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As mentioned in the recently published prolog to EGU2026 article, I submitted an abstract to talk about the results of the experiment we ran on Skeptical Science to gauge the effectiveness of our rebuttals. This blog post is a "companion article" to that presentation in session EOS4.1 Geoethics: Linking Geoscience Knowledge, Ethical Responsibility, and Action and will go into somewhat greater details than is possible in the 8 minutes available during the oral session for my presentation about Results of the Skeptical Science experiment and impacts on relaunched website.

Introduction

Skeptical Science (SkS) is a website and non-profit science education organization with international reach founded by John Cook in 2007. Our main purpose is to debunk misconceptions and misinformation about human-caused climate change and our website features a database that currently has more than 250 rebuttals based on peer-reviewed literature. SkS has evolved from a one-person operation to a team project with volunteers from around the globe.

Why set up an experiment?

We wanted to find out how effective our rebuttals are at reducing belief in myths and how effective they are in increasing acceptance of facts. We hoped to find out if there was a need to improve our rebuttals, whether we could identify key features of effective rebuttals, learn who is interested in reading our rebuttals and even if we could measure real-world impact of them.  

Design of the experiment (1)

Users arriving via an organic Google search at an English language rebuttal were invited to participate in a short survey via a modal screen. If they provided informed consent they were shown a pre-rebuttal survey and after reading through the rebuttal and reaching its end they were shown the same survey again as the post-rebuttal part. We also tracked their start and end times to measure how much time they spent on the page. 

Design of the experiment (2)

For both the pre- and post-rebuttal survey participants were shown the same statement related to the rebuttal they accessed. They randomly either saw a fact or a myth statement. The full list of statements used in the experiment is available in Appendix A of our published paper.

Here is an example:

• Rebuttal: "How reliable are climate models"
• Fact statement: "Scientists' computer models have been successful at predicting global warming over long time periods."
• Myth statement. "Scientists' computer models are too unreliable to predict future climate."  

Participants then selected their level of (dis)agreement with either of those statements on a 6-point Likert scale from "Strongly agree" to "Strongly disagree".

Experiment by the numbers

The data analysed for our recently published paper spans the period from November 2021 to July 2025. During that time, 858,016 visitors were shown the initial invitation, 13,432 consented to participate and filled out the pre-survey. 6,261 of them also completed the post-rebuttal form. 3146 participants were shown a factual statement in the survey quiz while 3115 were shown a myth statement.

Results - incoming climate perceptions

The majority of participants came to the website already convinced about climate change with nearly half of them (46.3 %) showing either full agreement with the climate fact or full disagreement with the climate myth. We may therefore either be just "chanting to the choir" or - what we hope is the case as it's a more constructive interpretation - our content is “teaching the choir to sing” by providing resources that empower people to respond to climate misinformation. Our survey also reached a significant number of undecided or dismissive users. 

Results - change in accuracy

We also looked at the change in accuracy - the difference between the pre- and post-rebuttal surveys. And the results are a bit of a mixed bag:

The good news is that overall, the belief in myths decreased and that we saw improved climate perceptions even among "dismissive" readers, those who either agreed strongly with the myth or disagreed strongly with the fact in the pre-survey.

The not so good news is that for a small subset of visitors and specific rebuttals, percpetion actually decresased. Those who were already highly certain (strongly agreed with facts) sometimes saw a slight dip in accuracy after reading a rebuttal. Certainly, not what we had hoped to see!

A bit of a guessing game

We had decided to keep the survey short with only one question asked to maximize participation, and therefore didn't include a question to learn why participants selected one of the options. Because of that we had to play a bit of a "guessing game" to find out what might have led to the decrease in perception for some rebuttals.

We decided to look at rebuttals which had received at least 50 completed surveys and devided them into two groups of top vs bottom performing rebuttals. We then compared the Top 3 (positive shift) to the Bottom 3 (negative shift) performers:

• Top performers: Always articulated a replacement fact and frequently identified the logical fallacy used in the myth.
• Bottom performers: Failed to provide a replacement fact and only rarely explained the underlying fallacy.

What's next?

In parallel to running our experiment, we have been working on a complete relaunch of the Skeptical Science website (see related companion blog post for EOS1.1). One new feature will be the inclusion of the fallacy employed by the climate myth. The results of our experiment indicate that moving to the fact-myth-fallacy structure in our rebuttals is a pretty good idea to increase chances of a successful debunking.

Future plans

We plan to restart the experiment some time after the relaunch of the Skeptical Science website. When we do, we plan to improve the survey design based on what we learned during this first run. We will most likely also add a few targeted and potentially open-ended questions to avoid having to guess what brought people to our website or what influenced their rating.

The team setting up the experiment

The setup for the experiment was implemented by members from our volunteer team, bringing their respective experience and knowledge to the table:

• John Cook provided the research know-how and the fact/myth statements related to the rebuttals.
• Doug Bostrom setup the necessary technical underpinnings in the backend.
• Collin Maessen and Timo Lubitz did all of the needed programming and made sure that the current website worked together well with the server running the experiment.

Our paper in Geoscience Communication

Our full results were published open access in Geoscience Communication on April 2, 2026 in Quantifying the impact of Skeptical Science rebuttals in reducing climate misperceptions.

 

You can download the full presentation in PDF-format here (2.5MB).

Reference: Winkler, B. and Cook, J.: Results of the Skeptical Science experiment and impacts on relaunched website, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-4110, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-4110, 2026. 

