Grist

Decades ago, in order to build up a solid foundation for I-95 through southeast Georgia, construction crews dug some earth near the town of Midway, Georgia, about 50 miles south of Savannah, and left a deep pit. There’s now a public park in that spot, bounded by a tidal creek on one side and the leftover dredge pit on the other. Although the park is more than 15 miles from the ocean, high tide washes up the creek twice a day. Lush marsh grass fills the space between solid ground and the creek, but it’s a different scene along the other bank, where the salt water has steadily eaten away at the land while depositing sediment in the basin. Now, what was once a deep pit is a shallow mudflat with little islands of marsh grass cropping up in the middle, naturally moving in now that the ground is suitable for it.

But the grasses halt abruptly where they reach the small, muddy cliff of the bank — shorn away sharply where the tide has battered it.

“If we walk that way, you’ll be able to see some of the, well, just plain erosion,” said Phil Odom, chairman of Liberty County’s Consolidated Planning Commission, on a recent afternoon. “This is how much it has collapsed. We’ve lost about 6, 8 feet right here.”

Local leaders are hoping to fix that erosion at the water’s edge, and they’re approaching it in a way that considers the lessons of the I-95 construction and prior, failed attempts to address the problem. Instead of putting up a wall or using chunks of concrete to hold the soil in place, the county is attempting to restore the marsh grasses that grow here naturally. Their roots will help hold the soil in place.

“We hope for it to replicate nature,” said Shannon Marino with Zulu Marine, which builds what are known as living shorelines. “When our solutions are done, you should look at it and not really recognize it as a repair or a bulkhead or a solution. It should just look like nature.”

It’s an increasingly popular way to address coastal erosion in the face of rising seas. Georgia is home to more than a third of the connected marsh habitat along the coast of the Southeastern U.S. — hundreds of thousands of acres. It serves as a critical buffer against storms, and it’s broadly protected under state law. But as sea levels rise due to climate change, protecting the existing marsh plants is only one step. 

With the sea level on Georgia’s coast projected to rise 1 to 2 meters in the next 75 years, the marshes will need to move inland too. They’re well equipped to do that, according to University of North Carolina wetland scientist Lori Sutter.

“Because of the magic of salt marshes,” she said, “they’re able to persist in this environment where they’re flooded twice a day, every day.”

But that magic of salt marshes only works if they have somewhere to go. Once a migrating marsh encounters a paved road or a building, they hit a dead end. There’s nowhere for new grasses to take root, which means the rising tide can sweep in unabated, flooding both the marsh and that road or building. 

That’s why a new action plan by a coalition of conservation groups, scientists, government agencies, and coastal communities calls for protecting not just the salt marsh itself, but also the adjacent land. The plan has identified more than 56,000 acres of land in Georgia where marshes will likely migrate that are also currently open to development. 

“That creates this really vast area that you’re trying to conserve, which can be overwhelming,” said Courtney Reich, the coastal director for Georgia Conservancy. Her group is working with Phil Odom and the other stakeholders in Midway and is spearheading the Georgia work under the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative, a multi-state effort to restore and protect coastal salt marshes. 

It’s a roadmap, not a binding policy or seizure of anyone’s land. Instead, the plan’s authors hope it can help landowners and public officials make informed decisions.

“You know, do we want to build up to the edge of the water or do we want to leave room?” Reich said. 

Short-term needs often drive land use conversations, she said. This plan aims to get people thinking about the long view.

Salt marshes by their very nature are always moving. Odom, an avid fisher, has watched Georgia’s dynamic coast change in slow motion over the last 75 years: deep salt water moving into areas that once teemed with marsh grass, marshes in new places, the tide creeping ever higher and leaving the ghostly skeletons of salt-choked trees in its wake. But sea level rise driven by climate change is forcing them to move faster — and adding urgency, because if the marshes can’t respond, Georgia’s coast will be left that much more vulnerable.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new plan to preserve Georgia’s marshes: Give them space to migrate on Aug 10, 2026.

Into a clear blue sky, the sweet-smelling smoke billows and spreads. Farmers have been burning and harvesting sugarcane this way for generations, but the practice creates ash fallout and hazardous air pollutants. Every year, farmers plan and coordinate the fires, to clear out pests like snakes and clear leaves, leaving behind only the stalks where the sugar lies.

Nobody in Iberia Parish thinks twice. Sugarcane smoke is a part of life.

But locals are wary of the dangers they suspect lurk within a different, newer industry. This new industry is going to be the ruin of Iberia Parish, they warn, with dangers ranging from toxic smoke and cancer-causing chemicals to homegrown tornados and flying debris, even poisoned farmland and worthless houses. 

Dangers that are almost entirely imagined, say experts, who now find themselves as the main line of defense against misinformation that could hamstring a vital field. It’s a dynamic being repeated nationwide.

This is a close-knit community, part of the Acadiana region of Louisiana best known as Cajun Country. But last year, opposition to solar farms became so heated here that speakers at Iberia Parish Council meetings were brought to tears. Hundreds of residents successfully mounted a campaign opposing a proposed utility-scale solar project that would have been sited northeast of town. Opponents voiced fears that solar panels would destroy farms and poison the soil. They wore anti-solar T-shirts and staked yard signs. They snubbed and scolded the project’s supporters.

A social media group for Nebraskans posted a meme aimed at Tennesseans opposed to industrial solar projects. Similar themes and images appeared in social media posts that targeted other states.
Facebook

They feared fires, falling property values and panels that they said would leach chemicals into bayous. “I’ve done my own research. I don’t need anybody to tell me that it can’t cause cancer, or that they don’t crack and things don’t seep out,” said opponent Cathrine DeGroat during a June 2025 council meeting.

After heated debate, the council passed an ordinance requiring utility-scale solar projects to be set back at least half a mile from the nearest residential property line. Solar opponents hailed it as a victory for Iberia Parish. 

The ordinance appears to have effectively killed the Acadiana Solar project, which could have brought millions in local tax revenue to Iberia Parish, a rural area that could sorely use the public funds. The project’s developers would have leased land from Andree McAnally’s family farm for part of the project, money that would have helped pay college tuition and other expenses in a household budget that has been tighter since the death of her husband from COVID in 2021, McAnally said. She felt the lost opportunity more sharply, she said, since the fight against it was not based on facts. 

The day of the vote, in July 2025, McAnally told parish council members that she was disappointed in them. “I thought you were going to call in your own experts and figure it out yourself,” she said. “People are fueled by misinformation.”

McAnally herself had once believed that misinformation, she told the council. When her parents first agreed to put a solar farm on her family’s land, she was furious — she believed that her family was sure to get cancer. So she dug deep into research. What she learned changed her mind. “We have three generations right there on the property. And I would not put myself or my children in harm’s way,” she said.

Misinformation has become one of the primary hurdles for utility-scale solar projects like the one once planned here.  “Sometimes you just have this opposition that develops from misinformation and disinformation that tends to spread like wildfire,” said Matthew Holland, energy policy outreach coordinator at the Blanco Center, who counsels solar advocates to counter misinformation through specific facts about the benefits of the projects. And, as solar projects become more commonplace, some misinformation may lose its grip. 

Posts aimed at solar opponents in Indiana, Texas, Iowa and California, clockwise from top left, repeated messaging and imagery. Composite image by Dominique Hodge / Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk

For some who live in Iberia Parish, the standoff seems more deep-seated. “I think you’re seeing the animus of people who feel like their opinion is not taken seriously,” said Josh Trosclair, a member of the United Houma Nation and native of the small community of Lydia, just south of New Iberia, who argued on behalf of solar in front of the council. After one meeting, agitated solar opponents followed him to his car, he said. 

It seems clear that unfounded fears of solar have found fertile ground here. 

Facebook groups and AI bots

In Acadiana, solar opposition appears to have been organized in large part through a 1,200-member social-media group known as “NO Industrial/Utility solar in Iberia Parish” on Facebook. “Panels are toxic, contaminate the soil and water, [and] are a huge fire hazard,” wrote one of the group’s administrators in an April 2024 post. 

The group appears to have been first created in 2024 by a local real estate agent, Angela Scott. Scott did not respond to multiple attempts to reach her for this story.

Many posts express concerns that Iberia would no longer be a farming community. “There’s about 500k acres of sugarcane in the state. About 250k of them are leased for potential solar farms in the future,” read a post reshared from a group for St. James Parish — which also saw an anti-solar campaign. “If we lose 250k acres of farmland in this state, the sugar mills will likely close.”

To date, experts project that, at most, Louisiana solar will require about 87,000 acres over the next 10 years, on sites spread out across the state — not just on sugarcane fields. Only about 1 percent of Louisiana’s total farmland would be impacted by the highest estimates of solar buildout over the next decade, researchers estimate. 

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Posts in the group echo the dangers cited by opponents in council debates, along with a few new alleged hazards, including “increased ambient temperatures” and suggestions that solar panels themselves create unstable weather, particularly tornadoes.

Many posts in the group are cross-posted from “Stop Solar-Wind-BESS-Carbon Capture Scams,” a larger, 11,000-member Facebook group, which has become a hub for people who oppose solar across the nation. It was created in 2020 by Indiana resident Franklin T. Wike. 

A pinned post by Wike under the name “David Herman” seeks people willing to be trained to spread anti-solar messages: “We are looking for volunteers that would be interested in learning how to HELP run anti-Solar or anti-Solar and Wind websites. We are willing to train the individuals if needed,” reads the post. “The position will basically involve copying and pasting news links from various Facebook Groups we run, then writing a short introduction to the news articles.”

Wike also did not respond to requests for comment.

Some members of the network of anti-solar groups are sharing nearly identical posts of AI-generated anti-solar content, tailored to different U.S. states.

“Once Louisiana is gone, there’s no way to get it back,” reads one AI-generated graphic, shared by user Sheila Thomson, the words appearing on a sign with a farm and red barn in the distance. “Solar panels belong on roofs, not on farmland.” In a Facebook group for Texans, a different user posted a similar image tailored to Texas: “Once Texas is gone, there’s no way to get it back,” reads the sign. The same message and graphic appears in other groups tailored to Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and elsewhere.

The accounts have been linked to a network of “AI slop machine” accounts, per an analysis released earlier this month by the threat intelligence company Alethea. The network has also targeted data centers. Many of the accounts are anonymously run, are based in Bangladesh, and appear to be rapidly producing a volume of “emotionally resonant, locally targeted content … to manufacture the appearance of organic, grassroots consensus.”

Highly charged issue divides neighbors

Iberia Parish is more familiar with a different aspect of the energy sector. Parish workers fabricate parts for oil and gas infrastructure, like offshore platforms and pipelines. They work for petrochemical companies that, historically, come in, extract resources, and leave behind poverty and pollution — and loss. Trosclair’s uncle, whom he’s named after, was doing oil and gas fieldwork when he was killed by a burst pipe in 1980 at 20 years old.

Fossil fuels also don’t provide the jobs they once did: A report this summer from The Data Center, a Louisiana nonprofit, found that oil and gas production and transportation in the New Orleans metro area lost over 6,500 jobs between 2004 and 2023, a 47 percent decrease. 

Solar, on the other hand, will keep growing, say analysts, because the technology has simply gotten so efficient and affordable that the low cost will keep driving demand despite the hostile federal policy landscape. Scientists say that the world must transition to renewable energy as quickly as possible as global climate change worsens. Energy generated by solar in the U.S. recently overtook coal for the first time. Even President Trump’s allies recently softened their once-hostile tone and began championing solar outright.

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Perhaps because of their fraught history with oil and gas, locals can be wary of large new developments on agricultural land. They rallied the council last year to discuss the risks of carbon capture and sequestration and weighed instituting a moratorium. For the past several years, the solar industry has instilled worries, turning longtime friends into enemies.

“This is a highly charged, emotional issue, not just for me but for all of my neighbors who are my friends,” McAnally told the Council, her voice shaking. “Or — were my friends.”

Sugarcane has long been the dominant crop in Iberia Parish, where some farms have been handed down through four or five generations. The hundreds of acres of sun-drenched land also appealed to Recurrent Energy, a division of Canada Solar, which selected about 1,000 acres for their proposed solar project, initially dubbed “Acadiana Solar.” It would have been a $175 million investment.

But amid passionate public opposition, Iberia Parish passed its first solar-related ordinance in February 2024, a moratorium on solar farms, described as a temporary measure until permanent regulations could be agreed upon. A year later, in July 2025, the council passed the second ordinance, requiring that solar farms in the parish be sited at least a half mile from the nearest residential zones and occupied structures.

At the state level, Louisiana legislators passed their first solar restrictions last year, with House Bill 459, which requires that solar projects 75 acres or larger be set 300 feet from the nearest residential property line. The law also allows local governments to set larger setbacks.

Louisiana’s setback law is “one of the larger distances that you’ll see in the country,” Mark Zappi, executive director of the Energy Institute of Louisiana, told 1012 Industry Report in April. The Iberia Parish ordinance, with a setback that’s more than eight times larger, is among the most restrictive in the state.

The full effects of that setback are unclear: Though Recurrent Energy has never officially announced that its project was canceled, there’s been no movement on the project since the ordinance passed, local advocates say.

Solar panels don’t leach toxins

It is clear that, for solar development in Louisiana, one of the most formidable hurdles is misinformation.

Some inaccuracies are spread among friends and neighbors, by mouth or by social media. Sometimes disinformation is spread deliberately by politically-linked groups or digital marketers sharing AI-generated posts.

Or, as Terrence Chambers, the recently retired director of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s Center of Efficiency and Sustainable Energy, testified in front of a Louisiana legislative committee in 2021: “I have recently heard many concerns expressed by members of the public, some of which are based on incorrect information, and I would like to address some of those concerns, so that public policy can be based on accurate information.” 

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In his testimony and in the 17-page written testimony that he supplied the committee, Chambers set the record straight. “The solar cell is completely protected from air and water during normal operation, and as such, rainwater does not wash any toxic materials into the soil,” he said. “Solar racks can easily be designed to wind speeds of 150 mph or higher,” he wrote, noting that data from 50,000 operational solar installations shows that “solar plants stand up well to hurricanes and hail.” Also, because solar panels are mostly made of non-flammable materials like steel, glass and aluminum, they will not catch fire.

A December study from Chambers and other researchers at UL-Lafayette reached a similar conclusion: “There are no harmful emissions or runoff from solar power plants that would negatively affect the soil.”

Some opponents’ concerns were valid decades ago, but have now been largely addressed. For instance, residents expressed worries that solar panels would depress property values, become eyesores amid the landscape, or  — like the “orphan wells” often left behind by fossil-fuel companies — that the projects won’t be properly decommissioned when the projects end, leaving farmland littered with aging solar panels.

