Grist

Don’t underestimate heat. While less visible than other extreme weather events like hurricanes or floods, heat consistently accounts for more U.S. fatalities than any other type of weather disaster. Around the world, extreme heat now kills one person every minute, according to a recent report, a rate that has risen 23 percent since the 1990s.

Heat deaths are also chronically undercounted, both in the U.S. and around the world. Outdoor workers are among the most vulnerable, along with older people, children, and those with chronic health conditions. But heat can affect anyone, and our own biases about what constitutes good weather (sunny summer days are glorious) often downplay its risks.

Grist has been reporting on the steadily increasing threat of extreme heat for years. So as we contend with continued record-breaking years of temperature highs, we’re rounding up some of that reporting to help you understand why it’s vital to take heat seriously, and how to stay safe. 

The rising threat of heat A sign posted in Phoenix, Arizona during the city’s 2023 heat wave. Mario Tama / Getty Images

To put it simply, hot places are getting hotter, and places that have traditionally not experienced extreme heat and are less prepared to weather it are increasingly subject to dangerous temperatures.

The risk of heat is increasing. Any given heat event can’t be solely attributed to climate change, but there is no doubt that heat waves are happening more often and reaching higher highs as a result of climate change. In fact, scientific consensus is now that climate change has played a role in making almost all heat waves more likely or more severe.

And yes, even in years that experience extreme cold weather, the average overall temperature is rising.

Other factors can amplify the warming effects of climate change, like the naturally occurring El Niño weather pattern. In an El Niño year, global heat is typically exacerbated by high ocean temperatures in the Pacific. The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño.

The term heat wave generally describes any period of unusually hot weather. But some of the most dangerous heat waves are caused by what’s known as a heat dome. In a heat dome, a high-pressure system traps hot air in one region, feeding off itself to increase heat and humidity the longer it stagnates in one place.

Humidity makes heat even more dangerous. Any type of heat can be dangerous when your body can’t pump out sweat fast enough to stay cool. But heat and humidity play together to affect your ability to cool off. Higher humidity makes it harder for sweat to evaporate, reducing your body’s ability to cool itself naturally.

That’s why you may hear not just about temperature, but about something called “wet bulb temperature,” a measure that includes both heat and humidity — essentially the temperature we experience after sweat cools us off.

When the wet bulb temperature crosses 95 degrees Fahrenheit, our bodies lose the ability to cool down entirely — a threshold that has already been breached more than a dozen times, mostly in Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula. But stress on the body can start much lower than that. Even healthy young adults can experience health effects at a wet bulb temperature as low as 86 degrees F.

Heat affects your whole body A poster on a Los Angeles street warns about heat-related illness in 2026. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Exposure to high heat has immediate health effects. Extreme heat forces the heart to pump two to four times as much blood per minute to cool the body. That can lead to dehydration, which makes blood thicker and harder to circulate, and worsen into heat exhaustion or heatstroke, or lead to heart failure. On particularly hot days, burns from scorching hot surfaces, including pavement, are an added risk.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. end up in the emergency department due to heat illness and related cardiovascular, respiratory, and kidney issues. 

What to watch for: The first symptom of severe dehydration is typically cramps, which might feel like normal workout cramps.

Signs of heat exhaustion include muscle aches or cramps; headache; excessive sweating and thirst; feeling lightheaded or dizzy; nausea or vomiting; and pale, cool, clammy skin, especially on the extremities.

To combat heat exhaustion, bring down a person’s body temperature by removing heavy clothes, drinking water, and moving to shade or AC. Laying them down with elevated legs and applying damp cloths or misting with water can also help actively cool the body.

Save this quick tip sheet from Grist’s Instagram. Adapted from Extreme Heat 101.​

Heatstroke occurs when the body loses its ability to cool itself and reaches dangerous internal temperatures. It can result in permanent brain injury or loss of life. Look out for symptoms like confusion, irritability, or unresponsiveness; severe fatigue; a fast pulse; nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea; lack of sweat (though sweating is possible too); and hot and dry skin.

Call 911 if you think someone is experiencing heat stroke, then dunk them in cold or iced water, or apply ice on areas near large blood vessels, like the groin, armpits, neck, and core.

Save this quick tip sheet from Grist’s Instagram. Adapted from Extreme Heat 101.​

Heat’s health effects also reach much deeper. Exposure to extreme heat affects us in all sorts of other ways that doctors and scientists are just beginning to understand. For example, heat has been shown to increase rates of violent crime, and has been linked to worsening mental health including suicide.

Long-term exposure to heat can result in chronic health issues, like cardiovascular disease. Outdoor workers in some of the hottest parts of the world are developing an unusual form of chronic kidney disease linked to extended dehydration and heat stress. 

Heat affects all of your body systems. These are a few key ones. Find even more here: How climate change gets under the skin​

Nighttime heat is a particular driver. Nighttime temperatures are increasing faster than daytime temperatures in much of the world, eliminating a crucial window for cooling down.

We also sleep worse when it’s hot, already losing 45 hours of sleep per year due to the heat.

Ways to prepare Improvised window coverings in a Paris apartment during the June 2026 heat wave. Sophia Berger / Hans Lucas via AFP / Getty Images

Your house makes a big difference. If a heat wave is headed your way, dehumidify your house to get the indoor humidity down. Seal off openings around windows and doors to prevent hot air from entering. Cover windows to prevent the sun from heating up the indoors — blackout shades, blinds, or even DIY solutions work.

In a low humidity environment, you can even DIY your own air conditioning.

Keep water, electrolytes, and ice on hand, at home and at work, and identify cool places to go, like a public library. This isn’t just useful to ease boredom — heat can place additional strain on the electricity grid as everyone runs their air conditioners, sometimes resulting in power outages.

In the long term: Retrofits like reflective roofs, window overhangs to block the sun, and better insulation can provide more relief.

And as you’re preparing, don’t forget to check on vulnerable neighbors and community members. 

Grist has even more advice for safety and preparedness. Go deeper on community readiness and workplace safety here: Extreme heat 101

And more tips on emergency preparedness, including for heat and power outages, can be found here: How to prepare for a disaster

Stay safe out there (or, better yet, inside where it’s cool).

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why heat is so deadly and how to stay safe on Jul 9, 2026.

Between the view, the marshes, and the birds, Liat Meitzenheimer concedes the drive along California State Route 37 is scenic. Still, she avoids it for two reasons: congestion and flooding.

The highway, about half of which is two-lane, is often backed up with people commuting between affordable communities in Solano County to the east and jobs in pricier Sonoma and Marin counties to the west. It also is a regional link to Napa Valley and other destinations, much of it built on embankments, bridges, and causeways that span marshes precariously close to San Pablo Bay. That makes it prone to flooding, which has led to occasional closures. 

“I don’t go that route whenever we have the potential of flooding, because I know how crazy it can get,” said Meitzenheimer, a retiree who lives in Vallejo, not far from the highway’s eastern terminus at Interstate 80. 

These problems will worsen as the population grows and climate change brings more frequent and intense storms. Without adaptation measures, portions of the road are at risk of permanent inundation by 2050.

The state Department of Transportation and the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission are pursuing a $500 million project that would, over five years, remake portions of the 21-mile highway. It would replace one of five bridges with one 5 feet taller, raise two one-mile sections by up to 8 inches, add a carpool and bus lane in each direction, and restore a tidal marsh and other ecosystems. 

Not everyone thinks that goes far enough. Some want the highway moved several miles inland. Others favor a far more ambitious $10 billion project that would take at least 20 years. It would raise almost the entire roadway, add a lane for cyclists and pedestrians, and perhaps include railway tracks. To do anything less, advocates of this approach say, overlooks two pressing issues.

“Highway expansion does not solve congestion and will worsen climate change,” said Zack Deutsch-Gross, who leads TransForm CA, a sustainable transportation advocacy organization. “This project is pretty egregious,” because the highway, if left where it is, “in the long term will be underwater.”

The challenges facing SR-37 are not unique. California’s iconic Highway 1, has been repeatedly closed due to floods, fires, and rockslides. Coastal cities like Miami Beach and Atlantic City are scrambling to harden infrastructure against rising seas and frequent inundation. Hurricanes routinely leave island and low-lying communities isolated by deluged causeways. Addressing these problems requires tremendous investment — bolstering bridges alone could cost $170 billion by 2050. Failing to do so could bring grave consequences. Without further adaptation, annual damage from coastal flooding worldwide could account for 2.9 percent of global gross domestic product by 2100. That’s up from 0.3 percent just 11 years ago.

California is among the states most aggressively planning for a warmer world. How it proceeds with SR-37 will show just how serious it is about adapting roadways to climate change.

California Highway 37 regularly floods during severe rain, as it did during an atmospheric river that dumped enough rain in January 2023 to require closing the two westbound lanes. Alan Dep / Marin Independent Journal via Getty Images

Highway 37 began as Sears Point Tollway, which opened in 1928 to connect Marin and Solano counties north of San Francisco. California bought it 10 years later, and in the decades since has widened it as the road became an increasingly important commuter and freight route. The road is essentially a causeway and crosses an intricate system of wetlands, sloughs, rivers, and creeks at the northern end of San Pablo Bay. It also traverses a federally protected wildlife refuge, a state managed wildlife area, and an immense tidal marsh.

Transportation planners have considered widening, raising, or relocating portions of the road since the 1950s, but rarely proceeded due to the cost and environmental impact. That’s become less of a concern as repeated flooding and sea level rise — California could see an average increase of 10 inches by 2050 and 1.6 to 3.1 feet by 2100 — become more urgent problems.

Fraser Shilling, who leads the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis, started researching SR-37 in 2010, which is about when Caltrans started considering sea level rise. His work presented a variety of ways to bolster it against that inevitability. “The least resilient was what they’re currently building, which is the highway on a berm,” he said. “The most resilient was to move the highway inland.”

A raised highway would still rest precariously on mud, Shilling said. He favors the strategic retreat of moving it as much as 5 miles inland. “There’s always been a problem that it goes through the marshes,” Shilling said. “You would never ever get permission to build that today.”

Barring that, he said, the state and region face irreconcilable choices. Without sufficient hardening, the highway could wash away. But too much could make the shoreline erode more quickly. 

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission considered relocating the highway, but chose to focus on more feasible projects given the cost and time constraints, said agency spokesperson John Goodwin. “We would love to see the long-term projects completed sooner rather than later, but recognizing that [it] would take many billions of dollars, and probably 20 years, we’ve got needs that need to be satisfied,” he said.

The agency has secured $270 million to replace the Novato Creek Bridge in what Goodwin called the first part of the long-term project –– that would accommodate sea-level rise and storm surges on SR-37 until 2130. He said starting with quicker, relatively cheaper projects will also give the agency enough time to find the $10 billion needed for the long-term project.

The Sanibel Causeway is the only road connecting Sanibel Island with mainland Florida. The state reopened it in 15 days. Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images

In 2022, Hurricane Ian flooded the 3-mile Sanibel Causeway, which connects that Florida island to the mainland. While the state managed to reopen it in 15 days, the experience has become a cautionary tale for other islands. 

Jill Gambill, a researcher at Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology, began developing an adaptation plan for Tybee Island in 2012 –– the first of its kind by a local government in the state. An 11-mile causeway connects it to the mainland near Savannah. Flooding closed it four times in 2024, leaving residents stranded for as long as five hours.

A hurricane has not made landfall in Georgia since 1979, but hurricanes Irma and Matthew brought the highest water levels since measurement began in 1935. “If we were to get hit by, even a category two or a category three storm here, where it’s a direct hit, that would be catastrophic,” Gambill said. 

The state, which maintains Highway 80, repaved and raised it 8 inches in 2019. Elevating it more substantially could help reduce flooding but require widening the base, threatening important marsh habitat. It would also be expensive, and the state Department of Transportation, which did not respond to a request for comment, has yet to commit the funding. 

Jo E. Sias, a civil engineer and professor who studies pavement design at the University of New Hampshire, said rising seas also bring hidden problems. As groundwater tables rise, they intersect with pavement below the surface, weakening the road and leading to faster deterioration, she said. The increased moisture in the soil caused by precipitation and sea level can weaken the road and potentially halve its lifetime.

There is growing interest in nature-based solutions. When the Sanibel Island Causeway disappeared, for example, segments near small, self-contained “pocket beaches” remained largely intact when others washed away. “Pocket beaches, beach nourishment projects, dune systems,” Sias said, listing possible solutions. “Anything that you can do to minimize the energy of the water as it’s coming across the roads is going to reduce the propensity for washout.”

Tybee Island recently added three rain gardens to bolster roads around Highway 80 through funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the city. A future phase of the project would build living shorelines, which use bags of oyster shells, smooth cordgrass, and other vegetation to absorb energy from waves.

Jason Evans, the executive director at Stetson University’s Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience, sees an opportunity to strengthen both habitats and highways. Oyster reefs, for instance, benefit the ecosystem and grow vertically as seas rise, unlike seawalls. 

Evans said flooding in low-lying southeastern communities is increasing as seas rise. That makes it essential to consider where roads lead and how they are used when developing mitigation plans. It makes little sense to raise a road by six feet if what’s at the other end hasn’t been prepared as well. “You might have an elevated road going out to a flooded island,” he said. 

There are also questions of equity. Residents of coastal communities tend to be wealthier than those living inland. Using tax revenue to elevate a causeway or bridge “so the millionaires and billionaires can get to their beach house” denies funding to projects that could serve a wider swath of the community, Evans said.

Ethan Elkind, who leads the climate program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said the Golden State’s approach to transportation conflicts with its climate goals, though he concedes fixing SR-37 is complicated. Many of those who use it commute to rural jobs in wine country or in low-density suburbs. Greater job density would allow public transit to drop workers at fewer, more central locations, “as opposed to needing small-scale transit to help workers reach dispersed locations,” Elkind said. 

Dense, affordable housing in Marin and Sonoma counties would help too by reducing the number of commuters. “Instead, those communities, for decades now, have really put up the gates to any new development,” Elkind said. He added that there’s still time to greenlight more housing development, shore up the roadway, and build a high-capacity bus lane.

As for plans to expand the highway, Hana Cregar, associate director of climate equity at the Greenlining Institute, said people are starting to see the downsides of adding lanes. A Transportation for America survey found that only 10 percent of respondents consider that the best solution to reducing traffic. It may help explain how the project is being pitched.

“The way that this highway expansion project is aiming to rebrand under a climate resilience lens is unique,” Cregar said, “because I think it’s aiming to hide the flaws in this project by painting it as solving a very real issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to build a highway in the age of climate change on Jul 9, 2026.

For decades, Jon Zehr was haunted by an organism he knew was there — but couldn’t see.

It all started in the ‘90s on a research boat in the middle of the ocean. Zehr was an oceanographer studying nitrogen-fixing bacteria — simple, microbial life forms that could pull the element straight from the air, making it bioavailable to plants and animals. Scientists at the time had only seriously studied one species of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the entire ocean, but Zehr wanted to change that. His plan was to gather and test samples of seawater with the hope that he might find something that other scientists had missed.

Left: Jon Zehr (bottom center) sits aboard a research vessel. Right: Zehr studies nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the lab. Courtesy of Jon Zehr.

Zehr’s plans involved something pretty cutting-edge for the time: DNA. He gathered seawater samples and ran tests for the presence of the gene for nitrogenase, the enzyme that gives bacteria the ability to pull nitrogen out of the air. If he got a hit, it would hopefully mean the seawater contained some new kind of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

And it worked. Almost immediately, he found traces of a species of nitrogen-fixing bacteria previously unknown to science. Looking at the genes themselves, he could get a pretty good idea of what this new bacteria should look like. It was likely a unicellular cyanobacteria, around 3 micrometers in size, that should fluoresce orange under the microscope. Full of anticipation, he popped the seawater samples under the microscope, expecting to see that bacteria everywhere.

Instead, he found nothing. There weren’t any organisms in the sample that matched the right description.

Surprised, Zehr repeated the process over and over. He tested samples of seawater from the tropical waters of Hawaii and the southern Caribbean, all the way to the cold waters in the Arctic. Again and again, the genetic signature surfaced but not the visible bacteria. It was as if he had discovered a footprint without an animal.

But he didn’t want to stop looking. He knew that any new discovery could represent a vital link in the Earth’s fragile nitrogen cycle. “This one I kept chasing, because it’s globally important,” Zehr said. 

To understand Jon’s obsession, it helps to start with a peculiar biological constraint — a cruel joke, as one scientist put it — at the heart of all life on Earth. It goes like this: All living organisms need the element nitrogen to survive. It’s a key part of proteins, DNA, and RNA. But while our atmosphere is absolutely packed with nitrogen, the one enzyme that can pull nitrogen from the air so that living organisms can actually use it basically falls apart in the presence of oxygen. So even though plants, animals, and fungi are constantly surrounded by nitrogen in the air, they can’t get a hold of it on their own. 

The only organisms that can actually pull this off are ones that can survive without oxygen: super simple bacteria and archaea. That means the entire natural world relies on a relatively small number of microscopic species to make nitrogen usable by more complex forms of life.

Animals, plants, and fungi rely on simple microbes like bacteria and archaea for nitrogen. Jesse Nichols / Grist

This biological bottleneck has had major impacts on human civilization. Nitrogen is a major component of fertilizer, since plants need it to grow. Enriching soil with nitrogen drastically increases crop yields — important for feeding a growing population. Centuries ago, fertilizer was in such short supply that countries fought wars over islands covered in nitrogen-rich bird guano. In the early 20th century, German scientists created an industrial method to create synthetic, or lab-made, fertilizer. While this invention saved billions of lives from starvation, it also wreaked havoc on the environment. Producing synthetic fertilizer uses a massive amount of energy, and the overuse of fertilizer has polluted the water enough to lead to massive “dead zones” in the ocean. 

These dueling problems — the consequences of too much and too little nitrogen — have led scientists to muse about innovations like self-fertilizing plants. But despite these dreams, researchers hadn’t been able to develop a form of complex life capable of fixing its own nitrogen. It seemed to be an ironclad rule of biology that no organism from the complex side of the tree of life could pull nitrogen out of the air.

Which made it all the more puzzling that Jon Zehr’s particular type of nitrogen-fixing bacteria didn’t seem to be playing by the usual rules. His research team had plenty of the organism’s DNA, but no actual organism. Not only that, but the more they studied it, the less the bacteria’s DNA seemed to make sense. They could tell from its genetic markers that it was photosynthetic bacteria, but it didn’t actually seem to have the genes to photosynthesize. In fact, it seemed to have lost about 80 percent of its entire genome, including several genes it should technically need to survive. The organism seemed less like a complete bacterium than a collection of absences. How was it even alive?

After years of studying this puzzle, Zehr started to notice a pattern: Every sample of seawater that contained the mystery bacteria DNA also contained DNA for one specific type of algae. What if the reason that he had never seen the bacteria under the microscope was because it was hiding in plain sight, inside another organism? That might also explain how the bacteria could survive, even with all those missing genes. 

Zehr began to suspect the algae was the missing piece he had been chasing for decades. What he didn’t know was that someone else had spent years trying to solve the other half of the same puzzle from the other side of the world.