Computational loads pose “immediate risks,” the grid watchdog said. Certain grid participants must take seven actions by Aug. 3 in response. 

The fastest approach to expand the grid is via the distribution system, using front-of-meter storage to precisely target substations and feeders that need relief, writes Jigar Shah of Deploy Action.

The state's Justice Department is “investigating potential violations of law” associated with offshore wind lease buyouts and anticipates litigation, the California Energy Commission said.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 6-3 ruling, along partisan lines, ends 61 years of voter protections for African-Americans and…

A prominent ultra-conservative think tank with a long history of climate denial and close ties to the Trump administration is questioning whether all Americans should be allowed to cast ballots in elections. 

“Look, I’m going to say something very controversial: Not every adult over the age of 18 should have the right to vote,” Jim Lakely, communications director of the Heartland Institute, said during an early April episode of the group’s In the Tank podcast. 

Heartland was a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for Trump’s second term.
 
 “We did not have universal suffrage when the framers of the Constitution founded this country. It varied a little bit state-to-state, but basically you had to be a white man. You had to be an owner of property, and a certain amount of property, and that pretty much was only white men,” Lakely said. “We’re never going back to that, of course, and I wouldn’t actually argue for that. But there’s something to be said for the way they set that up on purpose, and it was because they wanted only people who have a stake in the country — mainly the people paying taxes to support the government — should have the franchise and be able to select the direction of the government.”

Lakely’s comments, which DeSmog has quoted in full at his request, came just days before Heartland hosted a two-day conference in Washington, D.C. keynoted by Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Zeldin has been floated to replace Pam Bondi as Trump’s attorney general. 

Zeldin praised the Heartland Institute, which has long been at the forefront of spreading climate disinformation and strongly backed the EPA’s recent repeal of the “endangerment finding,” the Obama-era determination that under-girded the federal government’s authority to limit climate-heating air pollution.

It was time to “celebrate vindication” of the group’s decades of anti-climate campaigning, Zeldin said.

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All Americans should be worried that a top Trump cabinet official openly lauded a group that questions universal suffrage, said climate scientist Michael Mann, the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. 

“Heartland’s authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda is now exposed for all to see,” Mann told DeSmog in email. “The assault on climate action and the assault on democracy are one and the same, an effort to advance the authoritarian agenda of fossil fuel interests and the politicians in their pay.”
 
 When approached for comment, the EPA told DeSmog: “Administrator Zeldin is doing something genuinely different at EPA, refocusing the agency on its core mission of protecting human health and the environment and exercising its statutory authority as written, not as expansively reimagined in prior years. Administrator Zeldin will continue advancing President Trump’s agenda on behalf of the Americans who elected him to do exactly that.”

‘Reduce the Franchise’

During the podcast, Heartland senior fellow S.T. Karnick backed up Lakely’s comments about voting. “The original plan in America was that votes would go one vote to each property-holding family,” Karnick said. “That has been hacked away at throughout the decades and for a two and a half centuries now.”

“Now, can you go back?” he added. “Well, anything’s possible, but it wouldn’t be the same country we’re living in in any way to start to reduce the franchise.” Karnick said that an alternative solution would be to “repeal the doggone 17th Amendment,” the 1913 addition to the Constitution that established the direct election of U.S. senators, and return to having senators elected by state legislatures. “It would be a way of pulling away from the popular votes,” he said.  

Heartland Research Fellow Linnea Lucken and Editorial Director Chris Talgo also appeared on the podcast.

During the Heartland podcast, Lakely made the false claim that the use of mail-in ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic created “quite a bit” of “easy natural election fraud,” saying that “if you could go to the grocery store, if you could go to a BLM [Black Lives Matter] march, you can get in line at your local polling place and vote and participate in the election.” When DeSmog approached Lakely for comment about this last claim, Lakely responded: “I stand by that.”
 
 Zeldin, a longtime Trump supporter, has previously endorsed similar claims. Following Trump’s loss of the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Zeldin — then a House member representing New York’s 1st Congressional District — “sided with Republicans who were amplifying doubts about its legitimacy,” according to The New York Times, and shared ideas with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on how to discredit Biden’s win. On January 6, 2021, Zeldin voted against certifying the election results.

The following year, while running as the Republican candidate for governor of New York, Zeldin was disqualified from getting his ticket an additional ballot line for the Independence Party, because nearly 13,000 of the petition signatures his campaign submitted to the state elections board were photocopied duplicates.
 
 Soon after taking over the EPA in 2025, Zeldin promised that the agency would begin “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Since then he has revoked billions in climate funding, slashed thousands of EPA staff, and rolled back dozens of clean air and water protections.
 
 In his Heartland keynote address, Zeldin argued that these rollbacks were “what the American public voted for” when they re-elected Trump. 

The EPA chief praised the Heartland audience for being “right there on the front lines” of opposition to the endangerment finding. “I appreciate all of you for having the thoughtfulness years and decades ahead of your time.”

Attorney General Zeldin?

If Zeldin replaced Bondi, he would oversee the Justice Department’s defense of his EPA actions in court, including lawsuits by states and environmental groups over the endangerment finding repeal.

“The Supreme Court, in my opinion quite correctly, would say that the EPA should not be putting forth trillions of dollars in regulations without there being a vote in Congress,” Zeldin said in his speech, adding that members of Congress are “the ones who, as recently as this upcoming November [mid-term elections], put their name on the ballot, go before the people, and the American public will decide who in this republic will represent them.”