Studies have drawn differing conclusions about property values, but another UL-Lafayette paper points to two recent ones, by appraisers in North Carolina and Virginia who found that solar projects have no effect. Abandoned panels are less of a concern now since Louisiana law requires every project to have a decommissioning plan, which must account for closure in case of disaster and be updated every five years, with the costs set aside before construction begins. The way solar projects are designed has improved dramatically as well, said Stephen Barnes, director of the Kathleen Babineaux Blanco Public Policy Center at UL-Lafayette. 

Today’s projects are designed to be less visible than older ones, partly because it’s become standard for projects to include vegetative barriers – tall plants and bushes used to blend solar arrays with surrounding landscape.  “The reality is that most people that live in a parish that does have a solar farm don’t think about it ever,” said Barnes. “You could be driving past one and never even know it.”

Solar continues to grow, and provide needed tax revenue, despite hurdles

Across Louisiana, 19 solar projects are operating. Five began operating after Iberia passed its strict ordinance. 

Rural parishes that may otherwise see little investment are reaping massive tax benefits by embracing solar projects, researchers at UL-Lafayette say. Even if solar facilities are granted massive tax exemptions, they’ll generate at least 40 times more local property tax than farmland. 

Near Iberia, in Pointe Coupee Parish, the Oxbow solar project  — the largest in the state — is projected to generate $9.7 million in local tax revenue within the first three years. Morehouse Parish has already brought in about $3 million in sales tax revenue thanks to the Oak Ridge Solar Farm that began operating in 2023, about half of which went to the School Board. 

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The UL-Lafayette study predicts solar will bring in about half a billion dollars in state taxes through 2035. And once built, Barnes said, solar projects “tend to sit quietly with very little activity, generating significant, steady, predictable stream of tax revenue,” without requiring the increased public services — like fire protection or better roads  — that other large development projects need, said Barnes. Investment in a solar facility can also draw other businesses in, or prompt investment in improving the local electrical grid — what Barnes calls “broader spillover economic benefits.” 

“There will be continued expansion,” said Monika Gerhart, executive director of Gulf States Renewable Energy Industries Association. “The question is whether those projects will be over the state lines in Texas or Arkansas or Mississippi, or whether Louisiana is going to be able to avail itself of that revenue.”

Despite its opposition, Iberia Parish, too, has begun to see spillover benefits from investments in solar energy. 

Last year, a company called First Solar opened a $1 billion solar-panel production facility in Iberia Parish. It will manufacture 3.5 gigawatts of solar panels annually and is the largest investment in Iberia Parish history. 

The plant now employs hundreds of locals.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In rural communities, fears amplified by ‘AI slop’ and social media hamper solar boom on Aug 9, 2026.

In Wisconsin, utility Alliant Energy has called off a project meant to reduce power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities, after the Trump administration terminated a federal grant that would have supported it.

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which has deployed and upgraded hundreds of thousands of advanced smart meters, has not received any reimbursement from the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, for the work since October, when the Trump administration declared it was killing grants that it described as fueling ​“the Left’s climate agenda.”

And in the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities, and state agencies is still waiting for $464 million in DOE funds meant to help build high-voltage transmission lines to reduce grid congestion — although the agency in charge of the project says the funding will soon be restored.

Across the country, hundreds of such projects to improve grid reliability and make electricity more affordable face a highly uncertain future — the result of Trump administration actions that have slowed the outflow of billions of dollars of DOE funds to a trickle.

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Some of those projects in ​“blue states” were targeted as political retribution, as recent reporting from The New York Times has made clear. A handful of grant awardees in this category have won favorable court rulings, and more are seeking legal redress.

But many others are suffering from the DOE’s broader failure to carry out work that Congress has tasked it to do, according to groups that have been monitoring the agency since the start of last year. In red and blue states alike, the DOE is forcing thousands of grantees to undergo a laborious review process, so even projects that have not been officially terminated are stuck, unable to determine when or if they’ll start getting the money they’re owed.

According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025, and has threatened to terminate 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.

But the DOE has also stalled projects for ​“a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. ​“This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”

“DOE both overtly canceled a set of projects, then had this pattern of behavior where for 15 months they stopped actively managing projects,” said one former DOE official. ​“Projects can’t proceed to the next stages and get their next tranche of funding.”

The former official, who asked not to be named, described a pattern of stalling, stonewalling, and ​“ghosting” utilities, state governments, energy companies, and nonprofit groups awarded grants under the Biden administration.

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Many of those projects have been caught up in a process the DOE announced in May 2025 to review all financial assistance ​“on a case-by-case basis to identity [sic] waste of taxpayer dollars, protect America’s national security and advance President Trump’s commitment to unleash affordable, reliable and secure energy for the American people.”

Then, in October, the DOE announced the ​“termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects” — all of them tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The DOE’s termination announcement came right after Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, declared in a social media post that the administration would cancel ​“nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding.”

Canary Media reached out to a subset of DOE grantees that had won funding from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DOE issued a total of more than 100 GRIP grants — in October 2023, August 2024, and October 2024 — for projects to enlarge the grid, harden it against extreme weather, build microgrids to protect vulnerable communities, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries.

Some of the GRIP projects involve expanding clean energy and serving disadvantaged communities, two bugbears of the Trump administration. But many more are straightforward grid improvement projects that need federal dollars to reduce the costs borne by utilities and regional or state agencies.

The largest of these is in California. In 2024, the DOE awarded a $630.6 million grant aimed at upgrading more than 100 miles of high-voltage power lines in the state with advanced power cables capable of carrying more electricity along existing transmission corridors, a project estimated to be capable of delivering about $200 million in savings from improved energy efficiency. That project was terminated in October, and the DOE has disbursed no money for it, according to federal records.

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This uncertainty appears to apply to the majority of GRIP projects, according to Emlyn Bottomley, founder of the consultancy High Road Analytics, which focuses on workforce development, and a former Department of Labor deputy policy director in the Biden administration.

According to his tracking of federal spending, of the roughly $11.4 billion in DOE funds obligated to grid infrastructure and resilience — a category that includes GRIP program funds — $9.1 billion remains ​“at risk,” with funding stalled or timelines for completion shortened. That’s compared with $400 million in grants that have been canceled outright and $1.3 billion not yet disbursed but showing no signs of being stalled.

“It’s a shame these projects are being held up or canceled, especially since the case for them is fairly bipartisan — spanning national security, economic competitiveness, and cost and affordability,” Bottomley said.

All of the GRIP projects required partners to provide matching funds at an amount at least equal to the money DOE is providing, the former DOE official added. ​“You’re talking about folks putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. People have skin in the game for these awards.”

The costs of losing federal funding

Many of the GRIP grantees contacted by Canary Media declined to comment, citing ongoing discussions with DOE. Others reported that they are no longer pursuing the projects as described in their grant applications, at least not with the help of DOE money.

The latter is the case for Alliant Energy’s Smart Power Automation in Rural Communities (SPARC) project, which won a $50 million grant in late 2024 to add grid visibility and control devices to 140 grid circuits in disadvantaged and tribal communities served by subsidiary Wisconsin Power & Light — a utility in a blue state.

Those devices could allow the utility to quickly find and isolate faults on its grid, cutting power outages in targeted communities by up to 50 percent. They could also support grid-management software to help integrate more renewable and distributed energy, and potentially expand wireless communications access to these remote areas.

Alliant ​“voluntarily withdrew” from the grant award process in April, six months after its grant was terminated by the DOE, Alliant spokesperson Melissa McCarville told Canary Media. The agency has disbursed no funds to the project, according to federal records.

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Alliant is ​“actively pursuing many of the goals that were outlined in the SPARC project,” McCarville wrote in a May email, but as part of a 10-year strategic plan with no set timeline. ​“While the grant did provide valuable funding, it also required a significant investment, and we want to ensure our contributions are properly prioritized,” she wrote.

Still, at least one grant-funded project in a blue state is proceeding despite the absence of DOE funds. 

That’s the case for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the state’s capitol and environs. In 2023, SMUD won a $50 million grant to support a project to deploy 200,000 smart meters and grid devices and underlying software controls to ​“improve grid reliability, resilience, visibility and efficiency,” utility spokesperson Gamaliel Ortiz told Canary Media in an email. 

SMUD has carried out much of that work, which includes close to $100 million in utility spending, and has received almost $33 million in reimbursements from DOE, according to federal records. However, SMUD ​“has not received reimbursement for any costs incurred after the grant was cancelled on October 10, 2025,” Ortiz wrote. ​“We remain committed to this critical work and stay flexible as we evaluate how the loss of grant funding may impact the project timeline.”

In other blue states, some grants have been canceled and others are still under negotiation. In Oregon, utility Portland General Electric has recently learned that the DOE may reinstate a previously terminated $50 million grant to support next-generation ​“grid edge computing” devices, utility spokesperson John Farmer told Canary Media in an August email. That project had received only $1.2 million in DOE funding, according to federal records.

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The purpose of the project was to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid to ​“improve resilience, enable the integration of distributed energy resources, and maximize customer investments in home energy solutions.”

“PGE is evaluating the benefits and risks of reinstating the grant,” Farmer told Canary Media. The utility ​“recognizes that there are inherent risks of additional and changing demands by the DOE as the administration’s priorities change.”

At the same time, PGE remains in discussion with the DOE on a $250 million grant to build a high-voltage transmission line with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Farmer wrote. ​“Without this funding, we would lose the opportunity to offset those costs with external dollars, which could limit how efficiently we can advance needed grid improvements.”

Red state projects are also being held up because the grantee is located in a blue state. Such is the case of the aforementioned $464 million DOE grant for the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue project to build new transmission lines between the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states.

The $464 million GRIP grant was meant to bolster $1.3 billion in matching funds from utilities in the region to enable nearly 30 gigawatts of new generation to be built in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All but one of those states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election — but the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the entity awarded the grant, is in a blue state.

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In May, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced that the DOE ​“will honor its $464 million grant,” which will ​“unlock more than $1 billion in additional private investment and provide communities across the region with economic and infrastructure benefits.”

A DOE spokesperson told Canary Media in a July email that the DOE has conducted its review of GRIP projects based on a ​“number of criteria,” including whether it has ​“achieved the milestones set forth in the terms of the award,” whether it ​“remains technically and economically feasible,” and whether it ​“continues to effectuate the purpose of the program or the Department’s priorities.”

The spokesperson added that ​“none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” That statement is belied by court testimony reported by The New York Times last month, in which a DOE lawyer stated that none of the October grant terminations were ​“based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” and that all but one of them ​“had a recipient location and/​or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

During a series of congressional hearings in April, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that the DOE’s review of more than 20,000 grants was almost complete, and that more than 80 percent of grantees had received notice that their awards could proceed as is or with modifications.

But an Alumni Network analysis of DOE data shared with Congress showed that the DOE’s review both failed to restore the vast majority of projects caught up in the ​“blue state” termination action in October and failed to address the hundreds of projects that have never been officially terminated but remain unable to secure funds.

The revelation of the DOE’s explicit targeting of blue states for grant termination spurred 39 Senate Democrats to sign a letter to Wright and Vought demanding the immediate restoration of funding for DOE projects terminated in October.

“Once an administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote,” the senators wrote, ​“the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is blocking billions of dollars of grants that would fix the grid on Aug 8, 2026.

The Bridger Pipeline Expansion project has been moving through the permitting process with unusual speed. If built, the $2 billion, 650-mile pipeline will run through Montana and Wyoming and is one of three proposed pipeline legs connecting oil sands in Alberta, Canada to the trading hub in Cushing, Oklahoma. 

The project appears to be a priority for the Trump administration. The Bureau of Land Management announced that the pipeline will receive an expedited environmental review, and in late April, the administration granted the pipeline developer a cross-border permit to pass into the U.S. Permitting documents show the company, Bridger Pipeline Expansion, LLC, a subsidiary of Wyoming-based True Companies, hopes to break ground as soon as July 2027, pending state and federal approval.  

But the project has hit a stumbling block. On July 22, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, withdrew a waiver it had previously granted the pipeline. 

The waiver allowed the company to omit certain financial information and baseline environmental data from its state permit application with DEQ. Pipeline construction cannot begin without this permit and final federal approval. 

At the core of the debate is Montana’s Major Facility Siting Act, a state law that outlines the process of evaluating the potential economic, community, and environmental impacts of large energy projects like pipelines or power plants. Earlier this year, Bridger requested a waiver to omit certain financial and economic information, as well as baseline environmental data from its application to DEQ. The law allows for “irrelevant information” to be omitted from the review process, and DEQ granted Bridger the waiver in February. The agency is now backtracking on that decision.

In June, the environmental law firm Earthjustice filed a complaint on behalf of two Montana residents against DEQ’s decision to grant the waiver. Lars Phillips, an attorney with Earthjustice said the information needed to be included in order to have a thorough review process. 

“The law is clear, and DEQ was right to reverse course,” Phillips said. “But we are troubled by why DEQ decided to issue these waivers in the first place.”

Projects of this size and scale require both state and federal approval. Montana DEQ, along with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, held a public comment period on the pipeline proposal in May. Phillips said without Earthjustice taking this action to discover what information was waived, members of the public would never have known they were commenting on an incomplete application.

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The proposed pipeline is expected to move roughly 500,000 barrels of crude tar sands oil per day, according to DEQ documents. But at full capacity, that number is projected to increase to moving 1.13 million barrels per day from Canada, through Montana and into Wyoming.

The project has been referred to by supporters as “Keystone Light,” referencing the Keystone XL Pipeline, which then-President Joe Biden canceled in 2021. Shannon James with environmental watchdog Montana Environmental Information Center said calling it “light” is a misnomer. “It’s Keystone XXL and a major climate threat that far too many people haven’t heard about yet,” she said.

James and other opponents have raised concerns over the potential environmental harms the pipeline’s proposed path would take, a route that would cross water 150 times. 

“Pipelines leak,” James said. “It’s not a matter of if, but when. We should not be giving the green light to a company with a troubling track record in our state, especially before it has fully disclosed the impacts this project would have on Montana’s people, water, wildlife, and climate.”

In an email to Earthjustice shared with Montana Free Press, Jeremiah Langston, a lawyer for DEQ, said the agency is “requiring Bridger to produce the information in question” to move forward with the application. Permitting for the project cannot proceed until the application is complete, Langston said, and it’s up to Bridger to submit the additional information DEQ requires. 

Phillips maintains it’s a positive sign to see DEQ addressing gaps in the application, but said he would have liked to see the agency more proactively inform the public.

“It is unfortunate that it took two Montanans standing up to big oil to force DEQ to require Bridger to comply with Montana law,” he said.  

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Montana, a controversial $2B pipeline hits a speed bump on Aug 7, 2026.

A few years ago, environmental scientist Elliot Campbell went around asking people why they would, or would not, switch to an electric vehicle. A surprising number of them asked him a question in return: Because building an EV generates emissions, isn’t it better for the planet just to keep my gas car running for as long as possible?