Despite being told her research would be of no use to others, Japanese scientist Kyoko Hagino spent decades of her career studying a type of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii.
Naotomo Umewaka / Grist

Kyoko Hagino is an algae scientist from Kochi, Japan. Just like Jon Zehr, her story also started in the late ‘90s, with a microorganism that changed the course of her career. She was part of a paleontology research team, studying tiny algae fossils on the ocean floor, to piece together information about Earth’s past climate.

Among the countless microscopic fossils she examined, there was one that absolutely captivated her. It was a type of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii. Hagino fondly just calls it Bigelowii.

At certain points in Bigelowii’s life, it surrounds itself with this beautiful geometric shell, and Hagino would find these pentagonal skeletons throughout her samples. “When I first spotted Bigelowii, I thought it was in such a beautiful shape,” she said. “It has a very beautiful shape like a jewel.”

But no one really knew anything about the algae living inside. This was what Hagino wanted to study. But no one else seemed to share her fascination.

Braarudosphaera bigelowii in its jewel-like calcified (left) and non-calcified (right) forms.
Courtesy of Kyoko Hagino

“When I first started the research, my boss at the time objected to it,” she said. “[I was told] even if you do such research that nobody reads, it won’t land you a job.”

At the time, Hagino was having trouble finding a position at a university. At the same time, she was taking care of her young kids. And she was moving to a new city where her husband had found work. Everything in her life seemed to be sending the clear message that she should just drop it and find something else to study. But Hagino just couldn’t do that. For whatever reason, there was something about this algae that just absolutely fascinated her, and she wanted to learn everything about it. Even if that meant studying it on her own.

So Hagino and her daughter started taking trips to the beach, collecting samples of seawater in the hopes of finding this elusive algae. Over the years, they ended up taking hundreds of these trips. They did this so often that her daughter genuinely didn’t know that people went to the beach for other reasons, like to go swimming.

“‘The ocean — isn’t that the place to collect seawater?’” Hagino recounted her daughter saying.
  

Kyoko Hagino and her daughter collect samples of seawater. Courtesy of Kyoko Hagino

Hagino would then spend hours at home with the microscope, searching for Bigelowii cells and individually picking them out when she’d find them. This was incredibly time-consuming, but it was kind of the only way to study them. No matter what she did, the cells didn’t seem to want to grow in a test tube. 

For years, Hagino worked on growing a culture without any kind of university salary. To make ends meet, she ended up picking up a part-time job washing test tubes in a lab. One day, she was talking to one of the scientists there, and he suggested adding an unusual ingredient to her culture. It wasn’t a chemical or anything else you’d normally find in the lab. It was tokoroten, a type of traditional Japanese jelly noodle made from seaweed.

To Hagino’s amazement, the noodles were just what Bigelowii needed.

“I saw Bigelowii swimming and increasing in number,” she said. “I was extremely happy.”

Left: Kyoko Hagino holds a bowl of tokoroten, the secret ingredient she used in her Bigelowii culture. Naotomo Umewaka / Grist. Right: A microscope image of Hagino’s culture. Courtesy of Zehr Lab.

Now that she had a culture, she could finally grow enough cells to answer some of the big questions about this organism. And there was one big question at the top of Hagino’s mind. Over the course of her many years studying Bigelowii, she noticed something odd. It had all the normal components of an algae cell. But then it also had something she couldn’t explain — something she had never seen in any textbook. It was a black dot in the center of the algae.

A transmission electron microscope image of a Bigelowii revealed a strange object. Courtesy of Kyoko Hagino

Hagino was preparing to publish a paper on this mysterious dot, when she stumbled upon an article that had just come out in the American journal Science. It described the search for a seemingly invisible nitrogen-fixing bacteria that the author theorized was likely living inside a species of algae. The author of the article was Jon Zehr, and he was talking about Braarudosphaera bigelowii.

Hagino thought about the strange object she had discovered inside Bigelowii. The pieces fit. She ran a genetic test on Bigelowii, and it came out positive: She had found the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that Zehr had spent so many years searching for. 

“I never imagined that someone was doing research on Bigelowii,” she said. “I was shocked to think that I had been surpassed.”

Zehr was also surprised when Hagino reached out to share her discovery with him — the same puzzle, worked on from an ocean away. “Neither one of us knew that the two things went together!” he said.

Hagino and Zehr had both spent their careers trying to solve a scientific puzzle, with no idea that they each held the other’s missing piece. Now that they had a culture, they had the chance to unravel a mystery that would end up going deeper than they’d ever imagined.

Together, they would reveal a level of cooperation that would rewrite a fundamental rule of biology.

Zehr and Hagino look out at the Pacific Ocean. Left: Naotomo Umewaka​ / Grist Right: Jesse Nichols / Grist

Nature is full of symbiotic relationships: two organisms, each helping the other out. The clownfish from Finding Nemo is a good example of this — it looks after its sea anemone partner, in exchange for a safe place to live. But these helpful relationships can get closer and closer. There are organisms that live inside other organisms, like corals, which get food from zooxanthellae algae living in them. And you even have cells that live inside other cells. At a certain point, the relationship becomes so close that we’re not sure where one organism starts and the other begins. 
  
Now, two organisms converging — going from being considered separate entities to part of the same being — is pretty mind-bending, and it’s a line that’s only been crossed a few times in the history of life on Earth. The two famous examples of this are mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell found in every complex life form on Earth, and chloroplasts, the parts of plant cells that use photosynthesis to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into food. Both of these examples started as independent cells that over time got so close to their partners that they became organelles: little organs inside other cells.
  
But what about Bigelowii and its internal bacteria? There was no doubt the relationship between the two was close. Zehr and Hagino were eager to find out just how the two worked together. So they teamed up. She sent a culture to John’s lab with hopes to visit California as the experiment went on.
  
When the culture arrived at Zehr’s office, he was so excited he took a photo to capture the moment. His team debated over which experiments they were going to run first.  

Jon Zehr smiles as he receives the first Bigelowii culture shipment from Hagino in 2020. Courtesy of Zehr Lab

“We sat around as a lab, and we decided the ten things we were going to do first, because we didn’t know how long the culture would stay alive,” he said.  “And within three days, Covid lockdown started.”

The pandemic threw a wrench in all of their plans. Japan put up very strict travel restrictions that ended up staying in place for years. After all her hard work, Hagino couldn’t join Zehr in person. But the two were still hungry for answers, and they decided that Zehr’s lab should proceed with the tests. Hagino, who had funding from a grant she shared with Zehr, would help as much as she could from afar.
  
And pretty quickly, they started to find clues that the algae and the bacteria’s relationship was not a standard case of symbiosis. Bigelowii and the bacteria always divided at the same time. They also grew at the same rate, and in ways that looked really similar to mitochondria or chloroplasts. 

But the most compelling piece of evidence came from Tyler Coale, a postdoc in Zehr’s lab. He was studying the proteins inside of the two organisms, when he noticed something strange: the bacteria were full of proteins that they didn’t have the genes to make. Instead, these proteins were being produced from extra genes found in Bigelowii. And on the very ends of each of these extra genes, there was the same short DNA sequence that kept showing up over and over.

Tyler Coale looks at Braarudosphaera bigelowii cells under a microscope at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Jesse Nichols / Grist

This pattern reminded Coale of an earlier mystery: The nitrogen-fixing bacteria that had somehow lost many of the genes for proteins it needed to survive. Could Bigelowii be supplying them instead? To find out, he ran an experiment, lining up the missing genes from one organism with the extra genes from the other. The match was striking. For nearly every gene that the bacteria had lost, Bigelowii had evolved an extra copy. And each of those extra genes were tagged with that same sequence of DNA on the end — molecular delivery instructions to send the protein over to the bacteria.

This discovery was huge because this kind of system had only been seen a small handful of times in mitochondria and in chloroplasts and now, in the tiny dot Zehr and Hagino had found inside of Bigelowii. The nitrogen-fixing bacteria were no longer bacteria anymore. It had become a part of Bigelowii, an independent microorganism-turned-organelle.

Zehr and his team decided to call it the Nitroplast.

And that also meant Bigelowii had broken the fundamental rule that only simple organisms like bacteria could pull nitrogen out of the air. The algae are the first known organisms on the complex side of the tree of life that can pull nitrogen out of the air. 

While it’s early days, Coale says the discovery could have big implications for industries like agriculture. “This organism has done what decades of biotech couldn’t do, right? It has engineered this capability into this cell. It’s natural to think that there might be lessons here that we could learn.” he said. 

Zehr, while cautiously optimistic, thinks that self-fertilizing plants are still a long way from becoming a reality. “The downer is it’s really difficult to go from what we know about the nitroplast to engineering a plant,” he said. “But if you don’t take one step, you’re not going to make 100 steps.”

Zehr and Hagino are excited to see where the research takes them next. But for them, it’s never really been about changing the world. They spent their careers studying their tiny pieces of the puzzle, not knowing what they’d find, but with the hope that whatever they discovered could teach them a little more about how the natural world works.

And on that front, there’s so much more to learn.

“This experience has shown that we don’t know which research will be useful and when,” Hagino said.

“Some of the biggest, biggest advances might come from things that you didn’t expect,” Zehr said. “And this might be a case like that.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The tiny cell that broke a big rule of biology on Jul 9, 2026.

Europe has spent several weeks enduring blistering heat. The heatwave the continent experienced last month closed schools, disrupted power supplies, and has been linked to thousands of deaths. France, Germany, and Denmark all saw their highest temperature ever, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Now, new data shows that western Europe set another record: its hottest June ever. 

The readings, from the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program, showed that western Europe averaged 20.74 degrees Celsius, or a little over 69 degrees Fahrenheit, across the entire month — night and day. That squeaks past the previous mark set during June of 2025, and is more than 3 degrees Celsius above the average for the month. Ocean temperatures were also the hottest ever recorded. Globally, June was only .01 degrees Celsius off the all-time high.

“These records reflect a climate system continuing to accumulate heat,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. “The result is increasingly intense heatwaves, a persistently warm ocean, and growing risks for people, ecosystems, and infrastructure across Europe and beyond.”

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The late-June heatwave followed a similar spike in May, and preceded still more high temperatures in July. These extreme conditions would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago, the World Weather Attribution initiative noted last month. Climate change, it said, is driving a new, dangerous norm that’s wreaking havoc on European systems that weren’t built for these risks. 

“Many people still live, work, and study in places that are not designed for the temperatures we are now experiencing,” Carolina Pereira Marghidan, with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said in a statement. “We need greater investment in heat-resilient homes, cities, and infrastructure to keep people safe.” 

Recent extremes are reminiscent of Europe’s sweltering summer of 2003. Since then, World Weather Attribution scientists say climate change has made daytime heat of the kind Europe is experiencing 10 times more likely and overnight extremes 100 times more likely. Going into the morning of June 28, a weather station in East Saxony, Germany, recorded a minimum temperature of 29.4 degrees Celsius, or nearly 85 Fahrenheit. The country’s meteorological agency, Deutscher Wetterdienst, called the reading historic.

Experts say elevated overnight minimums are especially concerning for human health. “When we have these high nighttime temperatures, the body isn’t able to recover sufficiently,” said Kurt Shickman, who works on heat issues at the World Resources Institute. “They’re going into the next hot day with a couple strikes against you from a health perspective.” 

The heat is also further fueling wildfire risks in parts of Europe that are already dry. Fires in Spain and southern France have caused thousands to flee, thwarted Tour de France spectators, and killed at least one firefighter. Such conditions are expected to continue, as is the general trend toward a warmer planet. 

Extreme weather can sometimes prompt policymakers to take action. After the 2003 heatwaves, European governments developed early warning systems and other adaptation measures that research shows would have reduced deaths by as much as 75 percent. Shickman also points to apps like Extrema, which help people map the thermally safest route when they’re traveling. But he says there’s a lot more that could still be done — from increasing access to affordable air conditioning to installing more resilient infrastructure, such as reflective roofs and cooler walls — in the face of a warming future. 

Extreme heat is “something that we’re seeing more and more of,” said Shickman. But he’s also optimistic that events like this can also be a catalyst for change. “These types of iconic moments can be galvanizing for years and years to come.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Western Europe just set the record for its hottest June ever on Jul 8, 2026.

We’re not even one month into “super” El Niño, the natural Pacific weather pattern characterized by warmer than average sea surface temperatures, and fisheries around the world are already getting scrambled.

In Peru, government officials have effectively canceled the fishing season for anchovies, one of the country’s most important exports and a leading source of fish oil and animal feed globally. The Indian government is preparing for a season of smaller, less plentiful Indian mackerel. Meanwhile, in Southern California, recreational and commercial fishers have reported some of the most successful months of tuna fishing they’ve ever seen. 

The divergent situations show how El Niño can create winners and losers across the fishing industry, decimating some species while making others easier to catch. For fishers, the result is instability, with many forced to consider seasonal diversification. And consumers can expect fluctuations in the price of key fish products.

“People are worried,” said Juan Carlos Sueiro, an economist and fisheries director for the nonprofit Oceana Peru. As climate change is expected to drive more frequent, stronger El Niños, “our vulnerability is increasing.” 

El Niño is a weather phenomenon that happens every two to seven years in the tropical Pacific Ocean. It was named by Peruvian fishers who, hundreds of years ago, noticed periodic fluctuations in their catches, with huge declines occurring every few years around Christmas. They called it El Niño, after the baby Jesus.

The reason it has such disparate impacts on different fisheries has to do with the way it moves around ocean water. 

Under normal conditions, trade winds blowing west along the equator move warm water from South America toward Asia. This causes cold, nutrient-dense water to rise up from the depths, a process known as “upwelling” that encourages the growth of tiny algae near the ocean’s surface. During an El Niño, however, weakening trade winds slow or even stop this upwelling. Less algae at the surface means species that depend on it, like anchovies, are forced to search for grub in deeper waters. Not only does this make the fish harder to catch, it can also stress and shrink their populations.

At the same time, those ocean dynamics can boost other fisheries. El Niño often sees warm-water species like the skipjack tuna straying toward coastal waters of the Americas, where temperatures would normally be too frigid for them. Nearer to the shore, these species become easier to catch.

Both of these dynamics affect Peru, where El Niños of the past have both wiped out the country’s anchoveta fishery — the largest single-species fishery in the world — and increased the availability of shrimp, scallops, dolphinfish, and tuna. This spring and summer, coastal El Niño conditions have already strained the country’s anchovies, prompting the government to issue an indefinite ban on fishing for them during the April to July season so their populations don’t fall even further. Humberto Speziani, a Peruvian industrial fishing adviser and former director of the International Marine Ingredients Organization, said vessels equipped with sonar technology have been locating anchovies more than 100 meters below the sea surface. Even if commercial fishers were trying to catch those anchovies, they likely couldn’t — that’s twice the depth that’s reachable using normal purse seine fishing nets.

A fisherman carries a box of fish at Chorrillos beach in Lima, Peru, in April. Luis Robayo / Getty Images

Seafood prices are liable to change, too, due to El Niño’s milder impacts outside the Pacific Ocean. Wild salmon, for example, can get so skinny from a lack of food during El Niño that they’re dubbed “snakes”; their decline in North American coastal waters can lead to higher ex-vessel prices — what fishers receive at the dock — that are then passed down to retail and restaurant customers. And in local Peruvian markets, prices for jack mackerel and corvina have already reportedly doubled, prompting families to buy more chicken instead. Sueiro said the opposite may happen with species like shrimp, whose populations have boomed during past El Niños.

One demographic that is likely to benefit from El Niño is Southern California fishers, who call the weather phenomenon a “special treat” due to higher-than-normal catches of bluefin tuna, swordfish, blue marlin, and other species that usually stay closer to the equator. Even before El Niño was officially declared in June, SoCal’s recreational anglers and commercial fishers were celebrating “unprecedented” bluefin tuna yields; one fishing tracker suggests that nearly 300,000 more of the fish were caught off the California coast during the first half of the year, compared to the same period last year.

“We’ve got yellowfin, we’ve got bluefin, yellowtail, and dorado. What else can you ask for?” the manager of one San Diego-based sportsfishing company said on YouTube at the end of April. “It’s not even May, and fishing’s been red-hot.”

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Although artisanal fishers in South America often catch more of these species, too, they’re unlikely to fully offset economic losses wrought by El Niño. For one, high winds associated with the weather phenomenon can frustrate shipping vessels, making it harder to reel in additional species. And heavy rainfall can damage onshore infrastructure needed to process marine animals and take them to market.

El Niño-related shifts in fish migration can impact more than fishing economies. High ocean temperatures associated with the weather phenomenon can decimate coral reefs and the species that call them home. They can also cause kelp to deteriorate faster, reducing the amount of underwater oxygen available to maintain healthy ecosystems. And there’s been some research to suggest that shifting fish populations can escalate geopolitical conflict, as vessels stray into other countries’ economic zones.

Arnaud Bertrand, a senior scientist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, also worries about the Humboldt squid. These animals are an important income source for Peru’s artisanal fishers — they yield half a million tons of catch per year — and they tend to fare poorly during El Niños due to changes in prey availability. “If the Humboldt squid collapses, then you’ll have 10,000 boats that will try to find another resource,” Bertrand said. And because these artisanal fishers are less strictly regulated than commercial enterprises, all those boats looking for alternative species could have “huge, huge consequences for the ecosystem.”

Ultimately, the exact impacts will depend on how this El Niño forms and when its peak arrives. Exceptionally high temperatures in September could signal a more damaging El Niño, on par or similar to the disastrous one that struck in 1982. But even then, it’s hard to say exactly what will happen.

“Each El Niño is different,” Bertrand said, though climate change doesn’t make him optimistic. “With global warming, the worst is the most probable.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline El Niño is here, and it’s already scrambling fisheries throughout the Pacific on Jul 8, 2026.

When a 150-mph cyclone hit the Mariana Islands in mid-April, federal officials handed out more than 1,400 tents and 1,100 temporary roofs to help families with damaged or destroyed homes. Last week, local officials urged residents to take the tents down and find safer shelter as another super typhoon approached.

“Those tents are not rated to withstand anything stronger than a weak tropical storm,” Miguel Dandan, a public information officer for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, told NMI News Service. Days later, Super Typhoon Bavi hit the island of Rota with 180 mph winds; the neighboring islands of Guam and Saipan saw winds over 100 mph. “Our washer flew, our dryer, even our freezers flew. Everything, even the trees in the back broke down and fell on our cars,” Rota resident Peter James Meskin told the Marianas Press.

It’s the second massive typhoon to pummel the Marianas in less than three months, and the archipelago is only a week into its typical typhoon season. The islands are home to Indigenous Chamorro and Carolinian peoples who are accustomed to frequent storms, but scientists say climate change is making them more intense. It’s part of a broader pattern of Indigenous Pacific peoples bearing the brunt of climate impacts while contributing relatively little to the burning of fossil fuels that cause the atmosphere to warm. 

Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist who leads the science division at the nonprofit Climate Central, said abnormally hot ocean waters due to that warming atmosphere intensified both Bavi and Sinlaku, another super typhoon that struck Chuuk with 185 mph winds then weakened to 150 before hitting the Marianas on April 14. “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths,” she said. 