Zeldin’s record of election denial would fit right in at the top of the current Justice Department.

Since Trump took office, the department has shifted from enforcing voting rights laws — including scrutinizing whether states are conducting fair elections and prosecuting threats against election officials — to investigating alleged voter fraud. Most of the lawyers working in the Voting Section of the agency’s Civil Rights Division have left, according to reporting by Wired, and many of their replacements have ties to election denial groups.

Right now, Trump’s cratering approval ratings with voters paint a grim picture for Republicans in the November elections  — but as part of his efforts to manipulate the mid-terms, the Trump Justice Department has been openly coming to their aid. 

Under former AG Bondi, the department began collecting voter data from cooperative states — and suing dozens of states to get more — apparently hoping to direct purges of the rolls. The FBI in January raided an election office and seized 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, which Trump lost, although It’s well-established that voter fraud is very rare in the United States, and didn’t happen in 2020.

A number of red states have already answered Trump’s call to create more House seats for Republicans by redrawing their election districts. Now more are on the way because in late April the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, handing down a ruling that effectively lets states redraw their election districts in ways that weaken the voting power of Blacks and other minorities.

Within hours of the decision, several southern states began taking steps to create election maps that will increase the number of Republican House seats.

Badge of Dishonor

The Heartland Institute, which has denied that humans are driving climate change, calling it a “delusion,” has boasted of its “strong” ties to “big individuals” in the Trump administration.

During Trump’s first term, as DeSmog reported at the time, Heartland advised the EPA on staffing and policy decisions. “They recognized us as the pre-eminent organization opposing the radical climate alarmism agenda and instead promoting sound science and policy,” said Tim Huelskamp — a former Republican congressman who was then leading Heartland — in 2018.
 
 Heartland also advised a member of the administration’s National Security Council, longtime climate denier William Happer, on how to discredit the fact that burning fossil fuels was driving dangerous levels of global heating.

When Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, he invited Heartland’s then-CEO Joseph Bast to attend the announcement at the White House.

The Heartland Institute received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil. It has received donations from Republican donors in the Mercer family, as well as foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a fossil fuel giant and a leading sponsor of climate science denial.

“What a badge of dishonor it is to be a keynote speaker at this plutocrat-funded propaganda event masquerading as a ‘conference,” Mann said to DeSmog, referencing Zeldin’s ties to the group. “Polluting interests can only advance their agenda of a fossil fuel-dependent America by keeping Republicans in power.”

The post Heartland Institute Podcast Questions Whether All Americans ‘Should Have the Right to Vote’ appeared first on DeSmog.

Tiny particles of plastic amassing in the atmosphere may be intensifying warming, according to new study. 

Read more on E360 →

While most Canadians enjoy a clean, reliable, and affordable energy supply, remote communities, which are predominantly Indigenous, are still highly dependent on expensive imported fossil fuels for both heat and electricity. This is a system that’s...

Walk into a grocery store today and you’re likely to see the word regenerative on cereal boxes, coffee bags, snack foods, even meat and dairy. The word promises a better kind of agriculture—a future beyond the extractive, chemical-intensive system that has dominated American farming for decades.

Many consumers reasonably assume that regenerative food is grown without toxic pesticides. After all, how can a system claim to regenerate soil, biodiversity, and human health while relying on chemicals designed to kill living organisms? 

Yet Friends of the Earth’s new label guide finds that some regenerative labeling programs still allow the use of synthetic pesticides, including substances linked to cancer, hormone disruption, infertility, and neurological harm.

That disconnect matters. For families trying to reduce pesticide exposure—especially those with young children or who are pregnant—labels are not just values statements. They are health decisions.

It also matters for the land itself. Decades of scientific research make it clear that reducing reliance on fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers is foundational to any credible regenerative system. These chemicals degrade soil biology, decimate pollinators, contribute significantly to climate emissions, and pollute our air and water. A label that ignores this reality risks reinforcing the very system it claims to transform.

The report finds that certifications using the term regenerative vary dramatically in what they require—not just for harmful inputs but also for soil health practices. It also finds that some of the most rigorous standards meeting regenerative principles don’t use the term at all. 

Overall, the analysis shows that the USDA Organic seal, and labels that build on it—Regenerative Organic Certified and Real Organic Project—lead in prohibiting toxic pesticides and synthetic fertilizers as well as in requiring ecological soil health practices like cover cropping, crop rotations, appropriate tillage, and feeding the soil with biological sources of fertility.

A label is only as strong as the verification system behind it. The report also highlights another source of inconsistency: some labels are backed by rigorous, enforceable criteria while others rely on vague requirements and weak verification systems.

For a labeling program to be credible, it needs to do more than make claims—it needs to define clear standards and verify that farmers meet those standards through independent audits. 

Equally important is traceability—the system a labeling program puts in place to track a product through the supply chain. 

This matters in a very practical way for consumers trying to avoid pesticide residues. With no reliable way to trace a product from the field where it’s grown to the labeled product, it’s impossible to know whether it was mixed with conventional supply at some point along the way.

Again, organic stands out: it requires third-party certification, annual inspections, and binding standards with a full audit trail from farm to shelf. And it’s the only food labeling system in the U.S. backed by federal law.

Studies show that just one week on an organic diet can reduce pesticide levels in people’s bodies up to 95 percent. And decades of data show that organic farming systems result in regenerative outcomes for the land. 