Campbell, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, didn’t know the answer, so he set out to find it. Turns out the old adage that the greenest car is the one in your driveway is a myth. In fact, his study, published today in the journal Science, finds that swapping even a two-year-old gas car for an EV leads to a lifetime emissions savings of roughly 50 percent. 

Not everyone can afford to ditch a nearly new car, of course. It’s simply the most extreme example of the broader point his study revealed: The emissions saved by driving an EV very quickly compensate for the planet-warming gases generated by building it. Campbell said that finding consistently surprises his students, and goes against his own instincts.

“I like to repair things and keep them going,” he said. But, “we found there is a big advantage to retiring the gas vehicles early.”

Campbell designed the study to give internal combustion vehicles every possible advantage. “We really tipped the scales in favor of the gas vehicle,” he said. Most notably, it ignored the emissions that went into making the gas car, treating them instead as a sunk cost. EV still came out ahead, which suggests that climate-conscious drivers should make the switch as soon as it’s feasible. 

“You’re just delaying the benefits longer and longer,” he said, noting that sidelining gas guzzlers off the road can improve air quality as well. This is especially true for cars that were built to less stringent standards, added David Reichmuth, a transportation sustainability expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The magnitude of the benefits for getting an older gasoline vehicle,” he said, “can be much higher in terms of the air pollution.” 

Reichmuth was not involved with Campbell’s study, but said it aligns with his own work on the issue. His analysis found that EVs reach an emissions break-even point at around 18,000 miles, which the average driver travels in about 18 months. That, however, depends on where a person lives and the source of their electricity.

The benefit is greatest where the grid is greenest. In upstate NY, which generates a lot of hydroelectric power, getting around in an EV is like driving a gas car that gets 219 mpg. But even in the Rockies, where coal and natural gas are the norm, an EV is better than anything getting less than 68 mpg.

Campbell’s study identified few exceptions to the conclusion that replacing a gas car with an electric one significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Even moving away from high-efficiency vehicles and hybrids, like the Toyota Prius, is a climate win in the long-run. One case where it wouldn’t make sense, Campbell and his co-author found, is with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which have larger batteries and travel farther on electric power before switching to an internal combustion engine. Another is low mileage situations, such as with a second car that doesn’t get used that often. 

“To me, this is the biggest factor,” said Moaz Uddin, senior electric vehicle policy specialist at the think tank Great Plains Institute, about mileage. He gave the example of a retiree who only drives their Prius a few thousand miles a year. “It’s good that the study considers that.”

The new research finds that in order to repay the carbon debt of making a new EV, it must be driven 4,400 miles if it’s a car and 6,700 miles each year if it’s a truck. That’s already well below the 12,500 miles the average driver travels in a year, and the benefits to making the switch are likely to grow. 

As the United States increasingly relies on renewables, for example, charging an EV becomes even more environmentally appealing. Campbell and his co-author also point to improvements in battery recycling as a way of reducing the emissions involved with making an electric car. 

One hole in this latest study is that it doesn’t consider the cost of going electric. While previous research has shown that EVs come with higher upfront costs but lower operating expenses, it’s a thread that Campbell hopes economists pull on. He would also like to see someone better account for the emissions generated while extracting oil and getting gasoline to the pump, rather than simply the burning. But, for now, he believes the study sends a clear message.

“We’re trying to show that there’s not an environmental motivation for extending the lifetime of a gas vehicle,” he said. “Electric vehicles are a very clear winner.” 

The most direct policy interpretation of the study would be to give people money to scrap gas cars. There have been some efforts to do this, such as the 2009 federal Car Allowance Rebate System, also known as “cash for clunkers.” That gave people $3,500 to $4,500 if they upgraded to more efficient vehicles, and blew through its $3 billion budget in only a month. Reichmuth, though, says that the issue could be tackled earlier in the process.

“The obvious policy implication is don’t sell the gasoline car to begin with,” he said, with the corollary being that EVs need to be as attractive an alternative as possible. “Make sure there are more options, more support, for people to make that initial choice.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Your gas car works fine. Consider an EV anyway, scientists say. on Aug 6, 2026.

Jessica Skalka, 37, rounded the corner of a homemade bar in her dad’s garage, passing a framed collage of cutout newspaper clips marking the end of the 99-day strike at British Petroleum’s Whiting, Indiana, refinery in 2015. A row of championship banners for the Chicago Cubs, Bears and White Sox hung high across one wall, while a light-up “Donnie’s Man Cave” sign glowed nearby. An air conditioner hummed in the corner in the Northwest Indiana home as the first July heatwave pushed outdoor temperatures into the mid-90s. 

She picked an empty blue-and-orange Bears-themed bucket from the counter, shook it, and asked, “No candy today?”

“Yeah, well, I’m not working right now,” said Donald Skalka, 62, from across the garage.

The empty candy bucket was yet another reminder of how much life had changed over the past few months. Until mid-March, father and daughter worked at BP’s sprawling plant in Whiting, Indiana, the largest inland oil refinery in North America, located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, a half-hour drive from downtown Chicago.

The BP Whiting refinery as seen in March. The facility produces approximately 440,000 barrels of crude oil every day. Erin Hooley / AP Photo

There, Donald had spent nearly two decades working his way up to a job in the control room, where he monitored the refinery’s operations from behind a bank of screens. The plant processed approximately 440,000 barrels of crude oil every day, and Donald kept the electricity and steam-generating machinery at the plant running. Donald’s son worked there, too, as did Jessica, and Donald’s longtime girlfriend, Renee Pleitner, whom he met during his onboarding and is a third-generation refinery worker. 

For the last four months, the Skalkas, Pleitner, and approximately 800 other workers represented by United Steelworkers Local 7-1, or USW, have been locked out of the refinery without pay and with no clear indication of when they’ll return to work.

Unlike strikes, in which unionized workers advocate for themselves by refusing to work, lockouts are employer-initiated. During a lockout, management can prevent workers from returning to their jobs to withhold wages. Lockouts are generally seen as a hardline tactic during labor disputes and tend to be rare, especially in the refining business, which requires continuous production and a highly skilled workforce.

Now, longtime refinery workers worry Big Oil is experimenting with a new playbook to break union power, undermine national collective bargaining, and remake its workforce. They also worry that the dispute could have ripple effects far beyond the picket line and threaten not only workers and their families, but the health and safety of the surrounding community — a concern due to four flaring events, a fire, and a major power outage in just four months.

USW Local 7-1 member Alan Leon pickets outside the Whiting refinery in July. Leon is one of 800 unionized BP workers currently locked out of their jobs. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times.

BP began negotiating with the union in early January ahead of the previous contract’s expiration at the end of the month. But two months into discussions, after 98 percent of USW Local 7-1 members voted to reject what the fossil fuel company called its last, best, and final offer, it issued a lockout order. The proposal would have frozen wages, weakened safety protections, eliminated jobs, and expanded the use of artificial intelligence to monitor employees, according to the union. 

In an emailed statement to Grist, BP objected to the union’s characterization of its demands. “Our proposals are not unique or novel,” wrote BP spokesperson Cesar Rodriguez. “Most of what we are seeking has already been tested and implemented elsewhere.”

The lockout also “allowed for a safe and orderly transition of operations,” Cesar said. The union’s 24-hour notice requirement to strike and disrupt refinery operations  “presented safety and operational risk,” BP wrote in an earlier statement, and necessitated a continuity plan. 

Oil companies have had a banner year following the onset of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil have all reported record-setting profits, making more than $36 billion over the past three months. This week, BP announced quarterly profits of $5.7 billion, more than double the previous quarter.  

For Skalka, the March email notifying him that he wouldn’t be returning to work until further notice was gutting. 

“The gamut of emotions when I had to face my family, it was a lot,” he said.

From left: USW Local 7-1 members Don Skalka, daughter Jessica Skalka, and girlfriend Renee Pleitner stand outside their home in Munster, Indiana. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times

Skalka had inspired his children to follow in his footsteps. Born and raised in the northwest corner of Indiana, known for its concentration of factories, steel mills, and refineries, most of his family had worked at industrial facilities. His father worked at cement factories and later built parts for the nearby steel mills. An uncle was a shipbuilder on the East Side of Chicago. He followed suit. After spending a few years working on the railroads, he took a job at Whiting. 

He was eventually entrusted with an important role at the refinery. From the control room, he was responsible for identifying broken pumps, mechanical hiccups, and mystery leaks, all of which, if not caught in time, could mean a major fire or a multimillion-dollar headache for BP. Accidents and outages can also spike regional gasoline prices. A power interruption at the facility in April led to gas prices surging regionally by 40 to 80 cents per gallon. 

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“There’s a little bit of danger to it,” he said. “When you swipe in with your time card, you have to bring your A game.” 

All the same, he loved the job — and his daughter noticed. 

It was an exciting, breakneck-paced lifestyle, and the pay was good. She peppered her dad with questions, applied, took a qualifying test, passed, and eventually earned a spot. Donald Skalka Jr., Skalka’s son, spent approximately a decade working at a nearby steel mill. When an opportunity at the refinery came up a year and a half ago, he took it. It was a decision his father encouraged.

“He’s one of the 800 like the rest of us, and he’s going, ‘Dad, I don’t know if I should’ve listened to you.’ Well, I didn’t know at the time that was going to happen,” Skalka said.  “At the time, on paper, everything seemed better; you’re trying to have a better quality of life.”

USW Local 7-1 member Don Skalka looks at photos related to his organizing framed at his home in Munster, Indiana. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times

The lockout has reshaped his home life in other ways too. Jessica found temporary work. Her brother returned to a job at the mill. Donald and Renee are holding out, living on a budget that keeps shrinking. Besides leaving the candy bowl in the garage empty, they’ve swapped cable for streaming and are using rabbit-ear antennas for free local channels. They also paid their utility bills months in advance to avoid a power shutoff in the future.

“You get rid of the non-essentials right away,” Skalka said. “The thermostat stays higher, there’s less in the grocery cart, you don’t eat out obviously hardly at all anymore, 

Most days they take it easy. They pass the time filling poster boards with pictures of good times on the picket line this year and during previous standoffs. Sometimes, they visit Jessica’s home, which has a pool — otherwise they picket. Among Skalka’s picketing duties is bus driver; he pilots the union’s second-hand minibus, a stout, white vehicle, shuttling picketing union members between four different entrances. Union members have been assigned shifts to protest — four shifts a day, four protesters a shift. The schedule has allowed workers to find other employment and extend their ability to hold out during the lockout.

Donald goes on his off days too, when Pleitner is on the schedule, and she does the same for him. “We just kind of make it a family event,” Skalka said. 

By now, he’s used to the new routine. What he’s still wrapping his head around is a new, more aggressive tack from his employer — one that has pushed his family, friends, and coworkers to their limits. In recent months, the company and the union have blamed the other for alleged altercations. USW workers have filed police reports in two instances involving picketers who allegedly ended up pinned beneath a car. And the BP spokesperson alleged that union members committed unlawful acts. The tension has been building for months.

“This time it seems they’re in a union-breaking mode,” he said, “They’re following a playbook.”

A “fat cat” sits at a USW Local 7-1 picket site outside the BP Whiting refinery in July. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times

Union leaders trace the origins of BP’s strategy to Texas. In 2021, ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest oil and gas company, locked out approximately 650 unionized workers from its Beaumont, Texas, refinery when they rejected a “last, best, and final offer,” which would have frozen wages and ended some union seniority rights. At the time, the Beaumont workers were already operating outside the framework of the National Oil Bargaining Program, a national effort dating back to the 1960s to negotiate industry-wide standards for wages, health care, and workplace safety. Today, the program covers about 30,000 refinery employees across two-thirds of the nation’s refining capacity.  

The program exerts leverage by aligning approximately 200 refinery bargaining units around the same contract timelines, preventing unions from being pitted against each other, and establishing a national standard. Without that collective leverage, the Beaumont refinery workers were at a disadvantage. The Texas lockout lasted 10 months and ended in March 2022. When workers returned to their jobs, they did so under a weaker contract that gave Exxon authority over all job assignments, stripping the union of its previous role in determining a quarter of them. In the course of the 10-month lockout, approximately 20 percent of workers left the refinery for good.    

According to Eric Schultz, president of the USW Local 7-1, BP hired the architect of the Exxon negotiations, Jordan Marcks, as a director of employees and labor relations, while that lockout was ongoing. Schultz sees similarities between BP’s proposal and Exxon’s plan for the Texas refinery. For one, BP is pushing a contract term that would put the Whiting refinery out of step with the National Oil Bargaining Program. It is also looking to eliminate jobs and union oversight.

“They obviously liked that playbook,” he said. “They’re trying to bring that flavor up here to Northwest Indiana,” Schultz added.

When reached for comment about Marcks’ employment history and alleged tactics, the BP spokesperson said the company “does not comment on personnel matters.” Marcks did not respond to a request for comment. 

USW Local 7-1 members picket outside the BP refinery. Unionized workers have been assigned shifts to picket. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times

BP has brought in an unknown number of temporary workers — some from as far away as Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas — to replace the locked-out workers, according to Schultz. They’re being paid handsomely. Union wages run on average at about $54 per hour, but a union spokesperson said the new workers are being paid up to $127 an hour plus benefits for a six-month stint.

BP did not comment on how many temporary workers it’s currently contracting at the Whiting refinery. “Compensation is a personnel matter, and BP typically does not comment on personnel matters,” said Rodriguez. 

Mike Smith, the chair of the National Oil Bargaining for the United Steelworkers, said it’s not totally clear yet whether the lockouts reflect a new tack for Big Oil. “Whether this is an individual’s idea who happens to have been involved in both of those lockouts, or if this is a strategy — that’s still to be determined,” he said. 

Union members have been taking turns to picket, allowing them to find other work while the fight with BP plays out. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times

With the workers locked out, the squat union hall has transformed into an all-hours crisis center. Makeshift shelves in a corner carry everything from simple groceries like canned food and pasta to diapers and baby formula. The formula and diapers are typically the first to go, according to Michelle O’Shaughnessy, a union member who has been helping run the improvised pantry since the lockout started. 

A lot of the goods available for union members on a daily basis are there thanks to community donations. Amazon boxes arrive daily. So too do notes of support from across the country. The brother of a retired Whiting USW member mailed in a $20 bill all the way from Arizona to contribute to the strike funds. 

The local community has also rallied behind the refinery workers. “We have some faithful restaurants who are very good to us,” O’Shaughnessy said. Beggars Pizza in Whiting has been dropping off 10 pizzas to the union hall every Monday, as do Aurelios of Hammond on Tuesdays and Center Lounge, which has been bringing in meals on Wednesdays. 