Federal emergency officials were still processing disaster aid applications for Sinlaku when Bavi hit on Monday, and many families were still without power. A June 26 update from the commonwealth government estimated 29 percent of utility customers — more than 4,000 — lacked electricity more than two months after the April storm. Zeno Camacho Deleon Guerrero Jr., an Indigenous Chamorro resident of northern Saipan, considered himself lucky that his outage lasted only a little over a month after Sinlaku. But now his family is out of water and power again. Deleon Guerrero had been in Japan on a work trip when Sinlaku hit and was shocked to see the islandwide destruction on Saipan when he returned. “We were all just jaw-dropped flying in from Guam, being able to just see the whole south to north landscape, and it was just brown, dry and toasted bare,” he said. “We got the house cleaned up to a standard where it was livable but to where things were actually clean it was impossible because there was just a lack of running water.” He saw his neighbors lining up as early as 3 a.m. to buy water. 

Bavi didn’t hit his village as hard as Sinlaku did, but he still spent the storm mopping up water coming in through the windows. “It was honestly really chilling and terrifying to hear the rattling of the windows and just wondering, is it going to cave in or burst in at any moment?” 

The island of Rota, also known as Luta, had a direct hit from the 180-mph storm. Courtesy of Marianas Press

Deleon Guerrero’s experience might be repeated yet again before the year ends. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated last month that U.S.-affiliated Pacific island nations and territories would experience more frequent tropical cyclones due to El Niño, a weather pattern that shifts warm waters in the Pacific Ocean east toward South America. Chuuk is expected to see four to six cyclones this year, with Saipan and Guam potentially experiencing as many as seven tropical storms and typhoons.

Dahl noted that while El Niño may be fostering the formation of those storms, climate change is making them more intense. “Our data shows that the temperatures that (Bavi) is encountering along its path are 10 to 40 times more likely to be as hot as they are because of climate change,” she said. 

The fact that storms are growing more intense has major implications for Pacific peoples’ homes, health, economies, and lives. There are no confirmed deaths from Bavi so far, but Sinlaku was the deadliest storm to strike the Micronesian region in more than two decades, with the death toll reaching 17 across the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Deleon Guerrero, who works as solidarity director at the nonprofit Right to Democracy that advocates on behalf of U.S. territories, said the commonwealth’s inability to meaningfully participate in the federal government — including its lack of a vote in Congress or for president — makes it hard for the community to have any say in critical moments like this, when the commonwealth relies so heavily on federal disaster response. 

The day after Bavi swept through the Marianas, Deleon Guerrero woke up to another landscape of destruction, with his neighbors’ temporary roofing installed post-Sinlaku now part of typhoon debris. 

“We understand that it was meant to be temporary but it just goes to show that in this region, especially with the climate changing the way that it is, these temporary fixes aren’t cutting it,” he said. “A lot of people are just back to square one when some people thought we were making some meaningful progress.”

Grist reporter Joseph Lee contributed to this story. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Another super typhoon just pummeled the Pacific on Jul 8, 2026.

On a 200-acre farm and cattle ranch in Bandera, Texas, Mollie Engelhart grows organic produce, sells raw milk, and writes a daily column about the power of regenerative agriculture. She’s a farmer and a Make America Healthy Again mom who doesn’t like being called a MAHA mom. She prefers to think of herself as “MAHA-aligned.”  

In May, Engelhart opened her ranch to a couple hundred pro-MAHA politicians, activists, and leaders for a two-day MAHA farming retreat. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was there. Engelhart’s brother, Ryland, is one of the more well-known figureheads of the movement. 

Her biggest issue with the MAHA label is what she considers the “blue team or red team” politicization of it. Like many MAHA-aligned supporters, she voted for President Donald Trump in the last election largely because of RFK Jr.’s endorsement and their joint promise to clean up America’s chemical-laden food system. Back then, she had faith Trump would make good on that promise. But in the last year and half, that faith has frayed. 

“I think that one hundred percent the MAHA movement is very disappointed and disenchanted, and I am not the only one,” said Engelhart. “MAHA voters are homeless.” 

MAHA’s disenchantment with the Trump administration has much to do with its open support of Bayer, the manufacturer of the popular pesticide Roundup, which just won a Supreme Court case over the claim that the company failed to adequately warn users about the cancer risk of its weedkiller. First, the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up the case. Then, in February, the president signed an executive order that classified glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup key to national security and called for increased domestic production of the chemical. In March, it was reported that top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency met with Bayer’s CEO to discuss “litigation” issues. The following month, the administration sent a lawyer to argue on behalf of the chemical company in a Supreme Court hearing. 

Tens of thousands of plaintiffs had sued Bayer, alleging that the active ingredient in Roundup has caused cancer and other health issues and that the company failed to follow state laws when it did not include a warning about cancer risk on its label. But now, the court’s ruling means that states cannot mandate more information on the product’s label than required by federal law, and any such claims against Bayer will have limited pathways of legal recourse. 

Just hours after the decision was released, Trump signed an executive order framed as boosting regenerative agriculture and American farm resilience. (Broadly speaking, the term “regenerative agriculture” refers to farming methodologies that boost soil health and its potential for carbon capture, though there is no federal standard or definition like there is for “organic,” leaving it open to interpretation — and, in some cases, greenwashing.) The contradictions between the two actions have sparked a new barrage of criticisms from MAHA voters. “It does seem a little schizophrenic,” said Engelhart. “None of us can be a one-issue voter anymore…I don’t think that anybody is just going to blindly go and vote for one party or another,” she added. 

That sentiment is already showing up in the data, though the picture is far from clear-cut. Polling results from last October found that roughly 74 percent of MAHA-supporters identified as Republicans, with 59 percent also identifying as Make America Great Again supporters — the president’s most loyal base. Meanwhile, a POLITICO poll conducted this spring revealed that 47 percent of self-identified MAHA respondents who voted for Trump believe the administration has not done enough to “Make America Healthy Again.” And a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 28 percent of MAHA voters somewhat or strongly disapprove of the way the administration is handling food and vaccine policy, which may affect turnout in the midterm elections that could decide control of Congress. Limiting pesticide use, however, remains one of the movement’s defining causes, with 94 percent of MAHA adherents in favor of reducing exposure to harmful chemicals. 

“The People vs the Poison” protesters gather at the U.S. Supreme Court in April. Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

South Dakota farmer Jonathan Lundgren was at the White House on the day that the Supreme Court ruling was announced. Days earlier, he’d been invited to the Rose Garden for a dinner recognizing farmers and was asked to join Trump in the Oval Office for the signing of the regenerative agriculture executive order. Lundgren raises bees, sheep, and poultry, and grows flowers and apples on a 50-acre regenerative farm in Estelline, South Dakota. Like Engelhart, he shirks the political implication of identifying as MAHA, but considers himself aligned with the pro-regenerative agriculture and anti-pesticide faction of the movement.

“They needed some farmer faces to kind of give the whole thing a spin,” he said. Lundgren called the executive order “meaningful,” though it’s not lost on him that it doesn’t introduce new funding or regulations. 

Experts say it doesn’t do much at all. “It may sound great, but fundamentally, there’s nothing really new or substantive or meaningful in the EO that I can see that actually changes the equation for how the administration treats regenerative agriculture,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. 

Inside the Oval Office meeting, Lundgren watched on as Kennedy’s team swiftly mobilized to try to soften the MAHA backlash to the Supreme Court ruling with the president’s executive order, which culminated in an explosive argument between a Department of Health and Human Services official and a top farming lobbyist who was concerned that the order would imply that there are safety issues in the U.S. food supply. Lundgren himself stopped using Roundup about eight years ago when he noticed that agrochemicals were “causing more problems than they were solving” on his farm. But he can’t escape the downwind effects of nearby farms that spray it. Right now, he’s watching scores of bees slow down before outright dying, and his orchard’s leaves cup from herbicide drift. Then there’s the human toll. 

“We’re sick this time of year, and it’s a direct result of all of these pesticides being applied. My family is sick. That ain’t right,” Lundgren told Grist. His daughter is grappling with asthma and allergy flare-ups while his farm staff battles recurring headaches and fatigue. “It’s so intense that we call it in my community ‘The Spray Flu.’”

He says these dual actions by the administration, as well as the EPA’s recent approval of yet another batch of pesticides that contain PFAS, often called “forever chemicals,” have changed how he plans to vote in the midterms. 

“We’re in a weird state right now that has never really happened before, where food safety and the health of our children is weighing very heavily on American politics,” said Lundgren. “This is far broader than the farming community. I think that this is consumers; I think this is parents; I think this is society at-large.” 

Others argue that, despite the administration’s recent pro-regenerative ag messaging, Trump’s track record of anti-climate and pro-chemical policies has not helped the movement to clean up the food system, but hindered it. 

Kelly Ryerson, a leading MAHA mom and co-founder of the farming organization American Regeneration, agrees that, when taken together, the ruling and the order reveal a disconnect. “It’s inconsistent, to say the least,” said Ryerson. “If Trump is going to be doing things like the Supreme Court situation, it’s certainly not what anyone voted for…it’ll be really hard to come back from this now.”

For Ryerson, a registered independent who voted for Trump, the two actions have shifted how she plans to approach the midterms. “I don’t care if they’re a Republican or Democrat, I’m going to support the candidate that wants to decrease toxic exposures,” she said. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump tried to appease MAHA’s fury over Roundup. It backfired. on Jul 7, 2026.

When Rebecca Lindsey was fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last February, the first thing she did was stew. Then she worried about what was going to happen to the website she and her team had built over the last decade and a half. Lindsey had long been the lead writer and editor, and more recently the program manager, of Climate.gov, a site that distilled the agency’s research on climate change into easy-to-understand, free resources for the public. 

She was right to be concerned: Within a matter of months, the Trump administration had eliminated the rest of the staff supporting Climate.gov and shut down the website — ironically, to comply with an executive order calling for “restoring gold standard science.”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of it all being thrown away,” Lindsey said of the website, which had been used by teachers, community leaders, and policymakers. It had also given researchers in the government important insight into what everyday Americans needed to know about climate science and how to answer their questions effectively. Members of the former Climate.gov team met periodically to discuss what could be done to preserve the work. By the end of last summer, they’d decided to create an independent version of the site. It launched late last month with a new nongovernmental domain: Climate.us. 

The intent behind Climate.us isn’t just to save what was on the Climate.gov website when it died, but to continue to update it with new visuals, explainers, features, and Q&As, making climate science relevant to people with resources that are vetted by scientists. “We just try to constantly take the pulse of what scientists say is valuable and important and needs to be talked about and explained,” Lindsey said.

Since its launch two weeks ago, the new site has gotten about 800,000 page views — an impressive number, considering that the old NOAA site had been getting about a million views a month, according to Lindsey.

Read Next Why the federal government is making climate data disappear Kate Yoder

After President Donald Trump took office a second time, some of the most easy-to-understand resources to help people understand the warming planet disappeared. The National Climate Assessments, congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into warnings for policymakers and the public, vanished last summer. In December, the Environmental Protection Agency removed at least 80 webpages about the causes, indicators, and effects of climate change. The EPA webpage explaining the causes of climate change no longer lists human activity as a direct driver of global warming. It now emphasizes — misleadingly — natural processes. 

Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, called it “an all-out assault on climate information.”

Thousands gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to defend science as a public good and central pillar of social progress in March 2025. Astrid Riecken / The Washington Post via Getty Images Beyond the federal government

As organizations race to fill the gap left by the United States’ attack on its own scientific knowledge, many experts see an opportunity to shield research and data from the shifting winds of politics. The world’s science has relied on massive support from the U.S. government, but experts see a future that disperses some of its responsibilities, including how data is collected, handled, preserved, and used.

“It can’t just be the federal government anymore,” said Janice Lachance, executive director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union, the largest Earth and space organization in the world. “That’s proven to us that that’s unreliable, that there’s too much control in very few hands. And so how do we distribute this to like-minded organizations, civil society, and [nongovernmental organizations] who care about it?

The American Geophysical Union is trying to fill the void where it can. It has launched a global initiative to ensure that environmental datasets are more resilient against threats such as political interference, pulling together a group of about 100 experts around the world. It’s also working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science, hosting an academic network that allows U.S. scientists to participate in key international reports even after the Trump administration withdrew from the group. Along with the American Meteorological Society, it has also released an invitation for climate manuscripts to maintain the research momentum of what would have been the sixth National Climate Assessment, with plans to eventually publish a special climate collection across different peer-reviewed journals.

Read Next Why this NASA climate scientist wants you to stay angry Clayton Aldern

For many former federal researchers like Lindsey, trying to carry on their previous work at nonprofits and through independent initiatives has been challenging. 

Adam Smith, who led a project tracking billion-dollar weather and climate disasters at NOAA before the agency ended the program last year, has taken the work over to the nonprofit Climate Central. The project is now up and running with all the same data and methods, but it took almost a year to get it fully where it was back at NOAA. The research is important, Smith said, because it quantifies the economic effects of extreme weather, helping to communicate the real-world consequences of climate change to businesses, policymakers, and the public. He is working to develop the project further, documenting disasters that cost $100 million or more back to 1980. 

Creating an independent copy of the Climate.gov site wasn’t easy, either. Researchers who had no experience fundraising had to crowdsource money and court philanthropists to back their work, Lindsey said. Web developers had to update all the old links that directed people to the defunct original site. The Climate.us team wanted independent scientific review for their materials, as they had done at NOAA, but some scientists declined to put their names on a defunded federal project because of unwanted publicity or fear of retaliation. 

Lindsey managed to revive the site as one of just three full-time staff, compared to roughly eight people who were running the operation under NOAA full-time. 

“In a lot of ways, I feel I’m back in 2010 when we first started building Climate.gov,” she said. “There are days when I think, ‘What am I doing? Do I have it in me to start this all over again?’”

These efforts to save climate information are crucial, experts said, but it’s tough for a patchwork of nonprofits, universities, and independent initiatives to fill the vacuum left by the federal government removing the most accessible resources about climate change. “No nonprofit is going to have the reach of the federal government, and so I think that there’s a massive gap in terms of people learning about where they can find these resources,” said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental and public information researcher who co-founded the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Philanthropic funders can be fickle, too, raising questions about financial sustainability. “Truly, all of us are scrambling for funding and underfunded,” she said.

Nonprofits also don’t have the instant recognition that the government does, which can make it harder to earn public trust. When Smith started running the billion-dollar disaster project at Climate Central, for example, he found that some people didn’t know that anyone from NOAA was still involved. Now, the top of the website makes it clear that Climate Central is continuing NOAA’s dataset, with the same methods and the same lead scientist. 

A sign that reads “NOAA Saves Lives” is seen in a corridor of the University of Colorado at Boulder in May. Ulysse Bellier / AFP via Getty Images From rescue to reform

For information and data advocates, the current crisis is a wake-up call. “Guess what? We have really terrible and really insufficient data policies,” Gehrke said. As the Trump administration tests those vulnerabilities, it gives these stakeholders insight into what needs to change to protect government information from the political whims of future administrations. That could include writing specific requirements for agencies into law and building up Congress’ oversight capacity and enforcement mechanisms. 

When public-facing platforms like Climate.gov disappear, people tend to wonder, How can we bring this product back? without examining the structural failures that led it to be vulnerable in the first place. Sonia Wang, senior director at the Data Foundation’s Center for Climate and Environmental Data, uses the metaphor that people usually focus on the fountain — the shiny map or platform — rather than the plumbing behind it. This invisible infrastructure is much more fragile than people realize, Wang said, sometimes relying on one person who’s been maintaining a dataset for decades, or relationships the federal government has built over time. 

“This was always a problem, regardless of administration,” Wang said. “I think we’re just seeing more of the cracks be exposed now with the rapid decline in some of our federal partners being able to actually carry on their work without the staff.” 

As organizations work to shore up the plumbing of the data that helps us understand the world, there’s increasingly a sense that they can’t count on government support like they did in the past. “It happened in the United States last year, and it continues this year, but it could happen anywhere,” Lachance said. “And we just don’t think that critical scientific data should be vulnerable to the political winds of the day.” 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The plan to make climate science harder to erase on Jul 7, 2026.

For decades, toxic lead cables lay like giant sea monsters snaking across the bottom of Lake Tahoe. Installed as early telecommunications lines and owned by AT&T, the abandoned cables contained over 100,000 pounds of lead and were slowly deteriorating, leaching contaminants into one of the most iconic lakes in the country.

In 2021, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, or CSPA, filed a lawsuit to force AT&T to remove the abandoned lead cables. The multimillion-dollar litigation dragged on for over two years. Without sampling and scientific testing, it was difficult to make the case in court. Then Roland Peralta, the founder of a new non-profit called WHEN Justice, offered to provide $100,000 for the science needed to support the litigation. The case quickly changed course. 

With the new funding, scuba divers went down to the lake floor to collect samples that helped show that the lead in the cables was leaching into the surrounding waters. The crucial piece of missing evidence was found with lead isotopic testing, providing “fingerprints” that showed the lead in the cables was the same as the surrounding contamination in the lake.

Once the lead contamination was linked to the cables, AT&T settled the case in nine weeks and removed the cables within months. “That was the ‘aha’ moment, where we realized we could scale this model,” said Peralta.

An innovative pay-it-forward model

WHEN Justice is built around a simple but deeply powerful idea: Strategic funding at the right moment in litigation can help public-interest cases win. The non-profit raises funds to help pay for the costly pieces of litigation at the intersection of environmental and human health — like scientific testing, expert analysis, and sampling — that smaller entities taking on massive corporations in court frequently cannot afford. Because environmental lawsuits often include cost recovery, WHEN’s donations can sometimes be used repeatedly, helping fund multiple cases from the same original donation. 

Building off the AT&T case success, WHEN was officially launched on Earth Day in April of 2026. “WHEN made a huge difference in the Lake Tahoe case,” said Erica Maharg, the environmental attorney who represented the sportfishing group against AT&T. “Those funds provided us with the evidence we needed at a critical time in the litigation.”

Colin West, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake, sees that role as especially important for groups without deep legal budgets. “Being a smaller organization that is trying to step up and take on big litigation against larger entities is challenging,” he said. “A group like WHEN Justice that has closing that funding gap as their core focus fills a need, and a role that others can’t.”

The litigation bottleneck

Adequate funding is critical in today’s environmental justice landscape. Currently, much of the environmental law enforcement that forces powerful entities to clean up pollution is being done by individuals and nonprofit organizations. “We think of government and regulators as being the primary enforcement mechanisms. But in reality, many environmental cleanups happen because of the efforts of small organizations,” said Maharg.

For those groups, the main obstacle is usually not the legal standard, but the cost of assembling the scientific evidence needed to support the case. “If you’re going up against big companies, litigation is so expensive,” said WHEN’s chief executive and legal officer, Jacqueline Biner. “The way the legal system is set up right now, it sadly is not always about the merits of the case. It’s often just about who has more money.”

WHEN’s model is designed to help remove that barrier. In another current campaign, the organization is fundraising to support scientific analysis and sampling in a lawsuit involving a long-closed hazardous waste disposal site located on the edge of the San Pablo Bay in California. The lawsuit alleges that toxic substances are now leaching from the landfill into the bay. Together, WHEN and the public are funding experts to conduct sampling and analyze the results, showing how the pollution is moving from the landfill toward the bay, grounding the case in science and data.