More concerning still is how thoroughly the term regenerative can be co-opted when it’s not attached to any standards at all. Pesticide companies now market themselves as leaders in regenerative agriculture, even as they continue to profit from the very products that decimate soil life, biodiversity, and our health. When a single word can be used to describe both pesticide-free farming and farming systems drenched in toxic chemicals, it ceases to function as a meaningful word. 

This kind of greenwashing doesn’t just create confusion—it diverts public energy and attention away from true solutions. For those seeking a genuinely healthier food system, labels grounded in rigorous standards—like organic—offer a clear path.

Labels matter because public policy is failing. The explosion of regenerative labels points to a deeper issue: the failure of U.S. food and farm policy. Farmers operate within a system that heavily subsidizes chemical-intensive monocultures while making it riskier to adopt ecological practices like crop diversification or cover cropping. 

Meanwhile, regulators in the United States continue to allow over 80 pesticides banned in other countries because science shows they threaten our health or the environment.

Meaningful labels are doing important work to bridge the chasm between what farmers, consumers, and the planet need and the toxic food system our public policies are delivering.

But labels alone cannot fix a broken system. Ultimately, the goal should not be a marketplace crowded with competing labels, each asking consumers to decode its meaning. It should be a food system where the highest standards—healthy soil, clean water, thriving biodiversity, safe food, and fair conditions for farmers and workers—are the baseline, not the exception.

Until then, the clarity, transparency, and integrity of food labels matter. 

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

Photo courtesy of Jan Kopriva, Unsplash

The post Op-Ed | Consumers Think Regenerative Means No Pesticides. They’re Often Wrong. appeared first on Food Tank.

State regulators could require utilities such as PPL Electric, PECO Energy and FirstEnergy to integrate ATTs into proposed projects. Similar laws have been signed in at least nine states with more bills pending.

A combination of sustainability strategies could slash emissions from delivering parcels from online orders in China by more than four-fifths, according to a new analysis. The study also finds the climate impact of these deliveries may be more than 9 times greater than previous studies have estimated.

The researchers tested two strategies to reduce so-called last-mile emissions – that is, the impact of final delivery of parcels to individual addresses. The first was simply replacing gasoline-powered delivery vehicles with electric ones. If implemented nationwide, they found it could save 18.2% of last-mile emissions. The EV switch would have the largest impact in smaller cities, reducing emissions by almost 30% there compared to about 7% in the largest cities.

The second strategy, however, was the real winner. Cooperation among logistics companies—which the Chinese government has been advocating since 2018—could dramatically slash emissions by avoiding having multiple couriers from different companies make deliveries to the same neighborhood. If all six major delivery companies cooperated in this way, it would reduce emissions by up to 66%.

The two strategies together could reduce last-mile emissions by as much as 84.2%.

The growth of e-commerce and surge in online orders in recent years has resulted in a massive expansion of delivery services. But the climate impact of last-mile delivery hasn’t been rigorously studied until now. Past studies have tended to be small-scale, rely on modeling or simulations, or capture only coarse-grained movements of delivery couriers, leading to underestimates of emissions.

 

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In the new analysis, researchers leveraged data on 14 billion orders from the e-commerce platform JD.com and smartphone location data from 1.9 million couriers to calculate last-mile emissions for parcel delivery in 365 Chinese cities. The analysis is particularly important in China, which handles almost 60% of the world’s parcel volume, with more than 130 billion parcels delivered in 2023.

The researchers’ analysis shows that Chinese delivery couriers traveled more than 70 million miles per day in 2023 and generated 1.59 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

Surprisingly, last-mile delivery emissions don’t increase linearly with orders. From January 2023 to January 2024, orders increased by 83.5%, but emissions only went up by 31.3%, representing a decline of about 28% in per-parcel emissions.

“This suggests that system-level efficiencies, such as better logistics, routing, and consolidation, can significantly offset the environmental impact of rapidly growing demand,” says study team member Zhiqing Hong, a computer scientist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Source: Hong Z. et al. “Decarbonizing emissions from last-mile deliveries in Chinese cities.” Nature Cities 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

Revenue jumped in part due to the AI boom, while geopolitical uncertainty boosted the outlook for electrified, digitized building systems, executives said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call. 

Home battery installations shatter records in April, including a stunning new high for NSW and record volumes of new rooftop solar capacity across the country.

The post Rebate “frenzy” shatters records for home batteries – and doubles year-on-year rooftop solar growth appeared first on Renew Economy.

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A company established by former Macquarie bankers is starting big - with a massive battery positioned to support a swathe of new generation projects.

The post Former Macquarie bankers plan one of Australia’s biggest six-hour batteries with 4,800 MWh of storage appeared first on Renew Economy.