Union members can also get help filling out unemployment applications at the center. The union has a strike fund that helps pay some bills, but members do not receive cash payments or salaries. Other organizations have also stepped up to assist with mortgage payments and help apply for SNAP benefits.

A check-in table at the USW Local 7-1 office in Whiting in July. Candace Dane Chambers / Sun-Times

Last month, Hammond Mayor Tom McDermott announced he was returning $20,000 in BP sponsorship money for the local Festival of the Lakes celebration. Not long after, Pierogi Fest in Whiting announced they would also return BP’s sponsorship money and set up donation boxes throughout the festival to collect funds for members to pay their bills. And the Lake County Council and Lake County Board of Commissioners passed resolutions announcing their support for the locked-out workers.  

The backlash against BP is far from local. State treasurers from Illinois, California, Colorado, and Connecticut signed onto a letter in April urging BP’s Chief Executive Officer, Meg O’Neill, to consider the national implications of the ongoing lockout. “The costs of prolonged disruption will not be contained within this dispute,” the letter said. “They will be borne by households, workers, and communities across the country, including those that sustain BP’s long-term presence and success in the U.S.”

While the fight plays out, Skalka is hunkering down, preparing for a long road back to work. He’s not sure if he’ll get to put his BP uniform on next month or in three months. What he does know is that he, his family, his nearly 800 USW brothers and sisters, and the rest of Northwest Indiana are determined to win.

“We’re still going to keep living our lives; it’s not gonna deter the hardworking people in Northwest Indiana,” Skalka said. “They’ve got a good fight on their hands, and we’re gonna give it to them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the nearly 5-month labor lockout at an Indiana refinery on Aug 6, 2026.

Utah’s solar generation eclipsed all other electricity sources for the first time ever in May, the culmination of a slow but steady years-long shift away from coal. Energy experts are calling it a win for the environment and the state’s economy. 

Photovoltaic panels in Utah produced nearly 1 terawatt hour in May 2026. That represented nearly a third of all electricity generated in the state that month, according to data from Ember, a global energy think tank. Natural gas generated 32 percent, coal generated 28 percent, and wind 2 percent.

“The trend of more and more solar in Utah is wonderful news for air quality, it’s wonderful news for the climate, and it’s wonderful news for jobs and the economy,” said Dan Schroeder, a physics professor at Weber State University who regularly checks energy data.

Schroeder attributes the trend to several large solar farms coming online in recent years. The 2,500-acre Green River Energy Center in the central part of the state became operational this spring, and includes 400 megawatts of solar generation and 400 megawatts of battery storage. Excelsior Energy Capital’s Faraday Solar project in Utah County, the state’s second-largest county,  started providing up to 685 megawatts for the Meta data center there last fall. The Elektron Solar Project, an 80-megawatt photovoltaic farm, began sending electricity to Salt Lake City, Park City, and Summit County in June 2024.

Solar also supports nearly 8,000 jobs in Utah, according to the latest information from the Solar Energy Industries Association. The state is home to 132 solar companies, including 54 solar developers and 23 solar manufacturers. Investors committed $1.5 billion to Utah’s solar market in 2025 alone.

Oil and gas extraction, by comparison, accounted for 1,291 jobs in the state in 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coal mining accounted for 1,059 in 2023, the most recent year the bureau has data for that industry. Utah had another 1,905 jobs in coal and petroleum product manufacturing last year. 

The rise of solar power has helped the state wean itself off a dependence on coal. In 2017, coal generated between 64 percent and 78 percent of electricity in Utah, depending on the month. By 2023, it started accounting for less than half of the state’s power sources in certain times of the year. This spring, it was less than a third. 

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Electricity generation is complicated, however, and solar won’t represent a third of Utah’s portfolio every month. But with its sunny, dry climate, “Utah still has room to grow its solar percentage,” Schroeder said.

He pointed to California, which saw nearly 51 percent of its electricity generation come from solar panels in May, the most recent month that Ember has data — showing Utah has much more room to grow.

“We’re going to see milestones like this increasingly happen,” said Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and energy analyst with Utah Clean Energy.

About 51 percent of the new utility-scale electricity generation added to the country’s grid is expected to come from solar this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The country is likely to add another 43.4 gigawatts of solar, 24.3 gigawatts of battery storage, and 11.8 gigawatts of new wind power in 2026, compared to just 6.3 gigawatts of natural gas generation and zero new coal capacity.

Some of Utah’s electricity gets exported to other states, and some of its solar farms serve a single customer, like the project in Utah County that has a contract with Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.

Mitchell pulled the numbers from the state’s largest electricity provider, PacifiCorp, which is the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power. Turns out, another renewable energy source has seen a surge in generation in the region — wind power.

Wind blew past all other energy sources in PacifiCorp’s portfolio for Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho in December and January for the first time, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“Wind plus solar is on a tear right now,” Mitchell said. “We may have achieved liftoff.”

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And the two power sources complement each other, Mitchell said, since wind generation is highest in the winter months, and solar produces the most electricity in the summer.

Most of PacifiCorp’s wind generation comes from facilities in Wyoming, according to Jona Whitesides, a spokesperson with Rocky Mountain Power. He said the recent sweep in wind power likely comes from the company’s investment in new turbines, including 400 megawatts added to the grid last fall at PacifiCorp’s Rock Creek II facility.

“A lot of days we are using more wind,” Whitesides said. “There are no fuel costs there; it’s essentially free.”

The Trump administration is phasing out tax incentives for wind and solar projects, however, calling them “expensive and unreliable.” But renewables combined with battery storage increasingly produce some of the cheapest, cleanest, and most consistent energy sources in the country, Mitchell said, and are not subject to the price spikes and uncertainty brought by global politics. What’s more, burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, which is mostly composed of methane, creates pollution and contributes to a warming planet. 

Mitchell said he keeps a running list of the ways a warming West is hurting Utahns at home. A record-hot spring followed by a cold snap caused fruit farmers to lose their crops, for example. Utah also saw virtually zero snowpack over the winter, setting the stage for an explosively bad wildfire season and uncertainty about the state’s future water supply. Emergency room visits from tick bites are also on the rise in the West, Axios reports, as milder winters and earlier onset of warm temperatures help the insects thrive.

“In order to reduce those impacts in the future, we need to be reducing our emissions,” Mitchell said. “And we need to be doing it faster.”

Still, the shift in priorities at the federal level caused PacifiCorp to abandon plans to build more wind and solar projects in the next two decades, according to its latest Integrated Resource Plan update. The pivot has earned the utility criticism from renewable advocates like Utah Clean Energy.

Whitesides called the plan a “snapshot in time” that is constantly revised depending on energy costs, along with federal and state policies.

“It didn’t make financial sense to move forward with new renewable resources at this given time,” Whitesides said. “In two years, we could have a different administration. It may bring back more renewables.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a first, Utah got more power from solar than any other source on Aug 6, 2026.

When wildfire smoke blanketed northern Michigan skies last month, Kasey Wierzba thought the vineyard at Shady Lane Cellars in Suttons Bay looked like a different planet.

“That kind of pinky, peachy haze really was filtering through the whole vineyard. The visibility was really minimal,” said Wierzba, the general manager and executive winemaker at Shady Lane Cellars, a winery and vineyard that sits on the “little finger” of the state on Leelanau Peninsula, a region famous for its winemaking.

Wierzba also thought about how the pungent smoke might impact the grapes, something that the larger wine industry is becoming more familiar with as global warming increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Though she and other local grape growers were spared — the worst of the wildfires were burning far away in Canada and Minnesota, the smoke didn’t linger long, and it’s still early in the growing season — climate change could bring the threat closer to home in the future. 

At stake is the state’s nearly $9 billion wine industry, which may have to adapt to the smoke’s effects on grapes, a challenge those in wine regions like the West Coast and Australia are already confronting.

When grapes are exposed to smoke for an extended amount of time, finished wines can develop what’s known as “smoke taint” — unwanted flavors that have been described as everything from barbecued food to burnt bacon.

Because it’s early in the growing season, Wierzba said she’s confident there won’t be any impact on finished wines. The grapes are shaped like small pellets at this point of the year, known as the “buckshot berry stage” because they resemble the size of bullets used for hunting deer.

Andy Fles, vineyard manager for Shady Lane Cellars in Suttons Bay, Michigan, shows off young muscat grapes in the “buckshot berry stage” of fruit development.
Vivian La / IPR News

Still, if and when smoke hits again, Wierzba said she’ll consider sending grape samples to labs that could detect the compounds associated with wildfire smoke. “I think having the smoke incident at this time in the grape growing, when they wouldn’t be affected, spurred me to think, ‘Wow, I need to be prepared,’” Wierzba said.

Tests can help, but it’s generally difficult to measure damage from smoke before wine is produced, said Paolo Sabbatini, a viticulture professor at Michigan State University. Smoke compounds bind with the grape skin and tissues, and the flavors associated with smoke taint only come through during the fermentation process.

“You need to wait for the finished wine. So during the season, unless your vineyard catches on fire and you see damage on the berries after a smoke event, you can’t even measure anything,” he said.

Sabbatini received 10 calls from grape growers and winemakers around Michigan with questions about smoke impacts. But he said he’s “pretty confident” that there wasn’t enough smoke exposure over a long enough period of time for grapes to be impacted by the fires, which are still burning in Ontario and Minnesota and have so far destroyed more than 64,000 acres, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Local growers said it was fortunate that smoke didn’t hit the region during the key time that grapes change color in the fall — the period when they are typically most sensitive to smoke.

“We are sitting with our fruit still at a very immature stage, when we’re still going through cell division. So all of the cells, and the cluster, and the berries aren’t formed yet,” said Brian Hosmer, winemaker at Chateau Chantal, a winery and inn on Old Mission Peninsula, another northern Michigan winemaking hotspot.

Smoke taint is a rising concern elsewhere around the world, where hotter, larger wildfires have crept ever closer to vineyards. Ongoing fires in southwestern France have already scorched more than 160 square miles of forest near Bordeaux, pushing up against the country’s world-famous wine region.

“We’re talking about places where the fire is literally up to the edge of the vineyards, or even a couple miles away, where they’re getting ash falling directly on the fruit,” Hosmer said.

As climate change fuels the hotter, drier summers that increase the likelihood of wildfire events and widespread smoke, the number of places exposed to smoke taint is also increasing, said Ben Montpetit, chair of the department of viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis. The program is one of the country’s leaders in the area of smoke taint research.

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There aren’t simple solutions to smoke taint, Montpetit said. Treatments to remove some of the unwanted flavors could impact wine quality or introduce other tastes. While growing awareness of the issue has led to increased state and federal support for studies — the latest draft of the U.S. farm bill includes a directive for more research and development into wine grapes and wildfire smoke exposure — Montpetit said smoke taint will remain a problem. 

“As much as we can prepare, there are going to be fires in the future, and unfortunately, they will impact wine regions,” Montpetit said.

Grape growers said they’re learning to adapt to multiple changes in the environment, from drifting wildfire smoke to increasingly variable weather conditions. Studies looking at climate change impacts on Michigan’s wine region cite early spring frosts that can damage vines and hotter temperatures during the growing season.

Those in the industry said adaptation is part of the job. After all, winemakers first flocked to the region centuries ago to take advantage of the extended growing season that Lake Michigan provides.

“It’s always challenging. It’s farming. It’s legalized gambling,” Hosmer with Chateau Chantal said. He’s not concerned about impacts from this recent smoke, he said, but a trend of warmer summers “definitely makes us think about what’s going on in the woods around our vineyards” in terms of local fire danger.

Vineyard manager Andy Fles, left, and Kasey Wierzba, general manager and executive winemaker, examine the grapevines at Shady Lane Cellars.
Vivian La / IPR News

Andy Fles, vineyard manager for Shady Lane Cellars, said it’s already been a tough growing season in northern Michigan this year, between extreme precipitation and fluctuating temperatures.

“Global warming doesn’t mean everywhere is going to be warmer every single year,” he said. “I think what it means for us is that it’s climate chaos, and it’s very hard to predict what is going to happen.” 

And that includes wildfire smoke.

“It’s something that you can’t necessarily control, which is frustrating at times,” Fles said. “So this is just a new hurdle, and we’ll find ways to deal with it when we have to.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Michigan winemakers have a new climate worry: More wildfire smoke on Aug 5, 2026.

Betsy Robertson was standing in the center of the Spokane Convention Center on Monday afternoon, but she wasn’t there for a gala or a conference. Instead, the event space in the middle of Washington state’s second-largest city had been transformed into a Red Cross emergency shelter as a trio of wildfires, just a few miles away, burned down entire neighborhoods.

Nurses and volunteers were moving between the rows of cots around Robertson, making sure that the hundreds of evacuees – from the mothers with their babies to the elderly with their caretakers – had blankets and enough to eat. Just outside, the air was noxious with smoke “thick enough to burn your eyes,” she said.

Robertson, a communications director for the Red Cross, is from Washington, and has been with the organization for 10 years. She has seen communities devastated by wildfires before. But never like this.

“The scale of homes destroyed and lives changed forever – this is a new level,” she said. “We are bracing ourselves for seasons like this getting worse and worse, and starting earlier and going later.”

A historically dry winter, extreme drought and heat waves set the stage for the hundreds of wildfires that have burned across the Pacific Northwest this summer. Dozens of large ones have broken out in the last week alone. Though it’s still early in the fire season, Oregon recently broke its annual record for acreage burned with nearly 2 million acres scorched. 

Washington is also in the middle of its most destructive season on record, with more than half a million acres burned and at least 65,000 residents ordered to evacuate across the state. The three large fires that started on Saturday around Spokane had destroyed more than 700 hundred buildings by Monday afternoon. 

“I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how we’re going to house all these folks,” said Kitty Klitzke, a member of the Spokane City Council representing a hard-hit area where two fires were burning on Tuesday morning. Many of the people displaced by the fires in Spokane are senior citizens and their caretakers. “It’s a miracle that, so far, we know of no fatalities and no reported missing people,” Klitzke said.

A woman and her daughter wait for news on the status of their home at a Red Cross evacuation center in Spokane, Washington, on August 4, 2026. Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

As the planet heats up, the conditions that fuel extreme wildfires are becoming more common. A warmer atmosphere can hold about 7 percent more water vapor for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, drawing more moisture from soils and vegetation and leaving forests and grasslands primed to burn. That dynamic also causes rain to fall more intensely but less frequently, leading to long periods of drought.

“This fire, and what we’re expecting to come, makes no sense unless you connect the dots through a changing climate,” said Bob Freitag, who recently served as director of the Institute of Hazards Mitigation Research and Planning at the University of Washington. “The science is known, and this is not something that is a one-off.”