“There are so many cases out there, like landfills that are leaching contaminants, or factory farms leaking manure and nitrates into water bodies,” said Biner. She sees strategic, targeted litigation funding as a tool that could help fuel a sea change, showing large corporations that it’s more cost-efficient to clean up their own messes and address sources of harm, rather than fighting in court to try to evade responsibility.

A new way to demand accountability

A serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of wellness company Nutrafol, WHEN’s founder Roland Peralta initially envisioned giving back through traditional philanthropy. But he soon began to see an additional, larger opportunity: By directing strategic funding to organizations fighting expensive David-and-Goliath battles against large corporations, he could help create a healthier planet for future generations. “I kept asking myself, what kind of world will I leave for my son?” he said.

By helping cover litigation costs, WHEN can help smaller organizations pursue cases against much larger and better-resourced opponents. “The ability to access funding for litigation is really exciting, because it means that we can take on bigger cases,” said Maharg. “Having a partner like WHEN that can help with fundraising key costs in the litigation makes all the difference in our ability to take on these well-funded polluters.”

Over the next several years, WHEN Justice aims to build an infrastructure for a new kind of corporate accountability — helping identify harmful corporate conduct before it becomes irreversible. They plan to give people a direct way to participate in the fight for transparency and justice through crowd-funding. Peralta and Biner envision an interactive platform, where donors can direct their dollars toward the fights that matter most to them. These funds would support both large, precedent-setting cases, and smaller, community-driven campaigns that help local residents confront injustices in their own backyards. 

Winning is not the only goal, said Biner. “We also believe it is ok to pursue a case that may lose if it will create momentum and pressure. If we educate the courts, place new accountability on corporations, and educate consumers, that moves the needle in a different way.”

WHEN’s goal is also to get the public involved. “We think there is so much more power in a million people giving a dollar than in a single person giving a million dollars,” Biner noted. “We want people to become invested in these cases, to follow them, and to become more informed about the legal process.”

A call to action

That sense of agency is central to WHEN’s purpose. At its core, the model is designed to give people a concrete, accessible way to respond to injustices that might otherwise feel too large or too entrenched to take on.

For Peralta, that means creating a clear path that allows ordinary people to turn outrage into action. “Everybody’s angry and appalled about these massive environmental issues, but as an individual, it’s hard to know how to help,” he said. “WHEN Justice is designed to be the call to action button that everyone has been longing for, to help individuals play a role in shutting this madness down by voting with their dollar.”

WHEN Justice is a charitable crowdfunding platform for legal and regulatory action at the intersection of environmental and human health. From pollution and toxic exposure to climate-related harms, we select and fund high-impact efforts that seek accountability from powerful actors whose actions put people, communities, and ecosystems at risk. Every campaign is open to the public, creating a direct way for concerned citizens to participate in outcomes that affect their families, communities, and future.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Funding the fight against corporate polluters on Jul 6, 2026.

In the United States, PFAS chemicals are so ubiquitous — found in everything from frying pans to skincare — that nearly all of the country’s population likely has measurable levels of the so-called “forever chemicals” in their blood. It’s only in the last few decades that the public and scientists started untangling the health and ecological risks associated with some of the manufactured compounds, which earned their nickname because they don’t break down easily in the environment.

Now, new research from the University of Notre Dame has deepened our understanding of how PFAS can filter through ecosystems and move up the food chain to get to people.

The peer-reviewed study, published this spring in the Journal of Environmental Quality, focused on the Great Lakes. The researchers analyzed 42 years of studies and combined nearly 2,500 samples of algae, fish, birds, and other organisms, in what’s called a meta-analysis to identify trends in PFAS distribution.

PFAS have been linked to a range of health issues, and the chemicals have been identified in human tissue, including in the bloodstream, liver, kidneys, and lungs. Known health risks range from decreased fertility to a higher prevalence of certain cancers. People can be exposed to PFAS in several ways, including through the food they eat. 

“What we’re finding is that the food web itself is a vehicle for transferring these chemicals from one organism to another,” said Gary Lamberti, aquatic science professor at Notre Dame and a study co-author. “So it’s a more holistic view than we’ve known before.”

The Great Lakes study focused on six of the PFAS chemicals most commonly tested for, but there are more than 15,000 types out there, according to the National Institutes of Health. Researchers identified a dramatic decrease over the last two decades of one PFAS chemical known as PFOS, following a voluntary phaseout by industries in the early 2000s. 

“If we stop manufacturing these chemicals, they will eventually reduce in concentration in the food web,” Lamberti said. “That’s kind of good news for how we can manage these chemicals.”

Those declines were seen in the lower Great Lakes — Ontario and Erie — likely because these areas are home to the heavy industries that used the chemicals.

But there was little to no decline in PFOS in the upper lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, most likely because the water bodies are larger than the lower lakes. In contrast to the shallower Erie and Ontario lakes, which flush out their water about every 2 to 7 years, water can stay in the upper lakes anywhere from about 60 to 170 years.

The study also confirmed that these chemicals increase in concentration as they travel up the food chain. Algae and plants have the lowest concentration, according to the study, because they grow and die quickly. But predators like salmon and eagles had the highest concentration because they’re eating a large amount of prey that have a lot of accumulated PFAS.

Read Next Trump’s EPA vows to fight ‘forever chemicals’ — by loosening regulations Zoya Teirstein

Potentially dangerous levels of these chemicals in fish have prompted warnings by state officials across the country on how much is safe to eat, including in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Montana, and Pennsylvania. Michigan, which borders 4 of the 6 Great Lakes, has been testing fish for PFAS since 2012 and issues “safe fish” guidelines annually.

“If we can understand what the PFAS levels are in the food web, we can better communicate the risk of consuming those potentially toxic food sources,” said Katherine Manz, an environmental health professor at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study.

While it was easy to find PFAS data on salmon, trout, and some birds, Lamberti said, the information on the “less glamorous” smaller fish, invertebrates, and algae was harder to come by.

Tools to analyze the range of these chemicals are still evolving, said Vernon Lalone, CEO of Wave Lumina, a Michigan-based startup that’s developing a rapid testing kit for PFAS in water and soil.

“It’s like a chicken-and-an-egg situation,” said Lalone, who wasn’t involved in the study. “You’ve got to have an analytical method that’s robust and reliable enough to measure these things before you can regulate them at certain limits.”

Lamberti said there are still plenty of questions about how these chemicals will shift in waterways as temperatures rise due to climate change, ice formation shifts, and as industries introduce new chemicals. But he’s optimistic — his study shows that when forever chemicals are removed from production, food webs eventually cycle them out. There is no national ban on PFAS, but a patchwork of federal regulations restricts certain chemicals, and some manufacturers have phased out other PFAS compounds voluntarily. 

“That’s what we need to be thinking about with these chemicals,” Lamberti said, “how we’re going to remove them from the production and find substitutes for them to do the right thing.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips5','In scholarly research, a “peer-reviewed” study or article is one that has been independently evaluated by other experts in the field to assess scientific accuracy. Not all studies go through a peer-review process, so peer-reviewed studies and journals typically indicate a higher level of confidence in methodologies and results.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips12','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New research traces how ‘forever chemicals’ move through the Great Lakes and into people on Jul 6, 2026.

A pungent smell clouds the stadium where the U.S. men’s football team is set to play its first World Cup match. With 30 days to go before kick-off, the venue’s operations team is busy transforming the playing field into a world-class soccer stadium, the freshly laid soil covered in fertilizer ahead of the arrival of refrigerated trucks with special grass the following day.

Tending to the playing surface is one small task in the job of delivering a seamless event in Los Angeles, one of 16 cities hosting the most popular sporting event in the world this summer. 

Compared to other host cities, the stakes are particularly high in L.A., which hopes to use this year’s World Cup — and next year’s Super Bowl — as a dry run for the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, coming to the city two years later.

A freshly fertilized pitch on an overcast day in Los Angeles.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

This is the start of L.A.’s mega-sporting-event era, and while the eight World Cup matches unfolding at the SoFi Stadium pale in comparison to the size of the Olympics, they provide a good starting point to stress-test security strategies, mobility protocols, and heat wave response plans. The traffic-laden city, with its stressed budget, wants to know what an influx of fans does to its infrastructure,\ and hopes its mega-event preparations somehow pay long-term dividends.

“We’re here to deliver a lasting legacy,” Paul Krekorian, who heads L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ Office of Major Events tells council members at a City Hall meeting in May. He reminds them that the city bid for the sporting events not just for the honor of hosting them, but to ensure that they delivered a lasting benefit for the people of Los Angeles.

Yet current preparations highlight existing tensions: for Los Angeles, this year’s World Cup is set against a backdrop of weak hotel bookings, high ticket prices, and a growing budget deficit. The city also faces an urgent need to rebuild what burned down in the devastating January 2025 wildfires — the unprecedented scale of which scientists have linked to global warming — with tens of thousands of residents still displaced. Meanwhile, fears that ICE immigration officers struck into the hearts of residents when they raided the multicultural city a year ago, where a quarter of the large immigrant community is undocumented, are still very much alive.

Fans, workers at highest risk from overheating

“The vast majority of people at risk are not the athletes themselves, but rather the spectators — who are generally much less acclimatized — and other groups such as service staff at sales points or in catering,” sports sociologist Sven Schneider said. “These risk groups require particular protection.”

Traveling around L.A., oceans of concrete and limited shade or greenery make clear that fans are exposed to heat long before matches start, racking up hours under the sun as they wait in line for shuttles to venues and stand in long queues to get into stadiums. Just days before the World Cup kick-off, FIFA placed a blanket ban on fans bringing sealed, transparent water bottles into matches — and quickly backtracked following backlash.

A month before, on an overcast day typical of springtime in L.A., Otto Benedict, who heads operations at SoFi Stadium (rebranded the Los Angeles stadium for the World Cup), explained how his team is well versed with local climate risks, sardonically looking upward to say that some fans might even show up underdressed for a cooler “May gray” or “June gloom” day.

The first subway train arrives at the freshly innagurated Wilshire/Fairfax station.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

Regardless, he said they are ready. “We have cooling fans and cooling zones that we deploy if it’s a hot day,” he said, adding that he is constantly in touch with the National Weather Service, and that thermometers inside the stadium coupled with metrics from previous events inform their action plans. “We are sharing with FIFA what our response protocol is, and then learning from them what they need us to be able to do.” Heat response protocols differ across host cities, based on local risk assessments.

While heat waves are unusual at this time of year, record-breaking ocean temperatures are bucking the trend, said climate scientist Daniel Swain. “In the coastal parts of L.A. County, the prevalence of truly extreme heat is lower than in other parts of the country and other parts of the world,” he explains. “On the other hand, not all of the infrastructure is therefore designed for it, so when it does occur it can be very disruptive.”

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The $5.5 billion SoFi Stadium is the exception. Partly surrounded by greenery, it is designed to use the natural environment to create a comfortable experience. On hot days, Benedict’s team can open roof panels to create an updraft and cool the stadium’s interior, which is not air-conditioned. On rainy days, the roof funnels water to a catchment system. That rainwater, after being treated, is used to irrigate the native plants surrounding the venue, which in turn provide shade and cooling.

Yet one does not need to travel far to see a different story. The city of Inglewood, home to the stadium, has a tree canopy cover of 9 percent — when recommended canopy cover goals stand at around 30 percent. Temporary systems to spray mist, water dispensers, and sun awnings dispatched for the World Cup at key locations can only do so much when up against the demands of a climate-stressed county.

Sporting events entice users to try out public transport for the first time

L.A. Metro hopes that sporting events will give people a reason to experience public transit, maybe for the first time, and that a good ride can destigmatize the experience in a city where just over 3 percent of commutes are completed by public transit, according to 2024 American Community Survey data.

“We are planning with legacy in mind,” said CEO Stephanie Wiggins at the edge of the SoFi Stadium pitch as airplanes roared overhead. “We’ve been rolling up our sleeves to figure out how to make this as seamless as possible.” 

L.A. Metro has added multilingual signs to stations, introduced contactless payments on its buses, and consolidated eight apps into one platform for planning, paying, and receiving live information and service alerts. These are changes that both international visitors and commuters will notice.

Most notably, the agency inaugurated three new underground stops in May — just in time for the World Cup — having worked on the extension for over six decades. In June, fans used the D Line to reach watch parties and Fan Zones. Come August, unlike the match-day shuttles, the stations will continue to serve residents.

Most bus stops across L.A. County are not shelterd.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

Officials estimate that around 78,000 people will use the D Line every day, serving one of the U.S.’s densest corridors. As May drew to a close, L.A. Metro saw its highest ridership numbers in six years. The plan is to open six more stations by 2028, connecting the UCLA dorms, which will serve as the Olympic Village, with downtown L.A.

L.A. Metro is drawing from its history: Ridership numbers reached new heights in 1984 when the city last hosted the Olympics. “We know that global events can mean an opportunity,” Wiggins added. 

For the World Cup, L.A. Metro is providing free water at hydration stations in key locations, and during four days at the end of June it transformed L.A.’s main railway hub into a Fan Zone. Union Station came to life in a way it has not in years. “Our Fan Zone gave people a reason to arrive early, stay longer, and see Union Station differently,” reflected Wiggins in a Substack post. “When we make the system easier and safer to use, when we create places people want to be, and when we give riders a reason to choose transit for more than their daily commute, they respond.” 

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Time will tell whether ridership numbers continue to climb beyond the mega events. The backbone of L.A. Metro’s system is made up of buses. The agency serves around 12,000 bus stops a day, accounting for around three quarters of journeys — and the infrastructure leaves much to be desired.

Most bus stops are unsheltered, leaving riders under the sun, clueless as to how long without live departure boards or timetables in sight. The Sidewalk and Transit Amenities Program is currently upgrading stops, and has installed 403 shelters — yet departure screens are often out of service.

LA faces multiple tests as it counts down to Olympics

A few weeks in Los Angeles makes clear that authorities, agencies, and businesses struggle to work beyond the immediate tasks in their jurisdiction. L.A. Metro does not own bus stops; local authorities do. Transport experts say that local politicians are not motivated to invest in shelters, as they fear the homeless population would take them over. While the bus system will take you anywhere in L.A., riders accumulate hours under the sun transferring between lines, often accompanied by the city’s large homeless population — a reminder of the challenges the city faces as it readies to welcome the world. 

L.A.’s acute housing crisis and strained budgets mean not everyone is convinced that the time and money invested in delivering a party for the world will pay off for the local residents. A few days before kick-off, workers at SoFi Stadium threatened to strike and street vendors weighed match-day profits against their personal safety.

Halfway through the tournament, L.A.’s streets buzzed with life and there were plenty of signs of solidarity and camaraderie, with residents coming together to celebrate, wrote local journalist Alissa Walker in her dispatches. Yet celebrations were also obscured by toxic air stemming from a large warehouse fire. 

L.A. Metro’s CEO Stephanie Wiggins answers reporter’s questions with 30 days to go before the World Cup kick-off.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

The city’s wounds run deeper than last month’s smoke: Many residents are still reeling from last year’s wildfires, which ravaged entire neighborhoods in Altadena and Pacific Palisades — the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history. Air pollution reached toxic levels; pollutants still linger long after the fires have been extinguished.

Against the backdrop of a national administration focused on advancing fossil fuels, comparatively green California faces much pressure. Los Angeles published its Climate Action plan in April, with an entire section dedicated to using major sports events to accelerate “climate investments that extend well beyond the closing ceremonies.” The plan commits the city to net zero by 2045, 100 percent clean energy by 2035, and to host a “transit-first” Olympic games, which should upgrade mobility options in underserved neighborhoods.

Yet those working to make L.A. County more climate-resilient are unconvinced by the level of ambition or the speed of progress. Following the wildfires, L.A. Mayor Bass dropped the requirement to build new homes without fossil fuel-powered systems. 

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“The people and the trauma make this all very complicated quite honestly, but it was an opportunity to truly do things in a way that is more sustainable and the region chose not to,” said Cassie Rauser, who heads the advocacy group TreePeople, which educates, plants, and cares for trees across Southern California.

“It remains to be seen what the wildfire’s lasting impacts are,” said L.A. Metro’s Wiggins, grief palpable in her voice as she recalled her own employees’ devastation and shock at losing their homes. Regaining her usual confidence, she said that the wildfires showed how important it is to have good infrastructure and good transit: “We were relied on during those fires.”

Whether L.A.’s mega-event era will benefit the people of Los Angeles in the long run is a question that hangs thick in the air. It is exactly the kind of resilience that is deeply woven into the every day that L.A. will have to build more of for its mega-event investments to have a long-term legacy. The countdown until the Olympics opening ceremony marks two years and two weeks.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Los Angeles turns ‘most polluting’ World Cup into Olympic rehearsal in bid for climate legacy on Jul 5, 2026.

Following years of drought, the wells in Estancia, New Mexico, are running dry. 

After declaring a water emergency last week, the small town in Torrance County is hauling in water to fill its pipes. Estancia has also reduced water sales to the Torrance County Detention Facility, or TCDF, a federal immigration detention center run by the private contractor CoreCivic. The detention facility, Estancia’s largest commercial water customer, has resorted to trucking in water. 

In the midst of the crisis, Estancia Mayor Runnel Riley has taken a leave of absence. During a Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday evening, Estancia’s elected leaders passed a vote of “no confidence” in the mayor. The state has provided funding to drill a new well, and Estancia will be opening the 30-day bidding process this month.

Dozens of residents attended Tuesday’s meeting in person or virtually to voice their frustration about the water problems and delays in drilling a new well. When asked by a reporter for the Mountainair Dispatch, board trustees said they did not have data available on what proportion of the city’s water goes to the detention facility. Estancia is home to 1,400 people, and up to 800 people can be detained at the facility.

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Ryan Gustin, senior public affairs director at CoreCivic, said the company implemented contingency plans once it learned of the water emergency. He said that the Torrance County Detention Facility has brought in additional water supplies, and the water emergency has not impacted its operations.

“Drinking water is always available within our housing units and bottled water has been provided in addition to the readily available drinking water containers,” Gustin said.

Roy Hubbard, Estancia’s deputy clerk, told Inside Climate News that the town is meeting with CoreCivic on Wednesday to discuss next steps. The detention facility has been the subject of complaints about sewer and water problems in the past.

A detention center, a drought, and years of delay

The current water shortage is not Estancia’s first. 

Last year, Estancia asked residents to conserve water because its wells were not producing adequately. In 2024, the town issued a similar call.

Overpumping has caused significant declines to the groundwater level in the Estancia Basin aquifer, which the town relies on, according to the New Mexico Groundwater Alliance. The Office of the State Engineer, which regulates water rights in New Mexico, closed the Estancia Basin to new water rights. However, the office predicted that if existing water rights remain in use, the groundwater level will continue to decline.

New Mexico, including Torrance County, is experiencing severe drought. State officials expect groundwater supplies to further diminish because of higher temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change.

