diversifying America’s energy sources, including solar and wind.

“Trump’s energy agenda is costing Michigan families at the pump and on their power bills — and voters know it,” said Tom Lenard, Climate Power’s Michigan director, warning that candidates who back it “do so at their own political peril.”

Not every voter in Barrett’s district sees it that way. Alexander Melton, a 38-year-old heating and air conditioning technician, told Reuters that he still backs the Republican congressman. “We don’t dictate the price of gas,” he said.

Affordability versus the ‘Green New Scam’

In the Democratic Senate primary, which takes place August 4, Haley Stevens, Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed have all tied affordability messaging to clean energy — McMorrow, before exiting the race, called it “a freedom issue, it’s a cost issue” and argued that Democrats are “on the precipice” of lowering bills. Republican Mike Rogers, who’s running for a U.S. Senate seat for the second time, countered that the push for renewables is itself what is driving up Michigan’s energy costs.

Read Next The Trump EPA ended the ‘green new scam.’ A year later, communities are still paying the price.  Sophie Hurwitz

Underneath the messaging war sits real economic damage. Michigan lost $4.1 billion in planned clean manufacturing investment and roughly 11,700 jobs after the Trump-era rollbacks, while $540 million in climate grants were canceled or delayed — including $156 million meant to help low-income residents install solar panels. And the administration ordered Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant running past its planned retirement, a move the state’s attorney general and other critics said will cost ratepayers more than transitioning away from it.

The fallout has cut across party lines. In March of last year, Representative John James of Shelby Township and at least seven other House Republicans called on their colleagues to preserve the Biden-era clean energy tax credits. “We must not neglect the sector-wide energy tax provisions that manufacturers and job creators rely on in my district,” James said.

Divided government, divided stakes

The starkest fight is in Lansing. Michigan’s 2023 Clean Energy and Jobs Act requires 100 percent renewable electricity by 2040, but the November elections could determine the law’s future. House Republicans last month passed “Project Lighthouse,” a package that would repeal the clean energy mandates; its sponsor, state Representative Pauline Wendzel, called the 2023 requirements “arbitrary” and said they help large investor-owned utilities instead of everyday ratepayers. The legislation is likely dead in the Democratic-held Senate — for now. But DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, the state’s largest utilities, will submit integrated resource plans in 2026 for the first time under the new law, meaning the election will set the ground rules just as they take effect.

Ben Poulson, state government affairs director for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, argued the repeal legislation reaches further than its sponsors let on. “It repeals a lot of programs that we have been using to lower energy waste and lessens the accountability that we have on utility companies here in the state,” he told Planet Detroit.

Denise Keele, executive director of the Michigan Climate Action Network, said that climate change is showing up on the campaign trail under a different name. “We’re seeing it show up as energy affordability,” she said, noting that Michiganders pay some of the highest residential electricity and gas rates in the country. House Republicans, she said, “are essentially blaming clean and renewable energy as [to] why those energy prices are going up” — even though renewables make up only about 11 percent of the state’s mix and wind and solar are cheaper and faster to build. Her frustration cuts both ways: Not enough Democrats, she argued, are running on renewable energy’s success, a reticence she likened to what acclaimed environmental activist and journalist Bill McKibben calls “climate hushing.” The honest case — that prices will rise less with renewables than with fossil fuels — “is apparently too hard to message.”

Data centers and utility money

The hottest flashpoint may be data centers, which have driven up utility rates while promising jobs — and split traditional Democratic constituencies. Gubernatorial frontrunner Jocelyn Benson, endorsed by the Michigan League of Conservation Voters at a Grand Rapids riverfront event, has pledged enforceable guardrails on data centers and utilities and a moratorium on companies that violate environmental standards. Her platform centers on expanding clean energy to lower utility bills, replacing aging water infrastructure and reinstating polluter pay laws. 

Read Next America’s data center backlash is bipartisan — can it stay that way? Zoya Teirstein & Kate Yoder

But some unions back the data center projects. “We respectfully urge policymakers to support a responsible path forward for data center development that protects communities, grows the tax base, strengthens our workforce and keeps Michigan competitive for decades to come,” Douglas W. Stockwell, business manager and general vice president of Operating Engineers 324, testified at a hearing in Michigan’s House of Representatives.

Voter anger at the utilities is reshaping the money race, too. More than 150 Michigan politicians from both parties have pledged to reject campaign funding from Consumers Energy and DTE, according to the Michigan League of Conservation Voters — even as Consumers Energy requested another rate hike for its electricity customers this week. 

“This is disgusting what’s happening and it’s exploitative, it’s extractive, it’s unethical,” said Jerry Norris, a Lansing community activist who said he is following the money this cycle. “It might not own everybody when they accept money like that, but it influences it, and it creates an obligation and it creates a debt,” he told WILX10.

For voters like Alexis Jones of Lansing, the debate comes down to a number on an envelope. His utility bill is “almost $400,” he said. 

“It’s terrible. And not only do I have to look out for me, but I’ve got little munchkins, grandkids, to look after. And things are out of control.”

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Michigan, the price of energy is on the ballot and both parties know it on Jul 25, 2026.