According to Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, a lack of snowfall across the region helped set the stage for these fires. Normally, snowpack builds up during the winter and melts gradually through the rest of the year, providing a steady source of moisture. This year, the already-small snowpack was hit with hot spring temperatures, causing this reserve to melt early and leaving the landscape parched. Spokane had half of the typical snowfall this year, Pastelok said. Other parts of the state had even less, with many areas reaching historic lows.

In the last few days, powerful winds carried hot embers from the Little Giant fire, a 70,000 acre blaze in central Washington, for more than 3 miles, sending the flames clear over the waters of Lake Chelan and into the forests on the other side. Ryan Rodruck, a communications manager at the Washington Department of Natural Resources, called the overall situation “extremely tragic” and said that it had been an exceptionally challenging season for the thousands of wildland firefighters deployed across the state.

Residents of Spokane, Washington look through the remains of their burned home on August 3, 2026. AP Photo / Lindsey Wasson

In Spokane, more high winds forecast for this weekend could further worsen conditions, said Benjamin Cossel, a wildfire public information officer from California working with fire-fighting crews in the city.

The situation is comparable to the Los Angeles fires in 2025, Cossel said. Both outbreaks began in wild areas before moving into partially forested suburban neighborhoods. The urban setting also makes the smoke especially toxic, he said. A recently released study found that the Los Angeles fires, which sent more than 200,000 residents fleeing, had exposed an estimated 3.3 million people to high concentrations of a cancer-causing toxin. 

Klitzke, the city council member, said the affected neighborhoods in Spokane were known to be vulnerable to fires. Steep terrain and abundant plant life helped the fires spread quickly over the weekend, while the winding cul-de-sac layouts of the neighborhoods slowed evacuations and made it difficult for emergency responders to reach the fires.

“These are neighborhoods with thousands of people and only two ways in or out,” Klitzke said, adding that many evacuees were stuck waiting in traffic for hours, watching the houses around them burn down. 

Areas where homes mingle with natural areas are known as the wildland-urban interface. This kind of suburban housing is the fastest growing type of land development in the United States, and research shows that the homes built in these areas are more likely to burn down when wildfires spread.

“We already knew that this was a dangerous situation,” she said. “We need to get really serious about addressing climate change.”

Increasingly, fire-prone states like California are requiring homeowners to clear the trees and shrubs in a radius surrounding their home. This buffer zone, known as a defensible space, can dramatically reduce the risk that a wildfire will ignite a building. 

People chose to live in these neighborhoods precisely because they love the vegetation, Cossel said. “I understand why people don’t want to remove them,” he said. “But we can’t live in that world anymore because of these fires.”

This story has been updated to clarify where the fires started around Spokane.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire season is changing. Spokane is showing how. on Aug 5, 2026.

In a win for opponents of Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 pipeline, the Michigan Supreme Court vacated a key permit last week for a proposed project that would replace a segment of the pipeline running underneath an environmentally-sensitive area of the Great Lakes, finding that a state commission did not examine the full scope of possible harm to the environment.

Following the 6-1 decision, the justices remanded the permit back to the Michigan Public Service Commission for a more thorough review, which likely extends the timeline for a decision on a project that’s already been mired in legal and procedural hurdles for years. 

Enbridge Energy received the permit in 2023 for its proposal to replace a segment of the oil and natural gas liquids pipeline — which connects lakes Michigan and Huron via the Straits of Mackinac — with a new one encased in a tunnel buried in the lakebed. Environmental groups and tribal nations appealed the decision, landing the case before the state’s highest court this year.

Writing for a nearly unanimous court in a 58-page opinion, Justice Elizabeth Welch said that the commission didn’t consider the full range of potential environmental harms, nor did it look at how the project would impact the public’s right to use the state’s natural resources, which includes the Great Lakes — protections granted under the state’s public trust doctrine.

“We cannot fault (the commission) for this failure, because there was little authority on this issue prior to our decision today. Even so, it was error,” the opinion stated.

Justices found that the commission incorrectly limited its scope of review under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act to just the tunnel, when it should have examined how the project would impact the broader pipeline. Line 5 transports crude oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario, with 4.5 miles of the pipeline crossing the straits. 

In its new review, the justices said that the public service commission must answer whether the tunnel project will extend the lifespan of the 73-year-old pipeline, and if it does, determine what impacts there are to the environment and to the public trust.

“It is impossible to prevent or mitigate an environmental risk without understanding the nature of that risk,” the justices wrote.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs — four tribal nations across Michigan and three environmental groups — argued that because the tunnel project would extend the pipeline’s lifespan, it causes harm by increasing the risk of oil spills along Line 5’s entirety and increased greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil fuels it transports.

“The court has made clear that our understanding of environmental harm, it’s a practical understanding, but it’s also a broad one,” said Chad Hughes, senior attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which argued with the plaintiffs. “There’s no requirement to narrowly focus on the physical location of the project. You look at the environmental harms where they happen.”

By broadening the scope of reviews under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act, opponents said conversations about shutting down the entire pipeline are finally a possibility. The justices wrote that “a meaningful examination” of alternatives can’t happen until the commission determines the full impacts of the project.

“The door has been kicked open to an imaginable future where we can talk about alternatives other than Line 5,” said President Whitney Gravelle of the Bay Mills Indian Community, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

In a statement, Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy wrote that the company disagrees and is disappointed by the ruling, calling it an additional delay to a project that has already been under review for nearly a decade. Enbridge is reviewing the opinion and assessing legal options, he said.

“What remains unchanged is our commitment to operating Line 5 safely and responsibly, incorporating enhanced safety measures in the Straits, and protecting Michigan’s natural resources for generations to come,” the statement said.

The lone dissenting opinion from Justice Brian Zahra said that the court’s directive to consider the full scope of potential harms was “a moral hazard,” because state regulators already decided Line 5 was in the public interest when it approved construction more than 70 years ago. 

But Zahra agreed with the majority on the requirement to consider the public trust doctrine, and recommended that the commission use last month’s permit issuance from a separate state agency as a guide. The Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy said the necessity of the tunnel in preventing an oil spill in the Great Lakes outweighed other public interests.

Separate from the tunnel project, Line 5 faces legal challenges from groups that have fought to shut down the pipeline for years, including Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration. This spring, a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for state court proceedings on whether the aging pipeline can continue operating in the straits.

Line 5 protesters in Detroit in 2021. Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Last week’s ruling was also a significant win for public trust considerations, according to environmental lawyers. The public service commission declined to consider the public trust doctrine in its analysis prior to issuing its permit in 2023, a decision upheld by the Michigan Court of Appeals because it argued the commission “possesses only that authority bestowed upon it by statute.”

The justices reversed this ruling, agreeing in a concurrent case with plaintiff Flow Water Advocates that the state legislature grants the public service commission “the authority — and indeed, the responsibility — to consider the public trust doctrine.”

“It is elevating the rights of the public. It’s saying that the intergenerational equity that we promise our children will be there,” said Liz Kirkwood, executive director of Flow.

Gravelle with the Bay Mills Indian Community said this new consideration of the doctrine is a win for tribal treaty rights. Tribes in Michigan have long asserted that Line 5’s operation interferes with their rights to fight, hunt, and gather on treaty-ceded lands, which include the Straits of Mackinac.

“You can’t have a treaty right to fish if you don’t have healthy waterways for fish to spawn. You can’t have a treaty right to hunt if you’re cutting down forests and filling wetlands, you can’t have a treaty right to gather if you’re polluting waterways and watersheds that are impacting plant species that you rely on for ceremonial or medicinal purposes,” she said.

The court’s ruling reflects an Indigenous way of thinking that could shape future environmental reviews, Gravelle said.

“We have teachings in our culture that require us to think generations ahead: Is the decision I made today going to benefit seven generations from now?” she said. “We need more holistic, proactive decision-making from our state agencies moving forward. And so, I hope that’s the pathway carved.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A controversial plan to update Line 5 just suffered a major loss at the Michigan Supreme Court on Aug 5, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also spurred action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first two of those things may have mattered most. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued last month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away —  could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “We see this exact playbook every time the plastics industry is asked to stop misleading the public — they suddenly hide behind the Constitution.”

In his decision, Hayes applied a standard four-part test to determine whether SB 343 would unduly restrict companies’ speech rights. The law passed the first two tests handily, as it regulates “potentially misleading” speech and was intended to serve California’s legitimate interests in reducing consumer confusion and improving recycling rates.

The next tests are where the law ran into trouble. Hayes, siding with the industry trade groups, argued that the legislation would not advance those “legitimate interests.” Rather than encouraging companies to redesign their products and packaging to comply with California’s real-world recyclability criteria, he said the law would prompt them to remove the recycling symbol altogether. Products recycled at a rate below the 60 percent threshold that the law requires would no longer make it into recycling bins, which could in theory leave more of them bound for the landfill.

Hayes said a less stringent regulation could have better advanced California’s goals. For instance, the state could have passed a law requiring more descriptive qualifiers alongside the recycling symbol. He offered a hypothetical example of a label explaining that an item is “accepted by recyclers in the greater Los Angeles area but nowhere else in California.” Such a label would provide consumers with more and better information, he argued, but would not be allowed under SB 343.

Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the nonprofit National Stewardship Action Council, said the judge’s reasoning reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems facing California recycling systems. People are throwing too much stuff into their blue bins, she said. In addition to not actually being recyclable, much of this refuse — including plastic bags and other plastic films — can gum up sorting machines, causing operational delays and creating safety risks.

“People are wish-cycling, they’re so desperate to recycle,” Sanborn told Grist. “We have to pull all this [contamination] out, which is very labor-intensive, and then everybody wants to know why their bills go up.” 

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Industry groups welcomed the injunction, saying it would prevent California from “censoring truthful information on packaging.”

Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, said he’s seen free speech challenges to environmental rules many times before. Big polluters have frequently invoked the First Amendment to oppose regulations that require them to disclose information — like their greenhouse gas emissions — or tone down statements about their sustainability.

“What’s relatively new and concerning is when these arguments succeed and states are blocked from implementing common-sense initiatives to protect their residents,” he said.

A lawsuit Hochberg’s organization is pursuing against Coca-Cola illustrates the same debate. It alleges the company presents itself as a “sustainable and environmentally friendly company” despite its outsize contribution to plastic pollution. Coca-Cola argued that statements about its sustainability efforts — including plastics recycling — were protected political speech rather than commercial advertising. A federal judge rejected that argument in 2024.

The companies that sued California didn’t make that same distinction; their suit is more like one filed in 1992 that sought to block a California law restricting the use of terms like “biodegradable,” “ozone-friendly,” and “recyclable.” A judge upheld the law, ruling that it would not stifle free speech because corporations could still use a restricted word or phrase as long as they included qualifiers explaining how, where, or under what conditions it applied.

The injunction against SB 343 leaves California with few easy options. Hayes’ ruling suggests the state faces a difficult road if the case proceeds to trial. Lawmakers could amend the law to address some of the judge’s concerns, though that may be unlikely given the politics surrounding the issue. California could also appeal the injunction, but the lower court would still have to decide the case on its merits.

Earth Island Institute and Californians Against Waste announced on July 27 that they are joining California as defendants. Hochberg said he hoped to provide the court with more information “about how the recycling system actually works.” Losing the lawsuit will make it harder for other states to pursue similar labeling regulations, he said. 

It could also jeopardize California’s nation-leading extended producer responsibility law, which shifts responsibility for collecting, recycling, and reducing plastic packaging from taxpayers and local governments to the companies that produce it. It relies on the same definition of recycling and is currently being challenged by a separate lawsuit.

Whatever happens next, Sanborn said she’s ready to work with industry to come up with other solutions — including legislation to clarify labeling rules at the national level. “We can and should work together to solve this,” she said. “But you should not have the right to lie to people.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is the recycling symbol free speech? A judge just ruled it could be. on Aug 3, 2026.

Construction is underway on a $1.7 billion solar and battery storage project in Texas that will turn existing coal mining land into a hub of clean energy generation.

Panamint Capital announced last week that it broke ground on the 1.2-gigawatt Big Rooter Power solar farm in Bremond, about halfway between Dallas and Houston. The project will use some of the land and assets from the adjacent Twin Oaks coal-fired power plant and Calvert surface coal mine, both of which will continue operating.

Panamint’s clean energy project will be among the largest in the nation — and, the developer claims, the biggest solar array ever built at a brownfield site in North America.

“We believe deploying new capacity at existing energy sites is the clearest way to benefit communities, ratepayers, and the environment alike,” said Apolka Totth, CEO of Panamint, a Nevada-based investment firm.

The giant installation will further boost Texas’ thriving solar sector, which this year is expected to generate more electricity than coal in the Lone Star State. The renewable resource is helping meet the state’s energy demand from data centers, manufacturing facilities, and rising air-conditioning use amid more frequent and extreme hot weather.

The Calvert mine is a 19-million-ton surface lignite mine adjacent to the Twin Oaks coal plant. Panamint Capital

Panamint, which is backed by the private equity firm KKR, launched in 2019 with the goals of squeezing more life out of existing fossil-fuel infrastructure while building lower-emission facilities on the same sites. In 2023, Panamint acquired the 310-MW Twin Oaks coal plant and Calvert mine ​“with the express intention of leveraging the site’s existing characteristics to massively and rapidly expand generating capability at the lowest possible cost,” Totth said by email. 

Work has started on the first phase of the solar farm, a 491-MW section that is set to go online in August 2028. Construction will begin in December on the remaining 658 MW, which could start producing power in August 2029.

The 10,000-acre Big Rooter site will also include 1.6 gigawatt-hours of battery storage and 20 miles of new extra-high-voltage transmission lines. The investment firm says it also has the infrastructure and natural gas access needed to build at least 800 MW of gas-fired generation, either for the grid or customers like data center developers.

“Big Rooter is a landmark project that reflects the scale of investment being made in America’s energy future,” George Hershman, CEO of Solv Energy, said in a news release. The contractor is building the site’s solar array, substation, and transmission infrastructure.

Turning coal mines into clean energy 

Big Rooter’s pairing with active coal operations makes it unique within the nation’s small but growing coal-to-solar subsector, which has mainly focused on putting panels on former mine lands and retired industrial sites.

The largest of these projects is the 186-MW Tilden Solar Project in southern Illinois, followed by the 111-MW Martin County Solar Project in eastern Kentucky, which both went online last year atop abandoned coal mines.

In Louisiana, the 240-MW Dolet Hills Solar Project is now being built on a former coal mine property. And the developer BrightNight is advancing the Starfire installation on remediated mine land in Kentucky.

In 2023, when BrightNight announced the Appalachian project, electric truck startup Rivian signed on as the anchor customer, with a 100-MW power purchase agreement. Starfire was initially envisioned as a roughly 800-MW project, but is now on track for 410 MW, with construction slated for late 2027 and planned operations in 2030.