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Estancia elected Runnel Riley to replace the incumbent mayor in November 2025 by a mere five votes. However, Riley stopped attending trustee meetings as the town’s water problems became more severe.

State Representative Stefani Lord, a Republican who represents Torrance and Bernalillo counties, said at Tuesday’s meeting: “I called the mayor in January. He has never returned my phone calls.

“Just get the well finished. That is the short-term problem,” she said. “There are all kinds of things we can do in the future. But for this moment, we just have to focus on getting this done.”

During the meeting, the trustees also voted to prohibit fireworks over the Fourth of July weekend. The town still plans to hold a fireworks display, but private citizens will not be allowed to set off fireworks because of the ongoing drought and the risk of fires during the water emergency.

Hubbard, the deputy clerk, said that as of Saturday, trucks had delivered 116,700 gallons of water to the town. He said that water supply to CoreCivic will “gradually be turned back on” when there is more water available. According to reporting in the Mountainair Dispatch, more than 80 percent of the town’s water goes to commercial customers. However, town officials have not clarified how much of that share goes to CoreCivic.

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During Tuesday’s meeting, in response to questions from a Mountainair Dispatch reporter, Mayor Pro Tem Albert Lovato said that providing up-to-date information on the town’s water supply is difficult because of the fluctuating population at the detention center. “Our population goes up and it goes down because of CoreCivic,” he said.

The detention center has been a source of controversy for years. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General documented unsanitary conditions at TCDF in 2022, including “clogged toilets, broken sinks, inoperable toilets, water leaks, and mold.” The Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant and refugee rights organization, has also documented complaints from detainees at TCDF about sewage overflows and restricted access to water.

“There have been no sewage issues at TCDF because of this situation, nor were there any sewage issues in 2025 related to any water supply issues,” said Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson. “At no point have those in our care been without drinking water.”

The New Mexico Environment Department, or NMED, enforces health and safety regulations at TCDF. Agency spokesperson Drew Goretzka said that following a 2025 inspection, TCDF has addressed potential deficiencies with the sewer system.

“NMED is supporting the town of Estancia through emergency response coordination, including requesting assistance from other state agencies to provide alternate water sources,” Goretzka said. “The department is in communication with the town and its contractors to resolve the immediate water shortage issues.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement deferred questions about the facility to CoreCivic. 

The federal agency has expanded its detention capacity under the Trump administration. ICE purchased numerous warehouses around the country to open new detention facilities this year for immigrants who are in deportation proceedings. ICE has been detaining an increasing number of people with active immigration cases seeking to stay in the country. Many residents in these communities, from Texas to Pennsylvania, have raised concerns whether local infrastructure could support the increased water demand from detention centers.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A New Mexico town is running dry. An immigration detention center is its biggest water customer. on Jul 4, 2026.

What’s a winemaker to do on a warming planet? Much has been written about how climate change threatens viticulture around the globe — or at least, threatens to fundamentally change the practice. A long-lasting drought in Chile is forcing winemakers to rethink irrigation systems. Vintners in California must not only endure wildfires but also the smoke that comes with them and lingers, which can alter the taste of their grapes. Severe frosts in the Champagne region of France are also altering the acidity and flavor profile of vineyards’ grapes, although some growers are starting to lean into that. 

A new study out of Cornell University looks at three techniques that winegrape producers can use to adapt to warmer temperatures, ranging from relatively simple and inexpensive to potentially existential: Install shade cloth to shield precious grapes from the harsh effects of the sun; grow new varieties of grapes better adapted to the heat; or relocate to cooler climates. The researchers found that, for all three cases, when these changes are communicated to shoppers, consumers are willing to pay a premium for these climate-resilient wines — even if it means some of the name-brand recognition of, say, California’s Napa Valley is lost in the process. 

The idea behind the market study was both to help growers understand the climate adaptation strategies available to them, the costs associated with these decisions, and then finally, how consumers perceive them. 

“A producer can make all the changes in the world — but if they don’t resonate well with consumers, then it’s moot,” said Alex Susskind, one of the study’s co-authors and a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University’s school of hotel administration. 

The challenge with the three strategies identified by the researchers — invest in new infrastructure, invest in new grapes, or get up and move — is that only two of them might be immediately obvious to consumers. If a vineyard in California installs shade cloths throughout its estate to protect grapes from sunburn, most shoppers would have no idea, unless it was somehow explicitly stated on the finished product, like on the wine label. 

On the other hand, if a producer in Napa Valley known for cultivating Cabernet Sauvignon grapes switched to its focus to Carignane grapes — or if that same grower relocated to Lake County, just an hour or two north — consumers would likely notice. In the third option, for example, those grapes don’t end up producing a bottle of “Napa Valley Cabernet anymore, that’s a Lake County Cabernet,” said Susskind. 

In other words, the touchpoints that guide many consumers’ choices — what winemaking region a bottle is from, what grape variety they use — change. Of all the options available to winegrape producers, Susskind said, relocating showed the “least desirability” among survey participants, meaning they were least willing to pay more for these wines. But crucially, respondents still said they would pay extra for wines made from these grapes. 

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There are limits to the study. For one, it only considers adaptation strategies for winegrape growers and doesn’t explore climate mitigation strategies, which would help growers to decarbonize production and have an overall lighter impact on the climate. Additionally, only 300 participants answered the survey, most of them college graduates under 40 years of age. Included in the survey respondents were people who reported to “care about environmental issues and read labels on food products,” according to the study — two things not everyone does, or does every time they go shopping. And the researchers acknowledged that there may be a novelty factor at play here — over time, wine-drinkers’ willingness to pay more for these bottles may fade. 

Still, people in the industry feel that the results are promising. “This is genuinely valuable work,” said Jimena Balic, a winemaking researcher based in Chile. “The economics of climate adaptation in wine are badly under-documented, and putting real numbers to ‘go, stay, or change’ plus the finding that consumers will pay a premium for adaptation, is exactly the kind of evidence growers need.”

Balic believes that winegrowers are not likely to invest in any adaptation strategies unless they are likely to pay off. She added that for winegrape producers, adaptation is more likely to be implemented in a more piecemeal way rather than wholesale. Maybe producers plant different varieties of grapes in one part of their land and install shade cloth in another to maximize output. And heat isn’t the only climate threat facing vineyards: While some regions may face drought, others might see unpredictable rainfall, as well as hail, frost, and pests. “Wine risk is multifactorial,” said Balic, “and each hazard carries its own cost and its own adaptation choices.” She would like to see further research expand on these challenges. 

Similarly, the results of the study didn’t surprise Greg Jones, a wine climatologist and CEO of a winery based in Oregon. “But there’s so many other caveats,” he added. From his point of view, much depends on educating the consumer around the viticultural process and how wine gets made — and then doing more education around how climate change is affecting growers. Whether consumers can perfectly hold all of those things in their mind is something the industry is still figuring out. 

“We have a system where the consumer is hard to read,” he said. 

Jones, who has spent the last 25 years studying the impacts of a changing climate on winegrape production, among other things, said he felt encouraged by the Cornell team’s research. “The research says something important, people would be willing to pay more for [these wines],” he added. He hopes it will lead to further studies on adaptation and consumer preference. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline People are willing to pay more for climate-proof wine, study shows on Jul 2, 2026.

They tower overhead and sway in the wind and often teem with squawking birds, yet trees are easy to ignore. Urbanites rush by them without noticing, and without appreciating all the work they do: Trees reduce temperatures, mitigate flooding, and provide habitat for animals. 

City leaders are no exception to this oversight. As mayors around the world pledge to reduce municipal greenhouse gas emissions, they’re missing the literal low-hanging fruit of bolstering urban forests, dozens of scientists argue in a new essay. “We have to elevate it from something that is nice to have to something that we require — like, mandatory,” said Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, an ecologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom and lead author of the piece, which published today in the journal PLOS Climate. “In the same way that we treat education, security, transportation, it has to be elevated to that level.”

What makes urban forestry so important? For one, trees significantly cool the concrete jungle by providing shade and releasing water vapor to “sweat.” Patches of greenery also allow stormwater to soak into the ground instead of pooling and flooding — that investment alone will spare cities from economic damages as a warming atmosphere makes rain fall harder. Spending time in parks also boosts mental health, while urban farms produce nutritious food and create jobs. Planting trees, especially native species, also provides shelter and food for fauna. At the same time, vegetation absorbs pollutants, improving air quality for everyone.

These scientists have laid out a four-point approach to funding, raising, and maintaining urban forests. This, by the way, includes individual trees on sidewalks, parks, and woodlands in cities. But it’s really about all the vegetation — not just trees but shrubs as well — within the city limits, whether that’s in someone’s backyard or growing in a street median.

The first hurdle is investing in this stuff. Urban forestry isn’t just about buying a bunch of trees and hiring people to put them in the ground. It takes resources to maintain them, especially when they’re newly planted and not yet established, and therefore more vulnerable to stresses like pests. Money can (and does) come from private funders, but that cash isn’t always a guarantee. So city governments should be setting aside money for these green spaces, the researchers argue. “We say that it has to be critical infrastructure, because then we need a special budget dedicated just to them,” Esperon-Rodriguez said. 

Read Next The delight — and power — of your neighborhood’s unplanned green spaces Matt Simon

Even for cash-strapped governments, this is an investment proven to bring dividends: A recent report found that for every dollar put into parks and recreation, cities reap $3 in local economic benefits every year. That’s because green spaces encourage people to exercise, supporting public health and reducing the costs associated with sedentary lifestyles. By attracting locals and tourists, parks also spur economic activity as folks filter into surrounding neighborhoods to shop or have lunch. So while yes, it does take money to plant and maintain this greenery, it’s in a city’s best interests to do so.

Mayors must ensure that these domains blossom in an equitable way, the scientists add. Richer areas tend to be much greener, and therefore cooler, than underserved neighborhoods. People who can’t afford air conditioning are at higher risk of the urban heat island effect, or the tendency for the built environment to absorb the sun’s energy all day and release it throughout the night. “Then what’s the cost?” Esperon-Rodriguez asked. “They are missing opportunities, they are missing recreational activities. And if they don’t have air conditioning, then on top of that there is the issue of health.”

Officials can’t just roll into a neighborhood and plant trees, though — the essay argues that cities have to collaborate with their communities on strategies for doing so. Some folks might want more fruit trees, for instance, while others might object to cherries splatting on the sidewalk. Some might worry about their allergies, and request trees that don’t spew so much pollen. 

Esperon-Rodriguez adds that expanding the canopy across a metropolis, and doing so equitably, needs to be enshrined in some way. That is, it can’t just be a mayoral candidate’s promise to increase tree cover by 30 percent, but something that’s legislated. This is not only more durable over the years, and hopefully decades, but helps citizens hold elected officials accountable if they’re not meeting targets, Esperon-Rodriguez said.

Overall, these campaigns need to be evidence-based, the essay argues. Cities, for example, have to identify not just the tree species that communities prefer, but ones that will actually survive ever-climbing temperatures. It’s not just thinking about increasing the canopy in the near term to meet some goal, but making sure cities are more verdant and safer in the long run. “It’s a way to secure,” Esperon-Rodriguez said, “that whatever we’re planting today is going to survive the next 10, 20, or 50 years.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Urban trees aren’t just nice, scientists say — they’re mandatory on Jul 1, 2026.

When rain falls on the RVs that line Big Sandy Creek, it sounds like gunfire. The harder it pours, the louder it gets. But what bothers Ashlee Willis most is how the wind makes them sway. It is so unsettling that she cowers in her camper’s narrow hallway with her two frightened cats, a Taylor Swift blanket stuffed into their carrier in case they have to flee. 

It always reminds her of that terrible night in July, when the creek ran so high and so fast that the mobile home Willis lived in actually bobbed after the water tore part of it from the foundation. Within hours, the flood would kill 10 people and destroy 74 homes in Sandy Creek, a small community in central Texas.

It was supposed to be a joyful evening. Willis and her parents, Brandy and Gregg Gerstner, had bought “a bajillion” glow sticks to illuminate the above-ground pool, and had a stockpile of fireworks to celebrate Independence Day. Rain dashed that plan, so everyone, including eight guests, went to bed. Some slept in tents pitched outside.

By 2:30 a.m. the storm was so violent it shook Brandy and Gregg awake. The creek was rising quickly as they scrambled to round up the goats, but there was no saving them. Gregg loaded two pigs into a guest’s Jeep as Brandy dashed back inside to grab her diabetes medication and Gregg’s laptop. By the time Gregg returned to the house, water was rushing in and limbs were crashing through the windows.

Gregg led Brandy to higher ground, then waded through the torrent to save two dogs and a cat in the house. Before he reached the back door, he heard screams and watched the flood sweep the Jeep away, tossing its two occupants out. Gregg rushed to save them. One grabbed a floating tire he shoved toward her, while the other latched onto a plastic drum. He heard a third guest cry out for help from the branches of a partially submerged tree and convinced him to stay put. But he couldn’t reach Willis, who had climbed onto a pool table with the five other guests, two dogs, and a pair of cats as water filled her mobile home. She called her mother to say goodbye. “There was no way to comprehend how we were going to survive,” Willis said.

Suddenly the water receded. It retreated far enough for everyone to gather in Ashlee’s wrecked house. They used glow sticks to spell “Help” in the windows, then sang “the sun will come out tomorrow” while waiting for it to arrive. When dawn came, they found their world remade. “It’s all gone,” Ashlee said at the time. “Everything’s gone.”

One year later, the family is still waiting to rebuild. So is the rest of the community.

Many in Sandy Creek remain in damaged homes. The occupant of this one eventually moved into an RV, but others have not been able to do even that much.
Laura Mallonee

The Gerstner-Willis family spent seven weeks in a hotel. Everyone had made it through the storm, even Brandy’s sister Donna Wright, who had been swept 2 miles downstream before being caught by a light pole. Each morning they returned to Sandy Creek to sift through the confetti the flood had made of their lives. Sometimes they found pieces of the world that once was. Brandy unearthed someone’s crystal bowl, perfectly intact, from what had been her goat pen. Not all discoveries were joyful. Workers found three human body parts. “I was there when they dug up somebody’s hip,” Brandy said.

The family eventually moved into donated RVs. They sit no more than 30 feet from Big Sandy Creek — closer than before the flood. Gregg monitors the water level with security cameras, and sometimes shows Brandy the feed to calm her. 

A few months after the flood, Brandy attended a permitting clinic the county held to help people navigate the reconstruction process. “They informed us all, ‘Any of you thinking of staying, there are new permit rules, and we are watching you all now,’” she said. “They watch us like hawks.”

The rules weren’t new — just new to Sandy Creek.

A “Keep Out” sign warns trespassers against entering a property that flooded on July 5, 2025. Several lots in Sandy Creek are, like this one, now vacant. Laura Mallonee

The Gerstner-Willis family is among hundreds of survivors struggling to recover from the July 2025 floods that killed 139 people in central Texas and caused $1.1 billion in property damage. For many, the months since the disaster have revealed the complexities of recovery, a long, hard process that goes beyond repairing what the water destroyed. 

Residents of Sandy Creek face permitting requirements, limited aid, insurance gaps, and construction costs they did not anticipate. Travis County is requiring them to meet standards locals say it rarely enforced before the flood, but the poverty that put many of the community’s 600 or so people in or near the floodplain leaves some of them unable to comply. Dozens of families remain in RVs, damaged homes, or temporary housing, caught between the need to rebuild and the cost of doing so.

For many homeowners, the problems started with a federal standard known as “substantial damage.” Anyone with damage equivalent to at least 50 percent of the home’s pre-flood market value must bring the entire structure up to code. In Travis County, houses that sit in a floodplain must be elevated at least 2 feet above the expected height of a 100-year flood. For the Gerstner-Willis family, that means building 12 feet in the air and installing a lift to reach the door. Meeting these requirements can increase costs by more than $100,000, on top of the thousands needed for engineering and surveys. For some, the burden is simply too great.

“I would say 98 percent of the people out here are not going to be able to afford their houses to be raised,” Brandy Gerstner said. 

Disaster survivors who cannot afford to rebuild depend upon a patchwork of insurance, loans, government assistance, nonprofits, and churches for help. But those in floodplains often find that this system isn’t designed for them.

“The storm’s not over,” Brandy Gertner said in May, standing on ground still studded with shards of glass and debris 10 months after the inundation. “Surviving after the storm has been much harder. We’ve had to fight for everything.”

Two years before the flood, Ashlee Willis moved into a 1,500-square-foot double-wide manufactured home on her parents’ land. Family compounds like that are common in Sandy Creek, an arrangement that has made it difficult for some to get help rebuilding. Willis isn’t on the deed, and because her home is a second structure, few organizations could assist her. Some treated her as if she didn’t own the home. Others saw her situation as a duplicate claim.

“A lot of these groups out here helping don’t come across multigenerational plots of earth,” Willis said. “It looked like double-dipping.”

By early December, when the nonprofit organization Rebuild Sandy Creek encouraged her to apply for its home-rebuilding program, Willis had recovered just 3 percent of her losses — $1,000 from a church and $5,000 from Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian relief organization. Rebuild Sandy Creek board members selected Willis from among 17 or so applicants. The organization has struggled to raise money, but said it remains committed to helping Willis with construction costs. 

Her predicament exposed some limits of the recovery system. FEMA has registered 1,212 flood-affected households in Travis County and distributed $4.3 million in assistance. That aid, capped at $43,600 per household, is meant to stabilize people, not make them whole. Rebuilding can take anywhere from a few months for those with good insurance to a few years for those without it.

Read Next Texas floods showed why many rural communities feel abandoned in a crisis Laura Mallonee

Most don’t have it. Just 2.4 percent of affected households in Travis County had flood insurance, which typically pays only enough for policyholders to rebuild what they already had. For everyone else, help ranged from federal loans to small payouts of up to $2,000 from various ministries to a county donation fund that distributed $7.85 million to 264 families, or about $30,000 each. A concert by country singer George Strait raised enough to give more than 60 families $25,000 apiece. Governor Greg Abbott handed out the checks.

Austin Disaster Relief Network, which the county deployed to coordinate volunteers, offers help including funds for construction; it is still working through roughly 80 applications. Samaritan’s Purse is installing eight manufactured homes — Wright got one — and letting homeowners choose from a furniture package that includes appliances.  

Navigating this web of nonprofits is exhausting, and residents complain of “form fatigue.” The Travis County Recovery Alliance, which coordinates with 16 nonprofits to help 155 families, hopes to make the process easier by, among other things, creating a unified intake form so survivors fill out just one application. But things are still getting off the ground. “We’re building the plane while we’re flying,” said executive director Janis Bookout.

The county has tried to make permitting easy — it waived fees, expedited paperwork, and for several months staffed a mobile office to walk people through the process. But residents have sought just 24 permits for work in the Sandy Creek Ranches subdivision since the flood, though not all were for flood-related work. Only eight were for new homes. 

Simply preparing a lot for a manufactured home requires leveling and grading the land, laying a foundation, and installing utility hookups. Jason Hefner found the prospect of applying for the permit to do that overwhelming. “I know I’m gonna need one, but I have no idea where my home’s gonna go,” he said. “Even though you might have the money to build back, it’s just like, ‘Oh my gosh, here we go.’”