Headline News:

• “Renewable Energy Market to Reach $2.874 Trillion by 2033” • According to DataM Intelligence analysis, the Global Renewable Energy Market was valued at slightly more than $1.512 trillion in 2025 and is expected to reach $2,874 trillion by 2033. The rate of growth is driven by the increasing global shift toward clean and sustainable energy. [openPR.com]

Wind turbines (Ruben Hiebert, Unsplash)

• “Renewables More Cost Effective Than Direct Air Capture” • Direct air capture, which pulls CO₂ out of the air, has increasingly become part of the conversation on climate action. But the argument for pumping money into DAC “weakens substantially” when it comes to renewable energy because it is cheaper to eliminate emissions than it is to capture them. [Euronews]
• “Intermediate And Degraded Land Crops Are No ‘Miracle’ Solution For Sustainable Aviation Fuel, Study Shows” • Crops grown between food harvest cycles or on low-quality land are seen as green solutions for powering planes, but a T&E study shows that such crops could only meet 4% of the EU’s demand for bio-SAF by 2050. [CleanTechnica]
• “OECD Nations Pass Point Of No Return On Fossil Fuel Power, As Renewables Take Over” • Fossil fuel electricity generation in OECD nations is 19% below its historical peak, with the decline driven by substitution rather than reduced demand. Electricity demand continued rising through the transition, but renewables outgrew the gap. [Microgrid Media]
• “States Across The Wildfire-Prone Western US Are Using AI For Early Detection” • Another severe wildfire season is forecast for the Western US due to record-breaking heat and an abysmal snowpack. With concerns about wildfires, states across the West are adding AI to their wildfire detection toolbox, banking on the technology to help stop fires quickly. [ABC News]

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

The post What PJM States Can Do to Ensure Affordable, Reliable Electricity During the Data Center Boom appeared first on RMI.

UK Oil & Gas plc announced this morning it has submitted a revised planning application for its Horse Hill site , near Redhill, in Surrey.

The company said the retrospective application seeks to reinstate consent for oil production.

Horse Hill, Surrey, England. January 2026. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize

Planning permission for the Horse Hill site, now UKOG’s only hydrocarbon asset, was quashed by a landmark climate judgement, known as the Finch Ruling, at the Supreme Court in June 2024.

The court ruled that the planning permission granted by Surrey County Council in 2019 was unlawful. The judgement said the permission failed to take into account the climate impact of burning oil from the site.

Sarah Finch, who brought the challenge on behalf of the Weald Action Group, was last month awarded the leading international award, the Goldman Environmental Prize.

The Weald Action Group said this morning:

“This is an appalling but predictable move by UKOG. After repeatedly claiming they were transitioning away from fossil fuels, they have now submitted plans to Surrey County Council to restart oil production at Horse Hill, showing that they are still relying on this site as a financial lifeline.

“There is simply no room left in the rapidly dwindling global carbon budget for any more fossil fuel developments.  Instead, the site should be urgently decommissioned and fully restored. Given their disastrous financial position, with cash reserves reported at just £32,000, this application appears to be a way by which UKOG can further delay meeting these costly obligations.

“Enough is enough, this cannot be allowed to drag on any longer, and this application must be rejected.”

Immediately after the Supreme Court judgement, UKOG said it was working to reinstate planning permission.

This required a revised application with information on the carbon emissions from combustion, known as downstream or scope 3 emissions.

Surrey County Council reported in November 2024 it was waiting for this information.

Since then, UKOG has promised the details but repeatedly delayed submission.

At the time of writing, the new application was not listed on the county council planning register.

When the application has been validated, a public consultation is expected on the new information.

In a statement today, UKOG said:

“The Company has worked closely with its planning advisors and SCC to prepare the revised planning submission, which includes updated ecology, environmental and technical baseline studies and an assessment of downstream emissions in accordance with the Supreme Court judgment.

“A successful planning outcome would permit stable production at Horse Hill to resume, generating valuable revenues which would help support the Company’s ongoing transition to its announced clean energy projects in Dorset and Yorkshire.”

UKOG’s chief executive, Stephen Sanderson, said:

“This retrospective planning submission seeks to address the Supreme Court’s ruling on SCC’s 2019 Horse Hill planning consent in a thorough and transparent manner. Horse Hill remains a valuable UK onshore asset and, subject to planning consent, has the potential to generate revenues that can be responsibly reinvested to support the Company’s strategic transition towards hydrogen storage and other clean energy initiatives.

“The Company continues to pursue a balanced approach, managing its legacy oil and gas assets while actively investing in the UK’s energy transition and clean power future.”

UK Oil & Gas (UKOG) previously announced production had voluntarily ceased in October 2024.

More reaction

The local MP, Chris Coghlan (Lib Dem)

said:

“Last year I urged the government and Surrey County Council to ensure Horse Hill is restored to woodland. It’s no surprise that UKOG has now submitted a retrospective planning application, but with the company’s financial track record, I am worried they will not be able to deliver proper site restoration. Any decision by Surrey County Council must recognise residents’ concerns and guarantee that the site is fully returned to woodland.”

Salfords and Sidlow Parish Council said in a statement:

“In 2024, Salfords and Sidlow Parish Council supported local resident Sarah Finch in her ground-breaking legal challenge against Surrey County Council’s decision to extend planning permission for the oil drilling site at Horse Hill which is in our parish. Councillors recognised Sarah’s argument that the Environmental Impact Assessment failed to include the effects of emissions released from burning the extracted oil, assessing only emissions from the development itself.

“What began as a local campaign evolved into a five-year legal battle that climbed through the courts, culminating in a historic ruling by the UK Supreme Court in June 2024 and, crucially, the planning permission being overturned. The Parish Council was delighted to see Sarah Finch and her colleagues at the Weald Action Group recently being awarded the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize for Europe. Sarah’s landmark legal victory is already reshaping climate accountability across the UK and beyond.

“In August 2025, we also wrote to Tim Oliver, leader of Surrey County Council, expressing concern as to who will be responsible for restoration of the Horse Hill oil site in the event the UK Oil and Gas (UKOG) entered formal insolvency.