The 111-MW Martin County Solar Project in eastern Kentucky will supply power for Toyota’s automaking operations in the state. Toyota

“Earlier descriptions of a larger project reflected a broader long-term vision for the site, but as development has progressed, BrightNight has focused on the configuration that best aligns with current interconnection, permitting, site, and customer considerations,” a BrightNight spokesperson said by email. ​“We remain very enthusiastic about Starfire and its importance as a major redevelopment project on former coal mining land in Eastern Kentucky.”

Repurposing old mining sites for solar power has an obvious appeal. As opposition breaks out in rural areas over using prime farmland for solar — concerns stoked by Trump administration officials, including U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — brownfield projects allow developers to sidestep those conversations and put sullied land to use. Doing so has typically proved more complicated and expensive than placing solar panels on flat or uncontaminated fields.

The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act provided incentives to make it easier to finance clean energy installations on mine lands, while a $500 million Department of Energy program allocated funding for projects on current or former mines.

But last year, the Trump administration and Congress added more hurdles by phasing out tax credits for solar and wind energy, effectively ending the tax bonus for brownfield developments. And the administration scrapped at least one DOE mine-land award, for Mineral Basin Solar Power, as part of its sweeping cancellation of $7.6 billion in clean energy grants in the 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

The Nature Conservancy and its partners are developing solar projects on former coal mines, including at this site in Campbell County, Tennessee.
Cameron Davidson/TNC

“The federal policy landscape for developing clean energy on mines has changed, but the opportunity hasn’t,” said Jessica Wilkinson, the North America renewable energy team lead for The Nature Conservancy, a global nonprofit.

“In many parts of the country, wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy and are succeeding on economics alone,” she added. ​“And if building on mine lands, brownfields, and landfills has fewer community conflicts, they may be seen as very enticing.” 

The nonprofit and its partners plan to develop 25 solar and battery storage projects on former mine lands that The Nature Conservancy manages in the Cumberland Forest, which spans parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The first project, the 10-MW Wildcats Solar in Virginia, is expected to break ground this fall and could start delivering power to the grid next year.

Wilkinson noted that despite the federal pullback, states have continued to show support for what her group calls ​“mining the sun” projects. For example, Ohio and Colorado passed laws to incentivize renewable energy development on former industrial sites. And a handful of federal programs continue providing financial support for cleaning up coal mining areas — a crucial step for enabling future solar development.

“Communities still want to see these lands become economic engines again,” Wilkinson said.

Texas project adds solar — and more coal

Panamint, for its part, said it was able to secure clean energy incentives for Big Rooter Power before Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, repealing large swaths of the Inflation Reduction Act.

“We ordered long-lead time equipment such as transformers and circuit breakers well before last summer’s OBBBA, so we were largely insulated from those impacts,” Totth said.

She noted that Panamint is partnering with U.S. firms First Solar and Nextpower (formerly Nextracker) to procure domestically made solar modules and racks. Big Rooter is also located in an ​“energy community” — the Department of Energy’s term for brownfield sites and areas affected by coal plant and mine closures. For those reasons, the company says it will receive a federal investment tax credit worth 50% of total project costs.

Read Next For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal Tik Root

Yet as Panamint begins installing millions of solar panels in Texas, it has no plans to wind down production at the neighboring Twin Oaks coal plant.

“Twin Oaks is an economically competitive unit that provides low-cost reliability to Texas ratepayers, and we see no reason for an early retirement,” Totth said. She added that the company is also investigating both expanding the Calvert mine area and building a terminal facility to rail in coal for continued operations.

As Totth sees it, the new solar array will produce enough carbon-free power to ​“negate” the coal plant’s emissions profile on an annual basis.

It’s an example of the all-of-the-above approach to energy in Texas. Despite the massive amounts of solar, storage, and wind the state has built, it continues to cling to fossil fuels. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Texas coal mine will soon be home to a 1.2GW solar farm on Aug 2, 2026.

For generations, summer in Montana has meant long days outdoors. Children spent afternoons riding bicycles through quiet neighborhoods, swimming in lakes and rivers, hiking forest trails, and playing baseball past sunset. Families planned camping trips months in advance, double-checking that they had all the fishing, paddling, and tenting gear they needed to sleep in cool mountain air under clear skies. 

Today, many parents instead check the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index before deciding whether their children can play outside at all. 

As wildfire season becomes longer and more severe across the American West, smoky skies have become an increasingly familiar part of summer. In Montana, where wildfire has always been part of the landscape, summer now includes days or even weeks when children are advised to stay indoors because the air outside is unhealthy. 

Scientists have documented the growing health risks of wildfire smoke, particularly for children whose lungs are still developing.

But pediatricians and researchers say the consequences extend beyond children’s lungs. A 2024 UNICEF report found that wildfire smoke affects not only children’s respiratory health but also their learning, mental well-being, and opportunities for play, warning that repeated smoke exposure can shape childhood in lasting ways. 

Wildfire smoke blankets homes in Missoula, Montana, on July 26.
Mosabber Hossain/Inside Climate News

Repeated smoke events are changing children’s daily routines, limiting opportunities for outdoor play and social interaction and reshaping how many families experience summer. Schools are investing in better air-filtration systems as communities rethink how school buildings should function in a changing climate.

“I remember being stuck inside because of the smoke,” said Melody Irvine, who grew up in western Montana with asthma. 

During smoky summers, outdoor activities that many children took for granted often disappeared for Irvine. Today, as a student at the University of Montana studying environmental science and social work, Irvine sees those childhood memories differently. 

 “When I was younger, it felt like something unusual,” she said. “Now it seems like smoky summers are becoming expected.”

A threat to physical, mental, and emotional development

Smoke’s shift from an occasional disruption to a recurring part of childhood is increasingly drawing the attention of public health experts. 

“Kids typically spend more time outdoors, and they’re usually running around, increasing their breathing rate and their exposure to wildfire smoke,” said Kerri Mueller, an air quality specialist with the Missoula City-County Health Department.

Smoke exposure can trigger headaches, itchy eyes, sore throats, coughing, wheezing, and asthma flare-ups, while repeated exposure may reduce lung function.

Wildfire smoke contains tiny particles known as PM2.5, which can travel deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Studies in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology have linked exposure to wildfire smoke with asthma attacks, respiratory infections, and emergency department visits, particularly among children. 

Children play on a swing set in the University Village residential area of Missoula on July 15.
Mosabber Hossain/Inside Climate News

“Children face greater risks from wildfire smoke because their lungs are still developing, especially during the first several years of life, and they breathe more air relative to their body weight than adults,” said Lori Byron, a pediatrician and chair of the nonprofit Montana Health and Climate. “We also know much more now about particulate matter from wildfire smoke. Those particles can get into our brains and even reach unborn babies.”

“We’re only beginning to understand the full extent of the harm they can cause,” said Byron. 

Although Montana lacks statewide pediatric hospitalization data linking wildfire smoke directly to children’s illnesses, pediatricians say they routinely see more children with asthma attacks and other respiratory problems during smoke events. National studies show increases in emergency department visits among children during periods of heavy wildfire smoke, Byron said.

During smoke season, many parents begin each morning by checking not only the weather forecast but also the Air Quality Index, which can determine not only if their children can play outside, but if it is safe to open the windows to cool their home.

Read Next Wildfire smoke engulfed their cities. Did it make their babies sick? Zoya Teirstein & Jess Davis

When wildfire smoke blankets a community for days or weeks, childhood routines begin to disappear. Soccer practices are canceled. Playgrounds sit empty. Summer camps move indoors or suspend programming. Even simple activities like walking a dog or riding a bicycle become difficult when air quality reaches unhealthy levels. 

Such outdoor play is not a luxury, according to experts, but essential to healthy child development. Running across a field, playing with friends, climbing trees, or just loitering outdoors are far more than physical exercise for children, a September 2018 study from the American Academy of Pediatrics reported. These experiences build social skills, confidence, emotional resilience and overall, well-being. Mental health experts say repeated disruptions to those routines can also leave children feeling apprehensive and uncertain. 

For children, repeated cancellations and long periods indoors can create more than disappointment. When familiar routines, social activities, and opportunities for independent play repeatedly disappear, children may begin to feel that their environment is unpredictable or unsafe. Experts say that loss of stability can heighten stress, particularly for younger children who may not fully understand why smoke keeps disrupting their lives. 

A 2023 report in Current Psychiatry Reports found that children exposed to wildfire disasters are at greater risk of anxiety, stress, depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms, underscoring that the impacts of wildfires extend well beyond physical illness.

Read Next How climate change gets under the skin Zoya Teirstein

The emotional disruption of repeatedly losing normal childhood experiences may leave effects as lasting as the asthma attacks and respiratory problems pediatricians routinely see during smoke events, Byron said. 

And while the interruptions may be temporary, experts say their repeated incidence can lead their effects to accumulate over time. 

A recent brief from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child argues that repeated smoke exposure during early childhood can affect the environments and experiences that shape children’s brain development, learning and emotional well-being. 

“Kids don’t understand why the world suddenly isn’t stable or why they can’t do what was planned,” Byron said. “It kind of undermines a child’s faith in the world.”

Family pressures

Wildfire smoke also leaves parents dealing with new concerns.

“The summer I was pregnant with my daughter was especially hot and smoky,” said Sarah Lundquist, executive director of Montana-based nonprofit Families for a Livable Climate. “After experiencing heat-related fainting spells, we bought portable air conditioners and air purifiers just to keep our home safe. That experience has stayed with me. Now, as a mother of two young children, I check the air quality almost every day before deciding whether it’s safe for them to play outside. Something as simple and joyful as an afternoon at the park has become a health calculation.”

Children sense their parents’ anxiety, psychologists note, and often begin to feel less secure themselves. 

Researchers who study children’s mental health have found that environmental disasters can affect families collectively. 

Window air-conditioning units are seen at a Missoula County Public Schools building on June 25. Mosabber Hossain/Inside Climate News

Parents often have to rearrange work schedules, cancel summer plans, and keep children indoors for days at a time. As familiar routines disappear, families are left trying to substitute indoor activities that cannot fully replicate children’s need for exercise, social interaction, and unstructured play.

“Wildfire smoke really throws a wrench into families’ lives,” Byron said.

Pediatric experts say indoor activities can help pass the time, easing the stress both the children and their parents feel, but they cannot fully replace the physical, social, and developmental benefits of outdoor play.

While research directly linking wildfire smoke to increased screen time remains limited, many families say digital devices become children’s primary source of entertainment when smoke keeps them indoors. And while computers, tablets, and smartphones might provide some distraction when a smoke wave keeps kids housebound, they may also compound the mental and emotional challenges the lack of time outside is already imposing.

A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry found that greater screen time was associated with more anxiety, depression, attention problems, and other behavioral difficulties in children. 

Ann Bates, a Missoula resident who occasionally works as a volunteer with children at a summer camp and does fundraising for children’s programs, believes governments need to do more to protect young people from the growing impacts of wildfire smoke. 

“I’m a mother, so I know how stressful wildfire days can be,” she said. “I was always checking on my daughter wondering what she was doing and how she would get to and from school safely. She is in college now, but when I see young children struggling at school because of the smoke, sometimes with tears in their eyes, it breaks my heart. It makes me cry because they shouldn’t have to grow up like this.” 

Smoked out schools

Smoke has become a routine consideration in Missoula County Public Schools during late summer and early fall, facilities director Burley McWilliams said in an interview, and keeping outdoor smoke from entering school buildings is far more difficult than many people realize. 

High schools, for example, serve hundreds of students who move between classrooms, cafeterias, and outdoor spaces. Doors open constantly throughout the day, allowing smoke to enter even when ventilation systems are operating. 

“Our high school has about 1,200 students,” McWilliams said. “They’re going in and out of the building all day long. Every time those doors open, smoke comes inside.” 

Heat compounds the challenge. 

Read Next Climate disasters can alter kids’ brains — before they’re even born Kate Yoder

Many Montana schools were constructed decades ago, before prolonged heat waves became common. As temperatures rise, classrooms without air-conditioning become increasingly difficult to cool, particularly if smoke outside prevents opening windows, affecting both students and teachers. 

A study of California public schools found that between 2002 and 2019, wildfire and smoke accounted for nearly two-thirds of all weather-related school closure days. After the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025, school closures, relocations, and poor air quality disrupted learning for more than 700,000 students for months. 

Researchers at Stanford University have also found that wildfire smoke can reduce students’ academic performance, suggesting that the educational costs of smoke extend well beyond the days when schools are forced to close. 

Many educators must now consider wildfire smoke in their plans for instruction, student health and school operations. 

As hotter summers, longer wildfire seasons, and more frequent smoke events become an expected part of life in western Montana, schools are increasingly being designed to protect children’s health during climate emergencies by keeping classrooms cool during heat waves, filtering smoke-filled air and, when necessary, serving as clean-air shelters for surrounding communities.

That reality has inspired Montana’s Climate Ready Schools initiative. Missoula County Public Schools is working together with partner organizations to redesign schools so they can better withstand the challenges of a changing climate. 

The plans include upgraded HVAC systems, HEPA air filtration, more shaded playgrounds, and energy-efficient buildings. 

CIS, an environmental and climate resilience infrastructure company, is primarily doing the planning, technical assistance, community engagement, and resilience design for the initiative. 

“School buildings must now be designed with climate change in mind,” said Sarah Dobie, a project manager with CIS. 

Funding, however, remains an obstacle. “Making just three schools climate-resilient is expected to cost about $30 million, an investment that is difficult for most local school districts to afford,” she said.

That leaves most families on their own to figure out how to live with smoke as increasingly hazy skies become a normal part of childhood.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How wildfire smoke is reshaping childhood on Aug 1, 2026.

Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of people in France and Spain fled their homes, many in the dead of night, carrying only what they could. In the coming days and weeks, as evacuation orders lift, some will come home to partially destroyed towns. Others will only find ash. 

The fourth heat wave of a broiling summer is underway this week, and Europe has already seen one of its most destructive wildfire seasons on record, leading to one of the largest evacuation of people on the continent since World War II. It’s also the latest consequence of climate change, according to a study released on Thursday by World Weather Attribution, a scientific nonprofit that analyzes the role of global warming in extreme weather events. Human-induced climate change made the likelihood of fire-prone conditions in France at least twice as likely, and at least 20 times as likely in central Spain. 

“This is not an isolated event, it is part of a pattern,” said Maria Alcazar Castilla, the deputy regional director of the International Federation of Red Cross in Europe. The Red Cross is helping coordinate the disaster response effort in both countries and providing supplies and temporary shelter for thousands.

For months leading up to the recent wildfires, Western Europe had been scorched by back-to-back heat waves and an extended drought that dried out trees, shrubs, and farmland, turning the landscape into a tinderbox. Climate change makes the confluence of these extremes more likely, scientists say.