He received just $20,000 from his insurer and is betting Samaritan’s Purse will replace his home. “That’s one reason,” he said, “why a lot of us aren’t looking yet to rebuild.” 

This isn’t Brandy Gerstner’s first time starting over. After tumbling through California’s foster care system, she set out on her own at 15 and made her way to Texas, where she found work in nursing. Ashlee came along in 1987. Four years later, Gerstner walked into a real estate office looking for a place to build a home. She couldn’t afford any of the properties she saw until a realtor showed her a parcel with rent-to-own terms.

It sat on the banks of Big Sandy Creek, which had flooded a decade before. Weeds loomed over Gerstner, who is 5 feet tall, and a narrow path led to a mobile home built in 1975. It was overgrown with vines and infested with tarantulas, bats, and other vermin. Rattlesnakes bred in the flower bed. She squashed 75 scorpions within weeks of moving in. “It was horrific,” she said.

Gerstner rolled up her sleeves and set to work. She fixed the plumbing, tamed the yard, and built a deck. She planted apple, plum, and pear trees, established a garden, and later put up a greenhouse. Over the years she added chickens, pigs, and goats. In 2002, she bought a double-wide, which she eventually refinanced to add more buildings, including a garage for brewing beer, bottling honey, milling spices, canning fruit, and making cheese and wine. Her home was open to all, a place where 16 people frequently crowded around a dining room table meant for six. “This was where everybody came,” she said. “They called it their garden of Eden.”

Brandy Gerstner purchased her property in Sandy Creek in 1991 and built a small hobby farm called Asher Acres that included chickens, pigs, goats, and honeybees. “Asher means happy in Hebrew,” she said. When floodwaters swamped her property last July, she fled to her greenhouse, which sits at the highest point on her property, and survived. Laura Mallonee

Inexpensive land and scant oversight attracted others to Sandy Creek. Texas is a strong property-rights state where counties have limited power to regulate what is built and how. Some have little or no permitting, especially for manufactured homes and RVs. Enforcement is often complaint-driven, and few complain in places where people move specifically to avoid municipal meddling and taxes.

Travis County began regulating floodplain development in 1982, but many structures in Sandy Creek received exemptions because the community was laid out in the 1970s. Gerstner rarely bothered with permits unless a contractor required one. Few in Sandy Creek did. “This was kind of a free-for-all out here,” she said. “The county doesn’t care about the area.” 

In many ways, the Gerstner-Willis family is a best-case scenario, even as it illustrates where disaster assistance breaks down. The resourcefulness that allowed Brandy Gerstner to transform her property into a thriving hobby farm has helped her navigate recovery better than most. The family also had flood insurance, documentation, and the patience to negotiate with nonprofits.

Yet they still live in RVs that are closer to the creek than the house it destroyed. They also pay $4,000 a year for construction insurance on a project that hasn’t started and continue fighting the insurance company for $200,000 they believe they’re owed. Willis isn’t surprised. “I just had it in my brain, ‘We’re going to be in these things for probably two years,’” she said. “Everyone thought I was crazy.”  

Brandy and Gregg Gerstner stand in front of the RV they have called home since August. It sits even closer to Big Sandy Creek than the home the flood destroyed on July 5, 2025. Laura Mallonee

She and her parents plan to build two houses connected by a breezeway so Willis can help them as they age. It will cost about $1 million. They’ve already spent $15,000 on the design, engineering, and land surveys. 

For many others, rebuilding doesn’t feel like an option.  

In December, Sara Ashworth, a nurse who has volunteered in Sandy Creek since the flood, visited an elderly woman whose floors were rotten. Rodents and cockroaches scurried about. The woman had been hesitant to let her inside, and had not sought help because she had been in and out of the hospital. Ashworth recalled telling the woman, “You need to get out of this house tonight, this is dangerous.’” A social worker arranged a hotel, then a six-month Airbnb stay.

Many remain in damaged homes, unable to afford repairs, afraid of invoking the substantial damage clause, or unwilling to leave their land and livestock. In some cases, FEMA did not classify their houses as a total loss after the flood, but they later grew rotten or moldy enough to be condemned after the assistance application period had ended. 

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Landlords do not qualify for a lot of nonprofit aid, leaving many renters — who comprise 48 percent of Travis County households affected by the flood — in subpar conditions. Michelle Warner, a speech therapist who is recovering from knee surgery, moved to Sandy Creek 20 years ago from southeast Texas after losing everything to Hurricane Rita. She pays $1,175 a month for a three-bedroom mobile home scarred by the flood. “I’m just ready for this to look like it used to look, so I’m not driving up still to a damaged house I can’t fix on my own,” she said.

Noel Hernandez’s insurance agent advised him not to file a claim on the house he rents out, which sits in a flood-risk area, because his rate would go up. It rose anyway. As a landlord, he didn’t qualify for FEMA assistance and received about $3,000 in other aid — yet spent nearly $70,000 rebuilding. A family rented the place in February. An inflatable kiddie pool sits in the yard.

Dozens of families remain in campers. “If you go out there, it’s basically an RV park,” said Michelle Varela, a cofounder of Rebuild Sandy Creek. Last winter, space heaters sparked fires in some of them, Varela said. In mid-June, flooding washed out a portions of the water crossing the Gerstner-Willis family and others use to leave their property. The county bars RVs from remaining on a given site for 180 consecutive days or more. It doesn’t look like anyone is enforcing the rule. 

“Who in the hell is monitoring that?” Brandy Gerstner asked. “What are you going to do — kick us all out of here? Make us all homeless?” 

The systems that made Sandy Creek residents vulnerable before the flood have kept them that way after it. Poverty, political disengagement, and scant regulation shape how communities are built — and how they recover.

“Low-income people tend to live in low-quality homes in low-lying areas, because that is what the market allows,” said Shannon Van Zandt, a Texas A&M researcher who studies post-disaster housing recovery. In desirable areas like western Travis County, they are even more likely to end up in flood zones. “We need to be doing a better job of making sure that income is not such an important predictor of the harm that someone receives during a disaster,” Van Zandt said.

Texas counties have limited authority to regulate what is built and where it is built in unincorporated areas, and efforts to impose stricter standards often face resistance. Van Zandt said that contributes to poor-quality housing and suffering after disasters.

Counties have no legal obligation to offset these inequities, but Van Zandt believes they have a moral and practical one because resilience requires investing in vulnerable communities before a catastrophe. But residents of such places often lack the resources to make that happen. “People who feel disenfranchised for whatever reason — whether it’s income, race, ethnicity, or even documented status — are not going to get it because they don’t ask for it, or they’re seen as not entitled to it,” Van Zandt said.

Many in Sandy Creek still rely on the generosity of others. Even now, a year after the flood, people still throw community fundraisers. There’s one coming later this month. But relying on nonprofits to fill gaps is “not sustainable,” said Michelle Meyer, Van Zandt’s colleague. As tragedies like the Texas floods grow more common, even substantial contributions will not be enough. Donors are burning out, and inflation has made rebuilding costlier.

County governments sometimes buy vulnerable homes to minimize future risks and losses, but find many residents don’t want to leave. Travis County has purchased hundreds of floodplain properties in the lower Onion Creek area, a largely Latino part of South Austin. An unpublished study by the University of Texas found that, of 176 homeowners who accepted a buyout, nearly all moved beyond the floodplain, though most ended up near it. Van Zandt said buyouts work best when they are voluntary, offer enough to secure safer comparable housing elsewhere, and include efforts to preserve community cohesion. Researcher Kijin Seon, the author of the study, believes “relocation came at the cost of social fabric.”

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The root of the problem, Van Zandt said, is too little regulation. In a meeting with rural county judges in May, she recommended higher standards for subdivision development, including installing drainage, elevating homes, and ensuring ready access. Travis County regulates these things but lacks broader land-use controls like zoning. “That’s what they need,” Van Zandt said. “They need to be able to limit development in those areas.” 

Many counties have long asked the Legislature for greater authority to do that. Travis County has generally supported “legislation giving county governments the necessary tools to manage growth, protect property values, and preserve quality of life.” But counties have found lawmakers reluctant to act.

Disasters create a “window of opportunity” in which political reform is possible, Van Zandt said. But it closes quickly if residents aren’t engaged. 

Some in Sandy Creek are trying to hold that window open. Brandy Gerstner and Ashley Willis joined two other women in creating the Sandy Creek Alliance to lobby county and state officials to address the crisis. They visited Washington D.C. to call for strengthening FEMA, and asked the governor to create Fund Texas Forever, a disaster reserve financed by the state’s rainy-day fund to expedite relief. Willis handed him a letter outlining the idea and inviting him to return to Sandy Creek to hear from survivors. He thanked her and read it. “Nothing happened,” she said. 

Andrew Mahaleris, the governor’s press secretary, told Grist in a statement, “Governor Abbott and the State of Texas continue to use all necessary resources to help Texans recover and rebuild from last year’s disastrous flooding.” He noted that the state has provided more than $500 million to assist families and communities, and that Abbott signed legislation to better protect people from catastrophic flooding events. “The governor will continue to work with the Legislature to strengthen flood regulations and preparedness,” Mahaleris said.

Meyer supports the idea of a disaster reserve, something academics have suggested with little success. Politicians don’t like setting aside money for future disasters, and cash assistance often gets tangled up with talk of welfare and self-reliance. Survivors, she said, carry more political weight in pushing for such programs.

Willis has made that her focus. She got a part-time job helping build Organizing Resilience, a new national network of disaster survivors that’s advocating for reform. “I’m a Swiftie,” she said, “I always like to joke with county and government officials, ‘Look what you made me do.’”

The community is still rebuilding, but nature has reclaimed land ruined by the flood, just as Tamerra Garcia predicted it would a few weeks after the disaster. Before the summer heat settled in, the fields were ablaze with sunflowers. Prairie verbena, firewheels, and beebalm growing along the road swayed in the breeze.

The trees that once obscured Sandy Creek are gone, leaving the banks barren but for a few saplings. Neighbors who never saw each other before the flood now see into each other’s backyards. They also hear every trash can being rolled to the curb on Wednesday nights.

In a lot that belonged to Garcia’s grandfather, Harold Sherwood, a cardinal perched on a beam. Not much else remains of Sherwood’s home, which was razed after water reached 5 feet up the walls. It was there, amid the muck and the stench, that Garcia made her prediction.

A cross draped in red, white, and blue fabric stands on a concrete pad beside what is left of Harold Sherwood’s home. Laura Mallonee

Her grandfather did not live to see it come true. Overwhelmed by the prospect of building a home 12 feet in the air to comply with the building code, he planned to live out his life in an RV. He eventually had a change of heart and decided to rebuild. 

He died a short time later, around Christmas, of cancer. His health deteriorated quickly after the flood and “all the stress [of] losing everything you’ve had for all your life,” Brandy Gerstner said.  

Friends and neighbors held a poignant memorial in early January on the land where his home once stood. The tattooed minister stood before a cross of branches draped in red, white, and blue fabric to honor Sherwood’s military service. He reminded those gathered around it that Jesus was a carpenter, then invited them to imagine him building Sherwood a heavenly mansion.

This story has been updated to provide Sara Ashford’s full name.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One year after the Texas floods, home feels further away than ever on Jul 1, 2026.

For the past two years, more than a dozen major banks have been not only reneging on their climate commitments, they’ve been actively making the crisis worse. 

In 2024 and 2025, during the leadup to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, all six of the nation’s largest banks abandoned the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a voluntary climate coalition, precipitating the Alliance’s complete shutdown in October. Since then, others including Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, HSBC, NatWest, Santander, and JPMorgan Chase have either weakened or scrapped their decarbonization targets.

Now, new evidence shows banks are ramping up spending on fossil fuels. Beyond helping companies extract more oil and gas, they are bankrolling the industry’s pivot to plastics, fertilizers, and other petrochemical products.

Two reports released earlier this month illustrate the trend. An analysis from the Rainforest Action Network, or RAN, and other environmental groups found the world’s top 65 banks contributed $508 billion to companies expanding fossil fuel development in 2025. That’s a 27 percent increase since 2024, and more than any other year since at least 2016, based on the organization’s past analyses.

The second report comes from the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL. It found that, between January 2019 and June 2025, big banks gave the world’s top 15 petrochemical companies at least $591 billion in loans and underwriting. Some of that benefited integrated oil and gas corporations; the amount CIEL could directly attribute to petrochemical activities was $252 billion. (For context, New Zealand’s GDP is about $279 billion.)

Together, the reports suggest that large financial institutions are enabling a long-term viability strategy for the fossil fuel industry, one in which declining demand for oil and gas in energy systems and transportation is offset by a boom in petrochemicals. Indeed, in recent years oil majors including Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco have invested heavily in that field by, among other things, acquiring majority stakes in plastics and chemical companies and retrofitting oil refineries to accommodate a shift in production.

These investments reflect projections from the International Energy Agency that plastics, agrichemicals, and other petrochemical products will account for more than one-third of the growth in oil demand through 2030, and nearly half of it by 2050 — much more than other sectors like aviation and shipping. 

“Petrochemicals are not just a general growth area for fossil fuel companies,” said Ximena Banegas, global plastics and petrochemicals campaigner for CIEL and the author of the organization’s report. “They are a deliberate and pivotal strategy to ensure that we continue using fossil fuels.”

Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and the Japanese bank Mizuho Financial were among the top banks increasing financing for fossil fuel expansion last year, RAN’s analysis found. All 65 banks it analyzed boosted funding across the board for new oil and gas exploration, transportation, and refining. But the largest growth by far was for transportation — including new pipelines and capital-intensive LNG export terminals, which can create a decades-long commitment to using methane gas. 

“It’s overall disappointing,” said Allison Fajans-Turner, a senior energy finance campaigner for RAN. “Banks are unfortunately continuing to put profits over responsible societal action.” She noted that fossil fuel financing is becoming more concentrated among a smaller number of large banks, primarily those based in North America and Japan, as several European banks have begun to scale back funding.

RAN’s report didn’t look directly at financing for the production of petrochemicals, but some of its findings indicate growing interest in this portion of the industry. A significant increase in loans and underwriting for coal expansion, for example, is at least partially linked to a recent spike in the number of coal-to-chemical plants planned globally — mostly in China and India. Environmental advocates say these investments risk giving coal “a new lease of life.”

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Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Mizuho Financial are also among the top funders of petrochemical activities, according to CIEL’s report. The top 15 recipients of this funding include a mix of oil and gas, agriculture, plastics, and chemical companies, such as Exxon Mobil, Syngenta, LyondellBasell, and Dow.

Although CIEL didn’t compare each year between 2019 and 2025, it did notice a significant jump in petrochemical finance in 2024, the last full year examined. As evidence of the industry’s ongoing expansion, Banegas pointed to a recent report estimating that 127 new polyethylene projects will come online between 2025 and 2030. 

CIEL’s report also notes the petrochemical industry’s outsize contribution to toxic chemical pollution and global warming. As of 2020, petrochemicals’ annual greenhouse gas emissions amounted to 1.9 billion metric tons, more than twice that of aviation and shipping.

Fredric Bauer, a senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, has conducted similar research on petrochemical financing between 2010 and 2020. He said it’s not surprising to see continued interest in big plastics and chemicals projects, although it is perhaps counterintuitive. Despite warnings from industry analysts that the petrochemical industry is in “structural decline” — as shown by a large number of canceled or delayed projects, downgradings from multiple credit rating agencies, and the recent plastics and agrichemicals price shocks due to the war with Iran — companies keep investing because they often “do not respond to conventional market signals,” he said.

Rather than say, ‘“Oh, there’s oversupply, we should probably not invest in more supply or production capacity right now,’” their priority is “to ensure long-term markets for oil and gas.”

A coalition of advocacy groups including CIEL are calling on big banks to end their support for fossil fuel and petrochemical expansion. They’d like to see policies against financing companies building facilities to produce virgin plastics and fossil fuel-derived fertilizers. They also want banks to require clients to adopt credible transition plans to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which may include targets to reduce plastics use and phase out some pesticides. 

Fajans-Turner said the upward swing in fossil fuel financing reveals the weakness of voluntary sustainability commitments and reinforces the need for regulation. She suggested that, in addition to mandating more robust decarbonization plans from financial institutions, governments should require improved incorporation of climate risks when determining a borrower’s creditworthiness. “That would actually have many downstream consequences about who gets funding and who does not,” she said.

Joel Tickner, a professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and founder of an independent research initiative on sustainable chemicals, said it’s important that governments scale back loans and tax incentives supporting the fossil fuel industry, subsidies that amount to more than $1 trillion annually. Some of this money could help finance the development and commercialization of greener chemistry.

Fossil fuel companies “have received decades of subsidies and financial support,” Tickner said. “If we’re serious about sustainable materials, then we need to put our money where we want to go.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); 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 Banks are financing the fossil fuel industry’s next growth strategy on Jul 1, 2026.

Tomás Ayala leaps off the side of a small dinghy and into the dark swell of water. His arms slice through the waves like a cutlass as he dives deep into the bay off the southeastern coast of the Puerto Rican island of Culebra. Armed with a spear gun, Ayala swims even deeper as he scans the perimeter of the reef for his target. It doesn’t take long. Mere seconds later, a cloud of blood darkens the water around a large hogfish — proof enough that he found his mark. He snatches up his catch and makes for the surface. 

Back safely on his boat, Ayala drops the reef fish into a cooler, guns the motor, and heads for shore. It’s late Wednesday afternoon in mid-May. Ayala has been out since before dawn. The 50-year-old hails from a family of fishers — he started free diving for reef fish, laying lobster traps, and catching octopus when he was just eight years old, following in the footsteps of his brother and grandfather. Before long, he arrives at his destination — a concrete dock leading to a villa pesquera, a “fishing village” or “fish landing center,” a site with key infrastructure for Culebra’s community of traditional fisherfolk. Inside are cleaning stations, freezers, a saltwater tank for storing lobsters, a mélange of other equipment, and a bustling market. 

The villa pesquera provides the equipment dozens of local fishers need to sustain their work, and also a space to convene: Every week, the association that co-manages the space comes together for updates and to share their challenges and successes.

Ayala is greeted by Nicolás Gómez Andújar, a marine scientist whose dad is a local fisher, and they prepare the space for their next gathering. The members will discuss the federal permits they’re hoping to get for a native oyster farm, the effort to clear droves of abandoned fishing gear from Culebra’s seabed, and anything else someone may want to bring to the group. While they talk, they’ll eat a seafood mofongo, a popular shrimp-and-plantain dish.

Ayala and Pedro Gómez drive a boat off the coast of the island-municipality of Culebra. Nelson Vega Oliveras / 9 Millones

For decades, Culebra’s villa pesquera lay dormant, an abandoned facility shut down by the Puerto Rican government in 2002 because of political infighting, loss of government funding, and conflict between local fishers. In 2021, when Ayala and Gómez Andújar decided they wanted to resurrect it, dozens of their friends, neighbors, and local businesses donated time and labor to restore the dilapidated structure. It took roughly four years of organizing, fundraising, and securing permits for it all to come together. 

Last October, they formally reopened the fish market to much fanfare. Hundreds of people, on an island home to less than 2,000, showed up to help celebrate. They ate, laughed, and danced together. “We created what we dreamed of,” said Ayala. 