“The Parish Council has been advised on 5 May 2026 that UKOG will be submitting a retrospective planning application for reinstatement of production consent at the Horse Hill site. Once formally notified, Councillors will review all the new planning documents and make representation on the application on their merits including consideration of protection to our Green Belt and the local environment.”

• UKOG also announced today the month-long suspension of its shares had been lifted. Trading was suspended after the company missed the stock market deadline for publishing its accounts. The accounts, due to be published at the end of March 2026, were released this morning (5 May 2026). DrillOrDrop has reported on the contents of the accounts.

On a sunny Friday afternoon in October 2023, some 70 children filed into a cool, dark tunnel in the south of Paris to help the city rehearse for its increasingly hot future.

The tunnel, part of the abandoned Petite Ceinture railway encircling the city, is always 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celcius), making it the perfect safe haven from the potentially lethal heat imagined outside. Once underground, each youngster was asked to simulate the effects of extreme temperatures that might become reality in their lifetimes. Some pretended to have been poisoned by food that spoiled during a power outage. Others faked the effects of carbon monoxide leaking from a faulty generator. Meanwhile, Red Cross workers scrambled to decide who to send to overwhelmed hospitals. Around them, dozens of others — fire fighters, city officials, teachers — did their best to simulate the chaos and cascading impacts a heat wave of unprecedented duration and intensity might force them to confront.

The officials who created the Paris at 50C exercise wanted children to participate because they will face the consequences of a warming world and because they ask so many questions. Crisotech

The exercise, called Paris at 50 degrees Celsius, was designed to imagine what might happen if the mercury hits 122 degrees F, something scientists warn is increasingly likely by 2100. It combined live drills and a tabletop exercise to help shape a plan to protect the city’s 2 million people from that kind of heat. Once limited to a handful of cities, these exercises are spreading as local governments stress test health services, emergency response, and essential infrastructure before temperatures reach dangerous extremes.

What Paris is rehearsing could soon confront cities across the continent. European governments are being urged to prepare for 5 to 6 degrees F (2.8 to 3.3 degrees C) of warming, a change that could push Paris toward dangerous summertime temperatures by the end of the century. 

Such heat is a global threat. Modeling suggests more than 1.6 billion people in nearly 1,000 cities could regularly face perilous conditions within three decades. Heat waves are already straining hospitals, causing outages, and paralyzing transit. In the complex systems that make up a city, even small failures can lead to larger breakdowns.

But as cities invest time and money into these exercises, one question remains: Do they actually improve preparedness?

It took Pénélope Komitès more than 18 months to prepare a drill that would last just two days. As Paris’ deputy mayor in charge of resilience, she considers such planning essential. “It was very important for us to show people that heat waves are not just something we see on the TV, but something that can happen soon, and that we need to improve what we’re going to do,” she said.

To help inform the scenario, scientists at the Île-de-France Regional Climate Change Expertise Group, which advises city leaders on climate risk, modeled what the future might look like. Other studies based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have largely confirmed their projection that temperatures could hit 122 degree F (50 degrees C) by the end of the century. For now, the city’s record stands at 108.68 F (42.6 C), registered on July 25, 2019.

A temperature sign over a pharmacy in Paris, France, reads 47 degrees C (116 degrees F) during a heat wave in 2015.
Pierre Suu / Getty Images

The World Health Organization estimates that heat contributes to roughly half a million deaths worldwide each year. Symptoms can quickly escalate from fatigue to dehydration to heat stroke as the body loses its ability to cool itself. For older adults and people with heart or kidney disease, that strain can be fatal. 

In Paris, much of the work of designing the simulation fell to Crisotech, a consultancy specializing in crisis exercises. It spent nine months working with the city to develop a dozen scenarios designed to anticipate where services would buckle, how agencies would work together, and which residents might be missed. The role-playing the children, from two different schools, participated in at two locations occurred on the first day; the second was dedicated to tabletop exercises among city officials and first responders. 

The simulations are designed to test a city’s response to all the things that might happen during a prolonged heat wave, such as people experiencing heat stroke and other health impacts. Crisotech

“The objective was to anticipate all possible impacts of a heat dome across Paris, to consolidate the [preparedness] measures planned by the city in the event of an extreme heat wave, test new solutions, … and identify new actions to be implemented,” said Komitès.

More than 100 organizations took part, from city agencies and emergency services to utilities and nonprofits. While other cities, including Melbourne, London, and Phoenix, have hosted similar workshops, Paris made the unprecedented decision to include citizens in the role-playing portion of the €200,000 ($236,000) event. The city held informal meetings to recruit volunteers and help residents visualize the scenario. Children were especially valuable participants, both because they will face the consequences of a warming world and because they ask so many questions, said Ziad Touat, the crisis management consultant who led the simulation for Crisotech.

Komitès also wanted to prepare Parisians for the day when all of this would unfold for real. That’s important, she said, because the pandemic showed that well-informed communities respond to a crisis more effectively. If people recognize the symptoms of heat stroke, for example, or know when to find a cooling shelter, first responders can focus on the most vulnerable, Komitès said.

Five years ago, these simulations were confined to a handful of cities in the U.S. and Europe. Now, cities around the world are getting interested, said Cassie Sunderland, managing director of climate solutions at C40, a global network of mayors focused on climate action. 

Some of the sims are sprawling operations like the one in Paris; others are more modest tabletop exercises, or hybrids that combine interagency workshops with limited role-playing. All are meant to identify points of failure before a crisis does.