Last year, similar conditions created Europe’s worst wildfire season in history, with more than 2 million hectares burned by September. This year could be on track to surpass that: Some 430,000 hectares have burned so far — roughly 100,000 more than this time last year with two months left to go. In Spain alone, the burned area is roughly equivalent to the size of London.

With heat waves projected to continue in the coming weeks, the risk of more fire looms over the continent. Other research on Southern Europe, also released on Thursday, found that summer days with conditions making them prone to extreme fires have more than doubled in recent decades.

At the height of the disaster this week, more than 300,000 people had been displaced across France and Spain. Rural areas that rely on farming and tourism have been the worst hit, Alcazar said. “The impact to the livelihoods of people will be huge.”

Wildfire evacuees from the Bordeaux region of France rest at a temporary shelter on July 25.
Alain Jocard / AFP via Getty Images

The high temperatures that set the stage for these fires had their own devastating consequences. This June was the hottest ever recorded in Western Europe. In addition to causing nuclear reactors and train lines to shut down, the oppressive heat killed thousands of people across the continent in the span of a few weeks. 

This summer has shown that climate change is a “national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life,” said officials from the United Kingdom and Spain in a joint statement on Thursday. 

Scientific research that links climate change to weather events is a relatively young field known as attribution science. Groups like World Weather Attribution skip the typical publishing process in science and use rapid analysis methods to get answers faster. The goal is to give the public an understanding of the role climate change plays in an extreme event before the news cycle has moved on. 

Clair Barnes, a research associate at World Weather Attribution who led the analysis, said this particular study was completed more quickly than the organization’s usual studies. It drew from the group’s earlier research on heat and drought, which, along with wind speed, are key components in so-called fire weather. The group also analyzed historical weather data to compare this year’s fire conditions with those from past summers, as well as with simulations of a world without climate change.

“As long as we continue to emit fossil fuels into the atmosphere, those greenhouse gases are going to continue to warm the planet more,” Barnes said. “This is just the beginning of how bad it’s going to be.”

One significant factor, the group found, was a rainier than usual winter in January and February, which prompted a burst of vegetation growth in the spring. Then, as the monthslong drought set in, those plants dried up, becoming the tinder that fueled these fires.

This phenomenon, sometimes called “weather whiplash,” is a direct result of climate change. As the atmosphere warms, it gets spongier and thirstier, sucking up more moisture from the land and holding onto it for longer periods of time. That, in turn, leads to more intense rainfall that happens less frequently.

Bystanders watch the smoke and flames from a wildfire on July 21 in Cotignac, France.
FBM Media / Getty Images

How people use the land can also make wildfires conditions significantly worse, said Robert Field, a fire and climate researcher at Columbia University in New York. 

In both France and Spain, abandoned farmland and a shift away from cattle, which graze on plants, might have played a role in fueling the fire. In France, the wildfire outbreak was centered in the Landes de Gascogne, a coastal region with an abundance of planted pine forests. Research on wildfires worldwide has shown that timber plantations like these can be twice as flammable as natural forests. 

“I don’t think it’s an issue of firefighting capacity or investment,” Field said. “It’s fundamentally an issue of landscape management in the face of global warming.”

Since Tuesday, firefighters have managed to partially contain many of the fires and authorities have more than 100,000 evacuees to return home in southwest France. A weak cold front is also on its way to Europe, potentially providing a small window of relief, according to Jason Nicholls, a meteorologist and international forecasting lead at AccuWeather. 

But another surge of heat could come as soon as this weekend, with more heat expected by mid-August, forecasts show. “I don’t see any drought relief in the near term, which would mean the wildfire risk will stay very elevated,” Nicholls said. The drought and heat will continue to smother France, Spain, and other parts of Central and Western Europe, like Germany and Hungary.

“I’ve been doing international forecasting for 20 years,” Nicholls said. “These wildfires have been some of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Here’s what supercharged the monster wildfires in Spain and France on Jul 31, 2026.

More than half the world’s population depends on rice to survive. But this year’s El Niño weather pattern and the ongoing climate crisis are intensifying dry, hot weather that could cause yields to plummet.

Globally, rice production is set to fall for the first time in more than a decade, according to projections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the U.S., where most rice is grown in the Mississippi Delta, production for the upcoming season is expected to fall by more than half, to the lowest levels in 40 years. 

“High temperatures can substantially reduce the rice yield,” said Atul Jain, a professor of climate, meteorology, and atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois. “Farmers are going to be hit hard during these extreme climate events.”

How much rice farmers can produce depends on a range of weather conditions, such as precipitation and temperature. Climate scientists have predicted that this year’s El Niño will be the strongest on record, describing it as a “super El Niño.” The naturally occurring phenomenon, which happens roughly every two to seven years, will continue to drive extreme weather, including intense drought, in regions across the globe. 

Researchers at Columbia University’s Climate School shared this week that the current El Niño has already reached “very strong” levels and will continue to intensify in the coming months. During a given El Niño year, trade winds weaken and warmer ocean water in the Pacific drifts eastward, leading to convection, or warm air rising off the ocean. “That acts like ringing a bell,” said Radley Horton, a professor at the Climate School. “It sends out waves that resonate all across the globe.” The result is that some areas experience much wetter seasons than usual, while others see much drier months.

As this El Niño intensifies, the world could experience major disruptions to food systems dependent on staple crops like rice. “Drought,” said Jeremy Zwinger, president and CEO of The Rice Trader, an industry analysis company, “kills commodities.”

Read Next The ‘super El Niño’ is here. What happens next could upend food systems worldwide. Frida Garza

The good news, though, is that many countries are more prepared than ever for the variability that climate change brings to food production. In recent decades, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations have invested billions of dollars in improving agricultural technologies, especially irrigation systems and new, heartier strains of rice (some of which actually slash planet-warming emissions). 

Recent advancements in irrigation and plant-breeding are an insurance policy of sorts that has been useful in years like this, when the rainy monsoon season in parts of South Asia has been delayed and unpredictable. India has been especially successful at using new technology to boost production, which has pushed it to the top of the list of rice-growing countries this year.

In some ways, the agricultural gains have worked almost too well. The world is now oversupplied with rice, said Zwinger, which has resulted in falling prices and less money for farmers. “It’s a mind twist,” he said, “because you’re penalizing somebody for success.”

In another twist, the very carbon dioxide that is causing global warming also makes it easier to grow rice. Higher concentrations of CO2 in the air enhances photosynthesis and improves water-use efficiency, said Jain, calling it “the primary environmental factor” contributing to the surge in worldwide rice productivity.

Still, the increasingly warmer and dryer conditions that climate change will bring are expected to inhibit rice growth. A new study found that climate models have generally underestimated the production loss by as much as half. For every degree of warming Celsius, it said, rice production will fall about 8 percent. 

“Climate change amplifies these pressures through higher temperatures, erratic rainfall, floods, salinity intrusion, and longer dry spells,” said Alisher Mirzabaev, senior scientist and policy analyst on climate change for the International Rice Research Institute. 

Another worry is that some advanced irrigation systems, especially in India, are depleting long-term groundwater stores in order to meet short-term needs. “For this season, the rice growers have basically used groundwater,” said Sampriti Baruah, the head of sustainable agriculture for the environmental think tank WRI India. This type of excess withdrawal will eventually catch up with farmers, she said, “but that’s the fallout of the irrigation system.”

These risks are why experts say a continued focus on adaptation measures remain critical. “These different management practices help us offset some of these climate impacts,” said Jain. Of farmers, he added, “if they are very well prepared for that, definitely they can overcome all these issues.”

On the whole, Zwinger said he isn’t too worried about El Niño causing a slump in rice production this year. The excess in the system should be able to satisfy demand, and less supply could improve pay for many growers. But, at the same time, he certainly isn’t cheering for El Niño, either. 

“I know certain countries will really suffer,” said Zwinger. “What you’re going to have is the have and the have-nots.”

Zwinger is especially worried about the Philippines, where rice makes up half of the typical meal, and sub-Saharan Africa, both of which are major rice importers. An extra-strong El Niño would also worsen food security in other vulnerable regions around the world, including southern Africa, South Asia, and parts of Brazil. 

In Indonesia, one of the globe’s top rice producers, a weaker monsoon season due to El Niño would mean less rainfall. This could delay the planting season for rice, ultimately leading to reduced yields. In 2015, another very strong El Niño year, the country had already seen significant drops in rain totals by the early fall, said Horton. Resulting fires blanketed the parched country, as well as Singapore and Malaysia, in heavy smoke. That in turn impacted public health, particularly for outdoor agricultural workers. This year, “we’re concerned about seeing all these effects at once,” Horton said. 

Whatever El Niño and climate change bring, Jain’s research suggests that technology can help mitigate rice production problems — at least for now. “The challenge for the future is whether these management improvements can continue to keep space as the climate intensifies,” said Jain. “It will be the key scientific and the policy question.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why rice crops could be in for a weird year on Jul 31, 2026.

Officials from the Trump administration and members of Congress walked along the burn scar from Utah’s devastating Cottonwood Fire last week and saw the damage from the rain and flood that followed the flames.

The wildfire is among the country’s largest, charring more than 97,000 acres. It started on June 22, and is only 95 percent contained as of late Thursday, according to Utah Fire Info.

After surveying the destruction, lawmakers laid blame on a lack of forestry management. If the forest had been thinned, with “a lot fewer trees per acre, and maybe even some controlled burns to take the underbrush out, there’s just not the fuel there when these fires start to make them catastrophic fires,” Representative Bruce Westerman, a Republican from Arkansas, told Salt Lake City’s FOX 13 News. 

But these traditional fire prevention methods may no longer work, one researcher cautions, with a changing climate that makes hot, dry weather increasingly the norm.

“Weather and climate override the effects of fuels in determining what happens in forested landscapes,” said Dominik Kulakowski, a professor of geography at Clark University in Massachusetts whose research focuses on climate and mountain ecosystems. “The implication of that is that we’re losing our ability to manage forest fires.”

Larissa Yocom, a professor of fire ecology at Utah State University, agrees that today’s extreme wildfires defy the usual approaches to prevention, but she doesn’t think they are the West’s “new normal — yet.”

Climate change, which stokes intense heat, longer droughts, and extreme weather, has been the primary driver of wildfire risk in the Western United States for the last two decades, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The severe snow drought that afflicted Utah over the winter is 14 times more likely in Utah and other Upper Colorado River Basin states compared to the start of the industrial period when humans began releasing climate-altering pollutants into the atmosphere, according to research published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Forests in the West evolved in response to fire, and fire has long been part of their normal ecological function, Kulakowski said. But fires are now changing faster than forests can adapt.

Fuels like dry shrubs and drought-stressed trees are a secondary factor that contributes to wildfires, and they’re what most forestry treatments have focused on — like creating buffers around homes known as firebreaks, thinning forests, and scheduling prescribed burns. Yet fast fires can jump interstate highways and blow past firebreaks hundreds of yards wide, Kulakowski said.

“We’ve seen examples that embers from these dangerous megafires can travel … about a mile,” he said. “What we can do to protect ourselves is becoming increasingly difficult.”

The country’s most expensive, deadly, and destructive fires in recent decades moved extremely fast. Utah’s own Cottonwood Fire exploded by 20,000 acres overnight in late June as firefighters evacuated homes and struggled to keep the blaze contained.

As long as the trend of warmer and drier weather conditions continue, so will the megafires. And as extremely hot and large fires increase, the ability for forests to regenerate decreases, Kulakowski said. “The soil is being sterilized,” he said. “There are fewer surviving trees.”

Fewer trees mean fewer seeds to help forests regrow. In some cases, the types of forests that do re-sprout may look different — aspens may dominate where conifers once thrived, for example. But in parts of the West, Kulakowski said, it appears no forest vegetation is regrowing at all.

“In which case, we’re talking about ecosystem collapse,” he said. “We’re talking about forests disappearing from parts of the landscape.”

Eagle Point Resort, one of the smallest ski and snowboard areas in Utah, was one of the first areas to fall victim to the Cottonwood Fire in late June.
Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune

Other fire experts in Utah say traditional fire-treatment methods still work and should be deployed across forests. “We have a lot of examples where managing fuel is still beneficial and makes a difference,” said Yocom, the professor at Utah State.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers from Western states, including Senator John Curtis, a Republican from Utah, and Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat from Colorado, have sponsored the Fix Our Forests Act after spending months negotiating the best ways to manage woodlands and prevent catastrophic wildfire. The bill creates “fireshed management areas” — fire-prone lands that pose the biggest risk to communities — where federal agencies would streamline and speed up fuel treatments. It has yet to receive a full vote in the Senate.

Yocom acknowledged, however, that there’s little forestry managers could have done to prevent some of the large wildfires that have burned across Utah this season.

“In the most extreme conditions, those on-the-ground factors get overwhelmed,” she said. 

If forestry managers allowed more fires to burn in shoulder seasons in the spring and fall, during cooler weather and milder conditions, wildfires might be less intense and have different effects on forests, Yocom said.

“It’s not preordained that we are stuck with this kind of fire,” Yocom said. “The only type of fire we’re ‘allowing’ to happen right now are the ones that are burning in the conditions where we literally can’t do anything about it.”

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The Trump administration issued a directive this year calling on federal agencies to aggressively suppress all fires — including the smaller, milder ones that forests evolved with to keep them healthy.

“We have an imbalance within our natural environments because, basically, almost every ecosystem within Utah has developed out of an adaptation of fire,” said Bradley Washa, a firefighter and professor of wildland resources at Utah State, “and we have removed that fire from those ecosystems.”

A warming climate is taking a toll on Western forests, Washa said, but it’s difficult to pin any single fire event to climate change.

Through his work on the ground, he continues to see how small things — like removing a firewood pile or clearing overgrown brush — can make the difference between a home surviving a wildfire or burning to the ground.

Still, “some of our fuel treatments and defensible space concepts are designed for your average fire,” Washa acknowledged, “not these extreme events.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire prevention has always been a challenge in the West. Hotter, drier weather is making it worse. on Jul 31, 2026.

My weather app says it’s 80 degrees, but that’s a lie. I’m standing on a football field at Portland State University with professor Vivek Shandas, and we can feel intense heat radiating off the grass. Instead of being made of cellulose, these blades are plastic, because this field is artificial turf. Whereas natural vegetation has a cooling effect on a landscape — it “sweats” water vapor — this stuff absorbs and radiates the sun’s energy, making the ambient temperature especially uncomfortable.

Shandas, who’s founder and director of the Sustaining Urban Places Research Lab, can prove it. He hands me a Flir (forward-looking infrared) camera that I attach to my phone and control through an app. I point it at the ground and it gives me a color-coded view of the temperature at any given spot — approaching 150 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the ground beneath my feet, compared to as low as 100 degrees in a patch of real grass in the sun next to it. (In the video below comparing the two, brighter oranges and yellows indicate higher temps, with purple showing lower readings.) We’re actually picking up significant differences even within the field: The darker greens are about 10 degrees hotter than white lines, which are bright enough to reflect some energy away — the same reason you feel cooler wearing lighter colors on a hot day.