Hidden behind their success, however, lies a story of entrenched government divides and a growing need to rehaul how fishers are represented across the Puerto Rican government. The very survival of small-scale fishing and its unsung role in Puerto Rico’s food system depends on it — especially in the face of climate change, as rising temperatures make it harder and harder to fish for a living.

Ayala fishes for sardines following small-scale and artisanal practices. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

In the early to mid-1960s, amid a push to modernize commercial fishing boats and docking facilities, the Puerto Rican government formally established villas pesqueras, turning informal fishing spots into regulated, communal spaces. In 1979, Corporación para el Desarrollo y Administración de los Recursos Marinos, Lacustres, y Fluviales, or CODREMAR, the centralized agency tasked with handling all research, education, and conservation efforts related to commercial fishing, was born.

By the early ‘80s, the government began promoting the implementation of “fisher associations,” or organized local groups tasked with controlling their own seafood sales — partly to break up emerging seafood monopolies — and co-managing the villas pesqueras alongside municipalities. What happened next is not well documented. Research by University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez social anthropologist Manuel Valdés-Pizzini has found fishers still struggled to keep control of the landing centers because of political infighting and dwindling institutional support — the same dynamics that ultimately led to the closure of Culebra’s fishing village.

“There is a lot of politics in this,” said Valdés-Pizzini. “The landing center is just one piece of infrastructure in the whole fishery, culture, and society.”

In 1990, CODREMAR was dissolved after the Puerto Rican government deemed its oversight of the fishing sector inefficient, leaving its core responsibilities to be divvied up between two agencies — Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture and Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. Nowadays, experts and fishers alike say the governance of the industry in Puerto Rico is little more than a patchwork, piecemeal approach splintered across just about every layer of government. Villas pesqueras are typically co-managed by local fishing associations, independent fishers or businesses, municipalities, and the Department of Agriculture. Some of the equipment inside, such as storage lockers, is overseen by the Department of Agriculture, and fishers’ licenses, boat ramps, and other permitting approvals are largely regulated by the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. 

The list of government stakeholders and regulators also includes the Puerto Rican Department of Economic Development and Commerce, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Caribbean Fishery Management Council, the Puerto Rico State Historic Preservation Office, and the Puerto Rico Planning Board, among others. For the fishers who are trying to adapt to global warming, such as those in Culebra, the red tape just gets in the way.

A forthcoming analysis by The Nature Conservancy Puerto Rico, previewed exclusively by Grist and 9 Millones, found that the burdens of this existing regulatory process as it relates to marine aquaculture “can be disproportionately high for small-scale producers.” Permits and authorizations are not only notoriously unwieldy for small fishers, but can also cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, according to the report. For some, as in the case of traditional shellfish farmers, the upfront and operating costs can be far more than what their peers in other parts of the U.S. pay.

Puerto Rico’s fishing sector also differs from the rest of the U.S. in that it’s primarily made up of small-scale, artisanal fishers rather than industrial-scale operations. Fisheries account for a marginal slice of the archipelago’s economy. Commercial fishing falls within Puerto Rico’s agriculture, forestry, and fishing sector, which accounted for just 0.69 percent of Puerto Rico’s gross domestic product in 2024. Yet in the most vulnerable island communities, where food is almost exclusively imported, poverty rates are more than double the national U.S. average, and resources are scarce, the expansion of local fishing could serve as the cornerstone of long-term food security and sovereignty. 

A recent report found that just 12 villas pesqueras contribute more than $3 million every year to Puerto Rico’s economy. And that contribution is poised to grow, as more fishers advocate for a streamlined permitting system, better industry and cultural valuations for small-scale operators, and a centralized regulatory landscape overseen by one government office. Without those changes, they face an uncertain future. 

“Fishers are embedded in this complex web with the Department of Agriculture and Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. These different governmental institutions, they don’t seem to be talking to each other. There’s a disconnection,” said Luis Alexis Rodríguez Cruz, a food systems researcher and science communicator who works with the Caribbean Agroecology Institute on fisheries. “In Spanish we say, ‘Entre la espada y la pared’ — between the sword and the wall. It’s like, you want to do something, because this agency is requiring you to do [it], often this other agency is not requiring it, or somewhat counters it.”

An aerial view of the fishing village in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, which includes an area for processing the catch of the day and a fish market. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

Even as distrust between fishers and the government deepens, the effects of climate change are pushing fishers toward that very system for relief. 

Rising seas driven by a warming planet have continued to encroach upon shorelines, wetlands, and coastal infrastructure throughout Puerto Rico. Erosion has been identified in more than a third of Puerto Rico’s beaches. The situation is so dire that in 2023, the Puerto Rican government declared a state of emergency over the issue, a move that included earmarking $105 million in federal funds to implement nearly two dozen measures to minimize the effects. Late last month, Puerto Rico’s Governor Jenniffer González-Colón declared yet another state of emergency over coastal erosion. On May 27, days before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, González-Colón signed an executive order that described the “critical condition” of erosion as only having “accelerated” because of rising sea levels, storm surges, atmospheric phenomena, and the landscape vulnerability of several Puerto Rican coastal communities. 

Since 1901, the average ocean temperature around Puerto Rico has increased by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This has scrambled the region’s marine biodiversity — killing off coral reefs and seagrass, shifting which species are more abundant, and affecting the quality of the catch. But the surging frequency of intensified hurricanes hitting the Caribbean remains the biggest climate stressor for Puerto Rico’s fishing sector. 

In 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico as a Category 5 storm, devastating the archipelago and plunging parts of it into close to a year without power. The hurricane was also devastating for small fisheries, which lost an estimated $17.8 million in damaged gear, boats, and shoreside infrastructure, including villas pesqueras. Following the storm, the Puerto Rican government set out to rebuild and reconstruct the fishing hubs with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA, but quickly ran into issues. Aid was repeatedly delayed. Some fisherfolk didn’t receive any federal support for years and were forced to operate in makeshift markets. Others rebuilt, bit by bit, on their own dime. 

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Although no official record of how many structures were lost to the storm currently exists, a 2026 survey by the nonprofit Conservación ConCiencia found that 41 villas pesqueras are actively selling seafood, down from approximately 63 in the ‘80s, and the conditions of those facilities vary widely. The number of total active villages is unknown to the Puerto Rican government. The Department of Natural and Environmental Resources told Grist in an email that the agency currently has 1,646 “bonafide and licensed fishermen on record.” However, there tends to be discrepancies between the number of fishers licensed and those that show up in government data captured by multiple agencies.  

In the small beach town of Ceiba, which hugs the eastern tip of Puerto Rico’s mainland, Beverly Román Figueroa and her partner Ernesto Correa Torres have been fighting battle after battle with local authorities over their villa pesquera — battles that began when Maria hit. 

After the storm severely damaged Ceiba’s fishing hub, Román Figueroa says they were told by the mayor that the municipality had been allocated a little over $124,000 of Federal Emergency Management Agency aid to pay for the repairs. But when she and Correa Torres would visit the site — even as late as 2023, after a lengthy contract dispute over the villa pesquera’s management — they found little evidence that any work had been done. Photos and videos taken in March of 2023 show destroyed pipes and waterlogged floors and walls — a largely unusable space. 

“What they handed me was a neglected property,” said Correa Torres in Spanish. “This isn’t mine; this belongs to the people of Puerto Rico and to the fishermen.”

In Puerto Rico, fishing is a trade passed down through generations. Nelson Vega Oliveras / 9 Millones

For months, their requests for repairs went unanswered by local and federal officials. (The Department of Agriculture sent representatives at one point to conduct an on-site inspection, Román Figueroa says, but the visit resulted in “no real action.”) Tired of waiting and needing to generate income, the duo invested more than $60,000 of their own money into fixing up the villa pesquera. They even collaborated with Conservación ConCiencia and Hispanic Federation to get solar panels installed on the fish market for cleaner, cheaper power. 

Three years later, the structure and its facilities — storage lockers, the boat ramp, and the floating dock — are always accessible to local fishers. Its new restaurant, Pescaderia y Restaurante ANSI, is open four days a week. Román Figueroa whips up piping hot meals like sancocho de tiburón, a traditional stew made from the shark that Correa Torres hauls in from the sea. He is president of ANSI, the company made up of local fishers who manage the villa; she, the secretary and resident cook. Their children also help out — their daughter works in the market, and their son is also a fisher. 

“It was a disaster … but little by little, we got it back up and running,” said Román Figueroa in Spanish. The government, she says, had no part in that. “Despite everything we have done at the villa, we have worked alone.”

A sign reads, “Warning, ramp for exclusive use by commercial fishers” in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

Ariam Torres Cordero, an environmental planner and assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, has visited at least 15 of the archipelago’s villas pesqueras in the last two years to begin mapping the current state of the fishing industry. Together with Valdés-Pizzini, he is setting out to change the fact that the government has no official account of the current conditions of the fishing hubs in Puerto Rico. “You can see, already, the deterioration, even despite the fact that they were reconstructed less than eight years ago. You can already see the impacts of coastal erosion,” said Torres Cordero. 

Puerto Rico’s governance of the sector has made fishers more vulnerable to these threats — not less. This is most apparent in the bungled rebuilding of the dozens of villas pesqueras destroyed by Maria. Fisher communities across the archipelago still report being unable to access federal aid to repair storm-ravaged facilities and equipment. 

An audit published in January 2025 by the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Commerce found that Puerto Rico’s government had distributed only around 7 percent of the $11.4 million in disaster assistance funds earmarked for fisheries since April 2020 and had completed just 4 of 17 designated restoration projects. 

Puerto Rico Secretary of the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources Waldemar Quiles Pérez did not address Grist and 9 Millones’ requests for clarification on the severe delays revealed in the audit or provide updates on the agency’s aid disbursement. “All of the fishing spaces around the Island are either privately owned or are administer[ed] by the Department of Agriculture,” Quiles Pérez said in a written statement. 

Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Not only was the allocation of the aid itself riddled with delays and discrepancies, Torres Cordero pointed out, but what little money the federal government distributed for post-disaster rebuilding of villas pesqueras wasn’t used to rebuild in a way that accounts for the effects of climate change on fishing infrastructure. That much is obvious in how many of the facilities are already falling apart. By building back the structures just as they were designed decades ago, “we’re bound for another situation where we’re going to end up with most of this infrastructure being basically destroyed,” said Torres Cordero. “It’s not sustainable just to keep rebuilding the same.” 

With this in mind, he is trying to figure out how to minimize the risk of future storm and erosion damage while still allowing the fishing facilities to remain near the sea. The answer, he believes, lies in reimagining parts of the villa pesquera design itself to be both more durable and, where it makes the most sense, even mobile. 

Torres Cordero himself is recruiting the help of architecture, landscape, and social work students to come up with a new blueprint for a more “climate-proof” structure. “We need to decide, ‘What things do we need permanently placed in a location? And then what things should be mobile?’ And then design around that,” he said. 

A villa pesquera isn’t a simple building, however. The freezers and areas where fish are cleaned and prepared, for example, often require heavy equipment that would be too complex to move ahead of a storm. On the other hand, a fish market or dock could be designed to be mobile. (The Puerto Rican government, for its part, did try to do some version of this following Hurricane Maria by installing temporary floating docks in a handful of locations, which Torres Cordero says have proven not to be very durable or functional.) 

The pilot project is focused on the island of Vieques, another of Puerto Rico’s smaller island municipalities home to many traditional fishers. The work is in its infancy  — it only started coming together last summer – and Torres Cordero hasn’t yet secured the funding and capacity needed to move it forward. Several outside factors have also contributed to grounding the project before it’s really begun. In September, the fishers they were just beginning to collaborate with in Vieques were suddenly faced with the deployment of U.S. troops to the island, which the military considered a strategic position in its tensions with Venezuela. Vieques still bears the lasting environmental toll of decades of bombing by the U.S. Navy, which used much of the island for military practice. That included the navy’s regular disposal of unknown contaminants in the waters surrounding Vieques, polluting its fishing stock and marine ecosystems. Then, in April, students at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras went on strike, calling for the resignation of the university president, Zayira Jordán Conde, over her controversial decisions having to do with widespread research and staffing cuts.

“All of that fell apart,” said Torres Cordero. “Right now, we are playing the waiting game.” 

As the ocean temperature rises, fishers are forced to go to deeper waters. Nelson Vega Oliveras/9 Millones

The fishers in Culebra are as ready as they can be for the next calamitous storm. That’s thanks to the more than two dozen solar panels lining the villa pesquera’s roof, the hurricane-proof windows found throughout the blue-and-white building, and a rainwater harvesting system ensuring a backup water supply. These are small but mighty ways fisherfolk there have already sought to better fortify themselves against the many climate-borne stressors assailing their sector. In doing so, they’ve also bolstered their island community’s defenses against food insecurity when the next hurricane or flood tears through Puerto Rico. 

Following Maria, Puerto Rico’s fishers mobilized to feed their neighbors. In Culebra, Ayala remembers how, after the hurricane left the island without electricity for half a year, the local seafood supply chain collapsed entirely. To meet the need, as fishers struggled with damaged gear and lack of power, and the community waited on external food aid that just didn’t come, Ayala organized an informal system. He collected fish from other fishermen, set up a makeshift area to clean the catch, and knocked on doors to sell directly to people. The grassroots effort underscored the need for a more resilient system, catalyzing the formation of the fishing association and restoration of their home base — the villa pesquera. 

Even though fishing only makes up a marginal slice of Puerto Rico’s economy, it’s clear that Culebra is better for the work that Ayala and Gómez Andújar are doing. For a community where about a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, a primary indicator of food insecurity, building a robust local supply chain and bolstering their resilience against environmental degradation isn’t merely an aspiration, but a survival strategy. So in 2020, Gómez Andújar and local environmental scientist Megan Considine set out to create another pillar of that vision — the only permitted oyster farm in Puerto Rico. 

“Climate change is, of course, this unpredictable threat. And it’s chronic, and it’s there,” Gómez Andújar said. “To a certain extent, we need to flow with it. We need to adapt. We need to mitigate.” 

Culebra fishers are prepared for an incoming storm and regular power outages in part by the more than two dozen solar panels installed on the roof of the villa pesquera.
Nelson Vega Oliveras / 9 Millones

Though the oyster farm is currently grant-funded, with only research permits, local fishers like Ayala view farming native shellfish as a way to spark future generations’ interest in careers in fishing and diversify the seafood supply chain operating out of Culebra’s villa pesquera. But in order to keep it running through the next few years, they’ll need to commercialize the farm. Everything was moving in the right direction — until late last month. 

Much of their farm’s federal compliance suddenly hinged on an Army Corps of Engineers permit at risk of expiring. Rather than chance violations, they made the difficult decision to, at least temporarily, shut down roughly half of their operations while awaiting that clearance. “It’s demoralizing,” said Gómez Andújar. “The main message, really, is we’re doing the best we can to do everything right, and it’s still very, very, very hard.” 

After their yearslong effort to restore Culebra’s fishing village, Gómez Andújar and Ayala are buried under layers of bureaucracy, yet again. The road ahead looks much like the road behind. 

“We show people how to live from the ocean, how to grow food from the ocean,” says Ayala. Fishing represents so much more to Ayala than just a job — it’s the foundation of Puerto Rico’s food-sovereign, climate-resilient future. “And the government is the biggest barrier.”

Filmmaker Nelson Vega Oliveras contributed reporting. 9 Millones’ Laura M. Quintero contributed editing.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For Puerto Rico’s fishers, climate change isn’t the only challenge — being left to adapt alone is another on Jun 30, 2026.

No city dealing with a lot of lead pipes spends as much as Chicago does to replace them. 

With more than 400,000 lead water service lines, Chicago has the largest known inventory of lead pipes of any city in the country. Officials say replacing each one costs about $31,000 on average — more than six times the Environmental Protection Agency’s national estimate of $4,700 a line.

Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News surveyed other cities with the most lead service lines in the country — including Detroit, Milwaukee, and New York — about the cost of fully replacing a lead service line. The 18 that responded provided averages between $6,000 and $25,000, with most less than half of Chicago’s figure. Engineering firm CDM Smith, which works with cities across the country, pegs the national average at $12,500 per line. 

Now, with a federal mandate to remove every lead pipe within roughly 20 years, Chicago is facing a daunting timeline and an astronomical price tag. Replacing the city’s inventory at the current rate will cost more than $12 billion. 

“It is absurd,” said Cyndi Roper, a senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s safe water initiative. “You can’t play victim to your own policies. … You actually can make changes to bring the cost down.”

A review over seven months of hundreds of pages of program documents and contracts, plus dozens of interviews with city officials, policy experts, contractors, and homeowners, found several key contributors. The most significant include inefficient early contracts, cumbersome permitting requirements, and the city’s reliance on one-off replacements rather than undertaking whole blocks at once.

A glaring lack of clarity from the Department of Water Management, which oversees the city’s replacement program, has also made it difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons for the high cost. Its officials were unable to provide Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News with consistent figures for replacement costs and the number of lines replaced, or make clear whether the water department is tracking these costs systematically.

“It seems like the story here is how hard you have to work to get information that’s needed in order to figure out why the costs are so high,” Roper added.

More in this series

• Chicago residents risk daily lead exposure from toxic pipes. Replacing them will take decades.
• Chicago was supposed to warn residents about toxic lead pipes last year. Most still have no idea.
• Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation. We mapped them all.

A spokesperson for Mayor Brandon Johnson said in an emailed statement that he is committed to accelerating replacements and minimizing the burden to residents, but did not respond to specific questions about the city’s unusually high costs. 

“The Johnson administration is working across departments in coordination with local, state, and federal partners to accelerate replacements, streamline processes, and maximize every available dollar so more residents can access safe, reliable drinking water,” said the statement. 

Officials with the water department said they see some room to bring expenses down as work ramps up. But they’ve also disagreed with outside experts who say Chicago’s high costs are unreasonable, and they don’t appear to be treating the drastic cost differential with other cities as a high priority to address.

“There’s a lot of people that claim they know lead service line replacement,” said a senior official with the water department, who spoke with Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News on the condition of not being named. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” 

Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who has been working to secure federal funding for lead service line replacements across the state, said she wasn’t aware of the cost discrepancy but hoped the city would be transparent with the public about why costs are so high. 

“Cities just need to get their act together and get this done, and we’ve been slow to do this in Chicago,” Duckworth said. “Other cities have moved much faster than us.”

Replacing pipes on an entire block

Chicago replaces lead service lines through several programs, including emergency repairs, capital improvement projects, and equity initiatives targeting low-income neighborhoods and daycares.

It also replaces entire blocks of lead pipes at once. But that program accounted for just 3 percent of the approximately 15,000 lines swapped out between 2021 and the end of 2025, according to analysis of city replacement data by Grist, WBEZ, and Inside Climate News. Instead, nearly all of those lines were fixed piecemeal, mostly when crews were sent out to fix leaks and breaks. 