A huge generator provides power during an exercise designed to simulate the surge in electricity demand Paris might experience during a prolonged heatwave. Crisotech

Success is not measured by whether a drill runs smoothly, but rather, the opposite. The most valuable ones are realistic enough to force decisions, yet unpredictable enough to expose coordination problems and infrastructure failures. For example, engineers might be brought in to determine the temperature at which train tracks expand. “Imagine if you suddenly have a huge amount of people who need additional health care, but doctors and nurses can’t get to the hospital because of transport failures,” said Sunderland.

The growth of these exercises reflects a broader concern that many cities are unprepared. “Simulating extreme heat is really important,” said Dr. Satchit Balsari, a professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. “A lot of cities stop and make heat action plans, but they actually don’t drill into how they are going to implement them, whether the funding for it exists, and if they actually have the know-how.”

Some scenarios can only be explored in a simulation, such as the question of cooling patients experiencing heatstroke. “How do you take a large human body and put it in ice? Is there a bucket that big?” Balsari said. “The answer is no, so is it a body bag? Where do you get all this ice?” What might appear simple on paper becomes a challenge unless tested.

Simulations should also consider what measures are needed after the heat breaks, Balsari said. For instance, healthcare systems will need plans for addressing the long-term impacts like increased risk of chronic kidney disease. “Have a final session that thinks about what the subsequent months look like,” he said. 

Read Next How to build a heat-resilient city Jake Bittle & Naveena Sadasivam

Such challenges are compounded because most cities do not have someone responsible for crafting a unified response. A few, including Athens, Greece; Melbourne, Australia; and Freetown, Sierra Leone, have appointed “heat officers,” but most rely upon coordination among multiple departments. Rigorous testing can identify where that might break down and how coordination can be improved. Phoenix created a heat department after an exercise revealed that very problem.

Some of the cities most vulnerable to extreme heat may not have the resources to stage an expensive drill. But Touat said preparedness is not an all-or-nothing affair. Smaller, less costly efforts can still build readiness — whether by testing communications plans, mapping vulnerable citizens, or practicing how agencies would collaborate during an outage. “Don’t try to have everything at once and to spend too much money to do an exercise of this type,” he said. “It’s better to do five small ones than one big one.”

However, simulating extreme heat to improve preparedness isn’t enough, and work to decrease temperatures in cities must happen in parallel, Sunderland said. True resilience requires long-term changes that cool cities and slow climate change itself.

Even though these simulations have their limits and can come with a hefty price tag, many cities still see their appeal. 

In Taiwan, they are expanding beyond cities. The country staged a tabletop exercise last year and plans a live simulation in July to test coordination within cities and between national officials. The goal is to test whether national and local agencies can effectively work together, said Ken-Mu Chang, the deputy director general of the country’s Climate Change Administration. 

The tabletop exercise and role-playing scenario will focus on managing the health impacts of a days-long 104-degree F (40-degree C) heat wave — the kind of prolonged heat that can overwhelm hospitals and power systems. One challenge, Chang said, is designing an exercise that feels realistic enough to be useful without creating unnecessary public anxiety.

After last year’s trial run, officials realized that much of the exercise focused on agencies explaining existing plans, rather than showing how they’d respond to a crisis. “We want to make those gaps more visible and more concrete,” Chang said. “We want agencies not only to explain what they have, but also to identify what is still missing under a more extreme situation.”

Meanwhile, Barcelona, Spain is adapting the model Komitès helped develop.

Barcelona has created more shaded areas throughout the city to protect people from increasingly dangerous heat. Courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona

The Catalan city faces growing urgency to prepare for a hotter future. The Mediterranean basin is warming 20 percent faster than the global average, making it one of the continent’s climate hot spots. Barcelona is among the European cities expected to see the greatest number of heat-related deaths by the end of the century. 

Given that future, city officials want to develop plans to protect infrastructure, build a registry of vulnerable residents, and improve coordination. “It’s not easy when there’s so many actors and it’s not easy when the impacts are on so many different levels,” said Irma Ventayol, who leads Barcelona’s climate change department and is overseeing the simulation.

Barcelona’s Heat Plan 2025-2035 calls for the continued expansion of green infrastructure and shaded areas in public schools and playgrounds. Courtesy of Ajuntament de Barcelona

“Can we cope with waste management at 40 degrees C or 50 degrees C? Are the trucks prepared? Maybe they are, but no one has checked, so we need to ask those questions sooner rather than later,” Ventayol said. She also sees media coverage of the event as an opportunity to raise awareness among Barcelona’s nearly 2 million residents.

Beyond protecting the city, she hopes the exercise can help others. “I’d like to have a protocol that can serve other cities too, a scalable methodology that other cities can take and replicate, even for other impacts such as floods,” Ventayol said.

In Paris, the simulation — which inspired a flooding exercise that took place in October — produced 50 recommendations later folded into the city’s 2024–2030 Climate Action Plan. Some are now underway, including insulating thousands of homes and replacing asphalt parking spaces with trees; it planted 15,000 last winter alone. Even the three bathing spots along the Seine River that opened with a splash during last year’s Olympics are part of a broader effort to help residents stay cool.

Komitès is being peppered with questions from others eager to launch similar exercises. All of the lessons for the simulation were compiled into two public documents: a guide to running a heat simulation of this scale and a report detailing what organizers learned. “Everything we did is already on the internet so you’re already one step ahead,” said Touat at Crisotech.