At 1:45 in the afternoon, conditions are relatively mild so far. “If you think about a 100-degree day on a soccer game or a football game turf like this, I mean, those ankles are going to blow out, those knees are going to blow out,” Shandas says while pointing his own Flir camera at bits of turf. “Those kinds of temperatures are not good for the joints or physiology generally.”

We walk up a small hill at the edge of the field to get an overview of the I-405 highway. These multilane thoroughfares are consistently among the hottest parts of a city, because the surface soaks up the sun and vehicles generate still more heat with the friction of their tires. In addition, an internal-combustion engine produces a substantial amount of waste heat. You can think of them as thousands upon thousands of little heaters zooming past the Portland State campus every hour. I point the Flir camera at the lanes and from a few hundred feet away get readings approaching 120 degrees — still far cooler than the artificial turf — and pan down to the shaded vegetation in front of us, where it’s in the mid-80s. 

For pedestrians, shade is especially important on sidewalks. Making our way along the side of the field, pavement in the sun is in the mid-130s, dropping 50 degrees in adjacent shaded areas (shown below).

Back in his car, Shandas attaches a small magnetic sensor to the roof. A different app feeds me a constant stream of readings. Here in Portland’s downtown, with its tall, shade-bestowing buildings, it’s 84 degrees. As we move east across the Willamette River, it dips to 82 degrees before steadily climbing — 85, 86, 87, 88, and finally topping out at 89 F. 

There are many reasons for these disparities. The more trees a neighborhood has, the more shade it gets, and the more of that “sweating” cooling effect. (That low reading of 82 came as we drove down a tree-lined street in a residential neighborhood.) Lower-income areas tend to have much less tree cover, and therefore more open pavement that absorbs heat and releases it at night: The highest readings we recorded were in areas with wide roads, few trees, and low buildings, which provide minimal shade. So not only do these areas suffer higher highs during the day, but their residents don’t enjoy as much of a respite in the evening, compounding the stress on their bodies. This is especially dangerous for people who can’t help but be outside, like construction workers and the unhoused. 

Depending on where you live in a city, this heat unfolds in unique ways, hour after hour. “Places with the most buildings and infrastructure tend to be the hottest in the morning,” Shandas says, “but often some of the taller buildings keep it much cooler relatively in the daytime.” Areas with shorter buildings and few trees get blasted all day, taking a heavy toll on residents.

The hotter the planet gets, the wider these disparities grow. On this 80-degree day we’re finding differences of up to 7 degrees between neighborhoods. But during a previous heat wave, Shandas recorded 125 degrees in one notoriously hot area on the city’s east side, compared to 99 in a hilly, verdant neighborhood. “On a 90-degree day, the difference is about 15 degrees to 18 degrees,” Shandas says. “On a 110-degree day, it goes up to 20 to 25 degrees, and on. I don’t know what that limit is. I don’t think I want to find out.”

Read Next Why heat is so deadly and how to stay safe Jessica Stahl

The first step to helping urbanites cope is to understand the nuances of heat, hence Shandas’ regularly driving around with a sensor on his roof. (He’s also trying to get the devices on public buses, which run reliable routes throughout the region.) Different solutions will do different things in different neighborhoods. Portland and other cities, for instance, might prioritize planting trees in areas where heat accumulates and residents don’t have air-conditioning. (Better yet: They can develop urban farms, which produce nutritious food in addition to reducing temperatures.) They might also take the simple step of painting more roofs white, which, like the lines on the football field, bounce energy back into space. (Better yet: Move the urban farms onto rooftops.) Or more simply, they can identify particularly hot bus stops and shade them. 

“There’s just not one solution ever for these things, right?” Shandas says. “And so what we’re trying to do is: What’s the right mix of things that will actually reduce the likelihood of heat-related illnesses?”

For cities, extreme heat is now a many-headed emergency. The hotter it gets, the less productive workers become and the more economies suffer. Heat already kills far more Americans than any other natural disaster, and that only stands to worsen. And the electrical grid is straining as more people are forced to install air-conditioning. “Everything is dependent on that peak temperature,” Shandas says. “It is going to be pretty telling in the coming years, as we see it just crank up more and more.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These psychedelic images reveal what your weather app isn’t telling you on Jul 30, 2026.

The looming threat of cyclospora — a parasite often found in summer produce that causes severe gastrointestinal distress in humans — has struck fear into the hearts of salad enjoyers nationwide. 

On July 17, shortly after beginning its investigation into the multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak, the Food and Drug Administration announced a positive test result identifying cyclospora on shredded iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico for Taylor Farms, a major U.S. food producer. The company issued a voluntary recall — but the FDA walked back its statement two days later, describing the test as a “false positive” while insisting its investigation is “ongoing.” Representatives from Taylor Farms allegedly asked the FDA for more time before the agency recalled its products, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

At the time, the outbreak had been contained to five states in the Midwest, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since then, the CDC has linked four more states reporting cases of cyclosporiasis to contaminated lettuce from Taylor Farms, bringing the total of impacted states to nine. The CDC also stated that the outbreak has caused close to 2,000 cases of the illness — although that is likely an undercount. (The CDC is also monitoring cases of cyclosporiasis that appear unrelated to this outbreak.)

There are a number of reasons why it can be difficult to track cases of cyclosporiasis. For example, many people may experience and manage symptoms, which include persistent, watery diarrhea, at home without ever seeing a doctor. 

But the uneven rollout of information from public health authorities during this outbreak has further complicated matters. Former federal food-safety officials have criticized the Trump administration’s handling of what is now considered the largest known cyclosporiasis outbreak in U.S. history. 

Unsaid in all of this is whether climate change and its impact on our globalized food system made this year’s outbreak more likely. The answer is complicated. 

“There are a couple things that make it a little difficult to fully assess what [the role of] climate change or changes in weather patterns could be,” said Jeffrey Griffiths, a professor of public health at the Tufts University School of Medicine. “But I would say there’s still enough information that we have such that we can make some pretty reasonable inferences about how climate change would work.”

First off, what is cyclospora?

Unlike other foodborne pathogens — like salmonella and E. coli, which exist in and on animals — cyclospora is transmitted through food or water that has been contaminated with human feces. When infectious, cyclospora causes explosive diarrhea and other gastrointestinal symptoms in humans. 

Cyclospora can often linger in difficult-to-wash produce with uneven surfaces, like leafy greens and berries. Previous outbreaks have been tied to fresh produce including cilantro, basil, raspberries, and other berries. Thankfully, for anyone feeling overly cautious, cooking fresh produce kills this parasite. 

Whether or not a person who has ingested the parasite becomes ill depends on the maturity level of the parasite at the time of exposure. Cyclospora is not immediately infectious when released in human stool. The parasite must undergo a maturation process that typically takes about one to two weeks. If cyclospora is ingested after that point, then it is considered infectious and causes gastrointestinal distress in its host. However, if the parasite is ingested before it has had enough time to mature, then it will likely pass without causing any illness. 

This window of time wherein cyclospora is in the natural environment (say, in our water supply or on our produce) but not infectious to humans has created a lag in public health authorities’ ability to trace the origins of the outbreak. 

How does human fecal matter enter our food or water supply to begin with?

The exact origin of this specific outbreak is still unclear. Taylor Farms said in a statement that the company has voluntarily recalled its iceberg lettuce products that came from central Mexico “out of an abundance of caution” and has also reached out to “independent experts” to review its food-safety protocols.

But experts say there are a few potential pathways for contamination — most having to do with how water is used and managed for agricultural production. 

In many past outbreaks of cyclospora that have been associated with fresh produce, “we’ve seen that water is critical,” said Kalmia Kniel, a professor of microbial food safety at the University of Delaware. If the irrigation water supply on an agricultural site comes into contact with wastewater, for example, and is not adequately filtered, then it runs the risk of contaminating crops meant for human consumption. 

“There’s lots of different little mechanisms where that could happen,” said Griffiths — like if agricultural fields are located adjacent to faulty sanitation systems. In these cases, storm events resulting in flooding or water runoff could lead to cross-contamination. Additionally, if a farm reuses municipal wastewater as part of its irrigation system and that wastewater is not treated to a high enough standard so as to remove pathogens, it poses a risk of transmitting cyclospora to crops. 

Read Next Would you pay $49 a month to drink recycled wastewater? Matt Simon How might climate change increase the risk of an outbreak?

For one, warmer temperatures help speed up the maturation process that makes cyclospora oocysts, or early stage parasites, infectious to humans. That’s why you typically see more cases of the infection during the summer months. As climate change makes summers hotter — and longer — the window of time when cyclospora could become infectious and present a public health risk is also growing. 

Another way that climate change supercharges the conditions for an outbreak like cyclosporiasis is by disrupting the water cycle. Extreme heat sucks moisture out of the environment, from rivers and lakes as well as the soil and plants. During drought conditions, agricultural producers are more likely to reuse nontraditional water sources, such as municipal and commercial wastewater, to irrigate crops. What’s more, cycling between drought and downpours means that when it does rain on dry soil, more runoff carries more particles and organisms across a landscape. 

Is cyclospora the only foodborne pathogen to worry about?

I wish. Food system researchers have seen how very dry, hot conditions supercharge the likelihood of other foodborne pathogens, such as salmonella and E. coli. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a multiyear study centered on Yuma County, Arizona, where a majority of the country’s lettuce is grown in the winter months. The researchers found that dust kicked up from a nearby cattle feedlot helped carry E. coli through the air and deposit the bacteria on nearby water and soil.  

Holly Bainbridge, a senior attorney at FarmSTAND, a legal advocacy organization, noted that studies like the USDA’s point to a gap in the nation’s regulatory oversight of the food system. “It was a step in the right direction, but the federal government hasn’t really done anything with it,” she said. 

Bainbridge added that the corporate consolidation of agriculture — and specifically, the intensive confinement of animals on farms — makes outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli more likely. 

Last week, the FDA issued a recall of over one and a half million eggs that have been potentially contaminated with salmonella. As of this writing, 98 people across 17 states have been made sick, according to the latest numbers from the CDC.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 4 things to know about cyclospora and climate change  on Jul 30, 2026.

As tech companies have built hundreds of hyperscale data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom, they have triggered conflicting predictions over how these facilities will affect the nation’s power grid. Critics have argued that data centers will raise power bills and increase carbon emissions. Supporters claimed they could increase investment in infrastructure and clean energy, leading to lower prices and emissions.

We now have a clearer picture about at least one consequence of the data center boom, and it isn’t encouraging. A report released last week from the Energy Information Administration found that carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector rose by 4 percent last year — larger than the increase in the economy overall, where emissions only ticked up 2 percent.  The agency attributes this rise to a 13 percent increase in coal power generation, partially driven by the proliferation of large-scale data centers.

The national increase in power sector emissions represents the reversal of a longstanding trend. Before the AI boom, U.S. power consumption had been flat for decades. Utilities, grid operators, and energy planners had assumed that pattern would continue, and many planned to retire their older and dirtier coal plants with the expectation that natural gas and renewables could replace them. Instead, electricity demand is rising much faster than anticipated. Data centers could make up more than 10 percent of U.S. electricity usage by 2030, and they operate around the clock, including when wind and solar farm output is low. That demand has extended the life of some aging coal plants.

“Commercial load is starting to grow, and that’s part of the data center story,” said Steve Piper, the director of energy research at S&P Global Energy, a market intelligence firm. “It’s kind of a rising tide lifts all boats phenomenon. While we think structurally coal will decline over time, [the AI boom] is going to slow down that decline.”

The increase in power sector emissions would have been even bigger were it not for the fact that solar and wind energy also surged last year. Utilities can now tap cheap, carbon-free energy during much of the day, which means they are less reliant on fossil fuel-burning plants that make up the backbone of the energy system. Solar now produces more power than coal during sunny months when demand is low. The climate problem is that while solar is still growing, coal is not shrinking. 

The other driving factor behind last year’s increase was that coal became cheaper relative to natural gas, the country’s largest power source. As natural gas exports have increased, domestic gas prices have risen relative to coal.

The coal industry has also been buoyed by increased political support. President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright have vowed to revive the nation’s moribund coal industry by supporting new coal power plants and helping build an export terminal that can ship coal to Asia. Wright has issued temporary emergency orders to prevent the retirement of at least half a dozen coal plants around the country, forcing utilities to run plants they had previously sought to shut down. His department has argued that these orders are justified because hot and cold weather are straining the power grid.

But these orders aren’t actually the reason that coal emissions have rebounded. The plants that Wright has kept open are running at a lower capacity than they did before Trump took office, in large part because there are still cheaper sources of power than coal out there. 

Take for example the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, owned by Consumers Energy. It was the first major coal facility that Wright prevented from closing. At the time, Wright said that the plant’s operation was necessary so that Michigan “[did] not lose critical power generation capability as summer begins.” Yet in each of the last three quarters, the plant has generated less electricity than it did in the equivalent quarter the previous year.  

Instead, the increase is happening across the country. Outside of the Western U.S., nearly every state generated more coal power in 2025 than it did in 2024. One of the biggest jumps came in Virginia, home to the world’s largest AI cluster, where utilities almost doubled their coal power generation to serve the state’s growing clusters of data centers. Nearby coal states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia also stepped up their generation to match data center demand. 

The report is especially concerning since decarbonizing the electricity sector, which accounts for about 25 percent of U.S. emissions, is an essential step toward meeting national climate targets. Unlike in the transportation sector, where electric vehicles still face significant cost and infrastructure barriers, and heavy industry, in which natural gas is still needed to make steel and cement at scale, the power sector has real cost-effective alternatives to fossil fuels.

Once electricity became cleaner, switching cars, home heating, and other sectors from fossil fuels to electricity would sharply reduce emissions.  

And there were signs of progress: Emissions from the power grid have fallen by about one-third from their peak around 2005 as utilities have replaced old coal plants with less carbon-intensive methods such as natural gas turbines, which emit about half as much carbon per watt of electricity. The rapid build-out of solar and wind power was supposed to reduce power emissions even further. 

The stubborn presence of coal is a problem for that progress.

“Coal generation may sort of have a floor in our forecasts,” said Piper. He said he expects that in the long run, coal will continue to decline, but that “it will take something else” to dislodge it from the power grid altogether. And until we have a grid with enough round-the-clock power to render the dirtiest fuels unnecessary, the nation’s journey away from fossil fuels will be stuck at the starting gate.  

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline It’s official: Data centers are slowing America’s shift away from coal on Jul 29, 2026.