The biggest surprise to come out of the exercise had nothing to do with infrastructure resilience or cooperation among departments. What shocked Komitès the most was how unprepared Parisians are for extreme heat.

The realization prompted what may be the city’s most important adaptation effort yet: preparing citizens, not just officials. In March, Paris opened its first Campus of Resilience with the civil protection agency and fire department. The center will host training sessions, smaller simulations, and public workshops open to all residents. “We need to talk with Parisians,” Komitès said. “To inform them, to prepare them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cities are rehearsing for deadly heat. Will it help when disaster comes? on May 5, 2026.

If you want to ditch your gas furnace and heat your home more cleanly and efficiently, you need to scale up one of your kitchen appliances. The first option is “electric resistance heating,” better known as a space heater, which acts like a giant toaster to warm a room instead of bread. The second is a heat pump, which extracts warmth from even freezing outdoor air and pumps it indoors, like a refrigerator moves heat from inside the box to the kitchen. (That’s why the back of your fridge feels warm, by the way.)

Energy experts say that to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and improve human health, we need to replace toxic gas furnaces and boilers with heat pumps ASAP. Less talked about, though, is that we also need to replace those giant toasters with giant reverse refrigerators, which would make homes more comfortable and more efficient, and therefore cheaper to heat.

According to a new report from the nonprofit energy group RMI, one in five homes in the United States is heated primarily with electric resistance heating. Replacing those devices with heat pumps would save households an average of $1,530 a year, or $20 billion annually across the country. (The calculations included only single-family homes, not multifamily units like apartment buildings.) At the same time, demand on the electrical grid would fall significantly, while total carbon emissions from homes making the switch to heat pumps for climate control and water heating would plummet by about 40 percent. “There’s a lot of benefits to the grid, which translate to lower rates as well,” said Ryan Shea, a manager in RMI’s carbon-free buildings program. “Then, of course, there’s using less energy.”

Electric heat pumps work their magic with a trick of physics: By changing the pressure of refrigerants, they draw warmth from outdoor air or liquids coursing underground, then bring it indoors. (In the summer, the process reverses, cooling an indoor space like a traditional air conditioning unit.) They’re ultraefficient because unlike a furnace or space heater — which generate warmth by burning fossil fuels or using electricity — these appliances simply transfer heat from one place to another. Accordingly, heat pumps have a “coefficient of performance,” or COP, of around three, meaning they produce three units of heat for every unit of electricity used. In other words, they’re 300 percent efficient. That’s three times as efficient as electric resistance heating, which has a COP of one, while even the most efficient gas furnaces operate well below that.

In all kinds of homes, heat pumps are replacing electric resistance heating or gas furnaces. If you don’t have ducting, heat pumps come in units that embed in walls to exchange between outdoor and indoor air. If you have ducting, an indoor unit replaces the furnace and connects to an outdoor one, which exchanges the heat. If you also have an AC unit that has reached the end of its life, subbing in a heat pump will give you both cooling and ultraefficient heating. “That’s kind of the right trigger point for a lot of people to start thinking about heat pumps,” Shea said, “is when their air conditioner needs replacing.”

The next generation of heat pump is targeting apartment-dwellers, too. A company called Gradient, for instance, has been working with building owners and public housing authorities to deploy its units, which slip over window sills like saddles and plug into a standard wall outlet. The appliance can swap in for old window AC units, giving tenants clean heating, not just cooling.

The idea is to quickly and cheaply deploy these appliances in large buildings, without landlords having to retrofit each unit if they, say, get rid of the structure’s central fossil-fuel boiler. Gradient says that in less than two weeks, it installed 277 of them in a Providence, Rhode Island public housing development that previously used electric resistance heating. “It is very straightforward and a huge energy win for them,” said Vince Romanin, the company’s founder and chief technology officer. “You’re not just saving money. You are providing a dramatically better service, because you’re adding cooling.”

Still, the RMI report notes, the U.S. builds nearly 1.5 million homes each year, 200,000 of them with electric resistance heating. It also installs a million AC units annually in homes with electric resistance heating, when those could instead be heat pumps that’d save occupants money. The trick, then, is for policymakers and utilities to incentivize these efficient appliances with rebates and the like. That’s what helped Maine reach its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule — by next year, it hopes to install 175,000 more. 

The U.S., though, can’t simply replace all of its furnaces and space heaters with heat pumps and call it a day, energy experts said. It must happen alongside a push to make homes more efficient, like by installing proper insulation and double-pane windows. That is, a home needs to retain more heat in the winter and cool air in the summer, so a heat pump would need to run less. “Step one, don’t burn fossil fuels in your home, basically,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, who wasn’t involved in the new report. “Step two: insulate, insulate, insulate. And both of those go hand-in-hand.”

The grid, too, needs upgrades if heat pumps are to reach their full potential. For one, ideally you’re powering them with electricity coming entirely from renewables like wind and solar, otherwise you’re still burning fossil fuels to warm homes. (Though to be clear, because heat pumps are so efficient, this is still better than sticking with gas furnaces.) And two, heat pumps join electric vehicles and induction stoves in increasing demand on the grid. Utilities are already making upgrades to handle all this electrification, like installing huge battery banks to store renewable energy to use when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow. They’re also experimenting with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G, which allows EVs to send power to the grid when demand is highest.

If the U.S. is really going to wean itself off fossil fuels, it needs all these systems to work in concert: More renewables, more batteries, fewer giant toasters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline American homes need heat pumps, not space heaters on May 5, 2026.