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var(--color-secondary); font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0; display: inline-block; } .lead-replacements__credit { color: var(--color-secondary); font-size: 12px; margin-top: 3px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; display: inline-block; } .lead-replacements__logos { display: flex; align-items: center; gap: 12px; margin-left: auto; padding-right: 20px; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } .lead-replacements__logo { height: 20px; width: auto; } Replacements under the breaks and leaks program have ramped up faster than other city initiatives Monthly lead service line replacements by program, 2021–25 Source: City of Chicago DWM Cam Rodriguez / WBEZ / Amy Qin / Clayton Aldern / Grist (function() { const INIT_KEY = '__grist_lead_replacements_initialized__'; if (window[INIT_KEY]) { return; } window[INIT_KEY] = true; const COLORS = { TEXT: 'var(--color-primary)', TURQUOISE: 'var(--color-turquoise)', ORANGE: 'var(--color-orange)', FUCHSIA: 'var(--color-fuchsia)', BLUEY: 'var(--color-bluey)', 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Initiated', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2022-02', program: 'Equity', replacements: 4 }, { month: '2022-02', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2022-03', program: 'Equity', replacements: 23 }, { month: '2022-03', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2022-04', program: 'Equity', replacements: 15 }, { month: '2022-04', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 2 }, { month: '2022-05', program: 'Equity', replacements: 25 }, { month: '2022-06', program: 'Equity', replacements: 28 }, { month: '2022-06', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 3 }, { month: '2022-07', program: 'Equity', replacements: 17 }, { month: '2022-07', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2022-08', program: 'Equity', replacements: 18 }, { month: '2022-08', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 3 }, { month: '2022-09', program: 'Equity', replacements: 26 }, { month: '2022-09', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2022-10', program: 'Equity', replacements: 27 }, { month: '2022-10', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2022-11', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 18 }, { month: '2022-11', program: 'Equity', replacements: 40 }, { month: '2022-11', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 2 }, { month: '2022-12', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 23 }, { month: '2022-12', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 2 }, { month: '2022-12', program: 'Equity', replacements: 49 }, { month: '2022-12', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 8 }, { month: '2023-01', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 51 }, { month: '2023-01', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2023-01', program: 'Equity', replacements: 55 }, { month: '2023-01', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 13 }, { month: '2023-02', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 72 }, { month: '2023-02', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2023-02', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2023-02', program: 'Equity', replacements: 60 }, { month: '2023-02', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 8 }, { month: '2023-03', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 142 }, { month: '2023-03', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 23 }, { month: '2023-03', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 7 }, { month: '2023-03', program: 'Equity', replacements: 86 }, { month: '2023-03', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 13 }, { month: '2023-04', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2023-04', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 157 }, { month: '2023-04', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 30 }, { month: '2023-04', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 8 }, { month: '2023-04', program: 'Equity', replacements: 80 }, { month: '2023-04', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 30 }, { month: '2023-05', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 278 }, { month: '2023-05', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 68 }, { month: '2023-05', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 9 }, { month: '2023-05', program: 'Equity', replacements: 90 }, { month: '2023-05', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 26 }, { month: '2023-06', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 214 }, { month: '2023-06', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 74 }, { month: '2023-06', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 14 }, { month: '2023-06', program: 'Equity', replacements: 110 }, { month: '2023-06', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 25 }, { month: '2023-07', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 175 }, { month: '2023-07', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 40 }, { month: '2023-07', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 13 }, { month: '2023-07', program: 'Equity', replacements: 102 }, { month: '2023-07', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 42 }, { month: '2023-08', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2023-08', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 273 }, { month: '2023-08', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 75 }, { month: '2023-08', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 10 }, { month: '2023-08', program: 'Equity', replacements: 131 }, { month: '2023-08', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 44 }, { month: '2023-09', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 166 }, { month: '2023-09', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 11 }, { month: '2023-09', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 8 }, { month: '2023-09', program: 'Equity', replacements: 92 }, { month: '2023-09', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 38 }, { month: '2023-10', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 81 }, { month: '2023-10', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 23 }, { month: '2023-10', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 10 }, { month: '2023-10', program: 'Equity', replacements: 92 }, { month: '2023-10', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 39 }, { month: '2023-11', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 181 }, { month: '2023-11', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 4 }, { month: '2023-11', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 14 }, { month: '2023-11', program: 'Equity', replacements: 44 }, { month: '2023-11', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 27 }, { month: '2023-12', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2023-12', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 297 }, { month: '2023-12', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 2 }, { month: '2023-12', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 18 }, { month: '2023-12', program: 'Equity', replacements: 22 }, { month: '2023-12', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 29 }, { month: '2024-01', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 143 }, { month: '2024-01', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 12 }, { month: '2024-01', program: 'Equity', replacements: 9 }, { month: '2024-01', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 50 }, { month: '2024-02', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 228 }, { month: '2024-02', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 18 }, { month: '2024-02', program: 'Equity', replacements: 21 }, { month: '2024-02', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 17 }, { month: '2024-03', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 249 }, { month: '2024-03', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 19 }, { month: '2024-03', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 16 }, { month: '2024-03', program: 'Equity', replacements: 16 }, { month: '2024-03', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 45 }, { month: '2024-04', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 388 }, { month: '2024-04', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 30 }, { month: '2024-04', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 4 }, { month: '2024-04', program: 'Equity', replacements: 21 }, { month: '2024-04', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 36 }, { month: '2024-05', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 221 }, { month: '2024-05', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 27 }, { month: '2024-05', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2024-05', program: 'Equity', replacements: 20 }, { month: '2024-05', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 36 }, { month: '2024-06', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 259 }, { month: '2024-06', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 17 }, { month: '2024-06', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 3 }, { month: '2024-06', program: 'Equity', replacements: 18 }, { month: '2024-06', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 28 }, { month: '2024-07', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2024-07', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 254 }, { month: '2024-07', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 42 }, { month: '2024-07', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 6 }, { month: '2024-07', program: 'Equity', replacements: 22 }, { month: '2024-07', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 43 }, { month: '2024-08', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 265 }, { month: '2024-08', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 113 }, { month: '2024-08', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 13 }, { month: '2024-08', program: 'Equity', replacements: 30 }, { month: '2024-08', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 33 }, { month: '2024-09', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 2 }, { month: '2024-09', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 282 }, { month: '2024-09', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 47 }, { month: '2024-09', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 31 }, { month: '2024-09', program: 'Equity', replacements: 73 }, { month: '2024-09', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 44 }, { month: '2024-10', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 351 }, { month: '2024-10', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 57 }, { month: '2024-10', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 10 }, { month: '2024-10', program: 'Equity', replacements: 96 }, { month: '2024-10', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 34 }, { month: '2024-11', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 1 }, { month: '2024-11', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 332 }, { month: '2024-11', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 33 }, { month: '2024-11', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 19 }, { month: '2024-11', program: 'Equity', replacements: 101 }, { month: '2024-11', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 32 }, { month: '2024-12', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 26 }, { month: '2024-12', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 392 }, { month: '2024-12', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 7 }, { month: '2024-12', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 29 }, { month: '2024-12', program: 'Equity', replacements: 103 }, { month: '2024-12', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 10 }, { month: '2025-01', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 3 }, { month: '2025-01', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 234 }, { month: '2025-01', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 47 }, { month: '2025-01', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2025-01', program: 'Equity', replacements: 17 }, { month: '2025-01', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 24 }, { month: '2025-02', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 21 }, { month: '2025-02', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 291 }, { month: '2025-02', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 39 }, { month: '2025-02', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2025-02', program: 'Equity', replacements: 37 }, { month: '2025-02', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 31 }, { month: '2025-03', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 70 }, { month: '2025-03', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 256 }, { month: '2025-03', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 82 }, { month: '2025-03', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 2 }, { month: '2025-03', program: 'Equity', replacements: 69 }, { month: '2025-03', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 39 }, { month: '2025-04', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 54 }, { month: '2025-04', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 472 }, { month: '2025-04', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 125 }, { month: '2025-04', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 10 }, { month: '2025-04', program: 'Equity', replacements: 29 }, { month: '2025-04', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 33 }, { month: '2025-05', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 3 }, { month: '2025-05', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 351 }, { month: '2025-05', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 90 }, { month: '2025-05', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 13 }, { month: '2025-05', program: 'Equity', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2025-06', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2025-06', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 231 }, { month: '2025-06', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 35 }, { month: '2025-06', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 11 }, { month: '2025-06', program: 'Equity', replacements: 3 }, { month: '2025-06', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 3 }, { month: '2025-07', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 12 }, { month: '2025-07', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 463 }, { month: '2025-07', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 10 }, { month: '2025-07', program: 'Equity', replacements: 16 }, { month: '2025-07', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 46 }, { month: '2025-08', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 29 }, { month: '2025-08', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 136 }, { month: '2025-08', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 21 }, { month: '2025-08', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 16 }, { month: '2025-08', program: 'Equity', replacements: 32 }, { month: '2025-08', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 5 }, { month: '2025-09', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 65 }, { month: '2025-09', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 273 }, { month: '2025-09', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 163 }, { month: '2025-09', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 27 }, { month: '2025-09', program: 'Equity', replacements: 33 }, { month: '2025-09', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 47 }, { month: '2025-10', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 76 }, { month: '2025-10', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 331 }, { month: '2025-10', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 165 }, { month: '2025-10', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 25 }, { month: '2025-10', program: 'Equity', replacements: 43 }, { month: '2025-10', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 35 }, { month: '2025-11', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 72 }, { month: '2025-11', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 277 }, { month: '2025-11', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 98 }, { month: '2025-11', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 11 }, { month: '2025-11', program: 'Equity', replacements: 39 }, { month: '2025-11', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 26 }, { month: '2025-12', program: 'Block Level LSLR', replacements: 68 }, { month: '2025-12', program: 'Breaks and Leaks', replacements: 242 }, { month: '2025-12', program: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', replacements: 181 }, { month: '2025-12', program: 'Daycare', replacements: 15 }, { month: '2025-12', program: 'Equity', replacements: 37 }, { month: '2025-12', program: 'Homeowner Initiated', replacements: 21 } ]; // Series config: the single source of truth for which programs to plot, their // legend labels, and their colors. `key` must match the `program` value in the // embedded rawData above; `label` is what shows in the legend. To rename a legend // entry, change its `label` here only — you do NOT need to touch the embedded data. const series = [ { key: 'Breaks and Leaks', label: 'Breaks and leaks', color: COLORS.TURQUOISE }, { key: 'CIP Sewer and Water Main', label: 'Sewer and water main', color: COLORS.ORANGE }, { key: 'Equity', label: 'Equity', color: COLORS.FUCHSIA }, { key: 'Homeowner Initiated', label: 'Homeowner-initiated', color: COLORS.BLUEY }, { key: 'Block Level LSLR', label: 'Block-level', color: COLORS.EARTH }, { key: 'Daycare', label: 'Daycare', color: COLORS.RED }, ]; const programs = series.map(s => s.key); const colors = series.map(s => s.color); const labelByKey = Object.fromEntries(series.map(s => [s.key, s.label])); const dataByProgram = programs.map(program => { const programData = rawData .filter(d => d.program === program) .map(d => ({ date: new Date(d.month + '-01'), replacements: +d.replacements })) .sort((a, b) => a.date - b.date); return { program, data: programData }; }); const margin = { top: 20, right: 20, bottom: 50, left: window.innerWidth < 600 ? 35 : 45 }; function renderChart() { svg.selectAll('*').remove(); legend.selectAll('*').remove(); const node = svg.node(); const styleWidth = parseInt(svg.style('width')); const containerWidth = node ? node.getBoundingClientRect().width : (isNaN(styleWidth) ? 600 : styleWidth); const width = containerWidth - margin.left - margin.right; const height = initialSvgHeight - margin.top - margin.bottom; const x = d3.scaleTime().range([0, width]); const y = d3.scaleLinear().range([height, 0]); const line = d3.line() .curve(d3.curveMonotoneX) .x(d => x(d.date)) .y(d => y(d.replacements)); const allDates = rawData.map(d => new Date(d.month + '-01')); const maxReplacements = d3.max(rawData, d => d.replacements); x.domain(d3.extent(allDates)); y.domain([0, maxReplacements]); svg.attr('height', initialSvgHeight); svg.append('g') .attr('class', 'axis-grid') .attr('transform', `translate(${margin.left},${height + margin.top})`) .call(d3.axisBottom(x).ticks(d3.timeMonth.every(6)).tickSize(-height).tickFormat('')); svg.append('g') .attr('class', 'axis-grid') .attr('transform', `translate(${margin.left},${margin.top})`) .call(d3.axisLeft(y).ticks(5).tickSize(-width).tickFormat('')); const xAxis = g => g .attr('transform', `translate(${margin.left},${height + margin.top})`) .call(d3.axisBottom(x).ticks(d3.timeMonth.every(6)).tickFormat(d3.timeFormat('%b \'%y'))) .selectAll('text') .attr('class', 'lead-replacements__axis-label') .style('fill', COLORS.TEXT) .style('text-anchor', 'end') .attr('transform', 'rotate(-45)'); const yAxis = g => g .attr('transform', `translate(${margin.left},${margin.top})`) .call(d3.axisLeft(y).ticks(5).tickFormat(d => formatCompactWithB(d))) .selectAll('text') .attr('class', 'lead-replacements__axis-label') .style('fill', COLORS.TEXT); svg.append('g').call(xAxis); svg.append('g').call(yAxis); const chart = svg.append('g').attr('transform', `translate(${margin.left},${margin.top})`); const linePairs = dataByProgram.map((programData, i) => { if (programData.data.length > 0) { const whiteLine = chart.append('path') .datum(programData.data) .attr('class', 'line') .attr('d', line) .style('stroke', 'white') .style('stroke-width', 5.5) .style('opacity', 1) .style('stroke-linecap', 'round') .style('stroke-linejoin', 'round'); const coloredLine = chart.append('path') .datum(programData.data) .attr('class', 'line') .attr('d', line) .style('stroke', colors[i]) .style('stroke-width', 3.5) .style('opacity', 1) .style('transition', 'opacity 0.2s ease') .style('stroke-linecap', 'round') .style('stroke-linejoin', 'round'); return { white: whiteLine, colored: coloredLine }; } return null; }).filter(d => d !== null); const legendItems = legend.selectAll('.legend-item') .data(dataByProgram.filter(d => d.data.length > 0)) .enter() .append('div') .attr('class', 'legend-item') .on('mouseover', function(event, d) { const programIndex = programs.indexOf(d.program); linePairs.forEach((pair, i) => { if (i === programIndex) { pair.white.node().parentNode.appendChild(pair.white.node()); pair.colored.node().parentNode.appendChild(pair.colored.node()); pair.white.style('opacity', 1); pair.colored.style('opacity', 1); } else { pair.white.style('opacity', 0.3); pair.colored.style('opacity', 0.3); } }); }) .on('mouseout', function(event, d) { linePairs.forEach(pair => { pair.white.style('opacity', 1); pair.colored.style('opacity', 1); }); }); legendItems.append('div') .attr('class', 'legend-color') .style('background-color', d => colors[programs.indexOf(d.program)]); legendItems.append('span') .text(d => labelByKey[d.program] ? labelByKey[d.program] : d.program); } if (document.readyState === 'loading') { document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', renderChart); } else { renderChart(); } window.addEventListener('resize', renderChart); })();

Both city officials and experts agree that replacing lead pipes a full block at a time is cheaper. In Milwaukee, the per-line cost to replace a full neighborhood is nearly $2,000 less than a one-off replacement. Chicago officials say they want to ramp up blockwide replacements, but there have been legal and logistical barriers to expanding that program. 

In Illinois, property owners control half the service line, and the municipality is responsible for the other. State law forbids partial line replacement because the process can flush more lead into drinking water, and municipalities willing to replace private lines must first get the property owners’ permission. That’s harder and more time-consuming than it may seem, a key reason for the city’s low number of block replacements, according to officials.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers introduced a new bill at the water department’s request to fix that, granting city plumbers access to private lines without the owner’s permission. It passed in May and now awaits Governor JB Pritzker’s signature.

“We need to accelerate, as much as humanly possible, this process,” said state Senator Ram Villivalam of Chicago, a co-sponsor of the bill. 

A Chicago resident holds a lead water test kit from the city. Anthony Vazquez / Chicago Sun-Times

Still, it’s not clear how much block-level replacements will actually decrease Chicago’s costs. Water department officials pegged the average per-line cost for block-level work, which they have said is their cheapest program, at approximately $34,000, and the average for one-off replacements at $39,000. Both figures are well above the $31,000 overall average that department officials have cited.

Asked to explain how that could be, the water department did not respond. In her last email to the news organizations in May, water department spokesperson Megan Vidis said she would not answer any more questions on the topic.

The toll on homeowners

Any lead pipe a property owner replaces on their own is one the city doesn’t have to pay for. But some homeowners are finding that far harder than they imagined — in part because of the city’s prohibitively expensive and complex permitting process. 

Craig Hines and his wife, homeowners in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood, discovered they had a lead service line last summer when they received a letter from the city. They were immediately alarmed. They cook regularly for young nieces and nephews, and Hines knows there’s no safe level of lead exposure.

They called 14 plumbers looking for a quote. Some refused to take them on or seemed to be trying to dissuade them from doing the work altogether, saying the job would be too expensive. One preliminary quote totaled $25,000. They were told permits alone could cost between $5,000 and $7,000.

“These fees seem so exorbitant when it’s like, this was a city screw-up,” Hines said, referring to Chicago’s history of installing lead lines long after the health consequences came to light. “I just cannot believe that the permitting fees are so high to help fix a problem that the city created.”

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Replacing a single line can require permits from the water and transportation departments as well as inspection-related charges, according to the city’s Department of Buildings. The fees vary based on the type of street and size of pipe.

The water department said it waives all its permit fees when the city pays for replacements. But it’s not so simple when property owners want to shoulder the cost. Some qualify for a city program waiving up to $5,000 in fees; others don’t. Water department officials could not provide an average cost for permits, saying it varies by project site. 

After more than six months of research, including contacting their alderman, district commissioner, and multiple city departments to track down answers about costs, Hines and his wife finally settled on a plumber who knew how to navigate the city’s permit waivers. He gave them a quote of $22,000 for the job, which he said will include permits. They hope their replacement will take place in July.

Several miles south, Ryan Wilson and his wife, Alaina Harkness, said they didn’t qualify for the fee waiver. They paid nearly $25,000 to replace the lead line at their Hyde Park home last year, but because they also upsized their service line while replacing it, they weren’t eligible for the waiver.

Ryan Wilson and Alaina Harkness stand next to their new water meter that was placed during the replacement of the lead pipes in their Hyde Park home. Anthony Vazquez / Chicago Sun-Times

Wilson has worked in urban planning for decades, and even so, said he found navigating the city’s permitting requirements extremely confusing. They never were able to figure out how much of their final bill was allotted to permits. If Chicago wants to improve citywide replacement efforts, Wilson said, improving the permitting process should be high on the list.

“There’s not a single person to talk to about this,” he said.

Inefficient contracts and funding woes 

Water department officials pointed to two key reasons for the high costs. First, they said that the city lacked a firm grasp of costs when launching its replacement program in 2021 and that its first round of contracts was inefficient. The early contracts also bundled jobs poorly, tasking contractors with work outside their specialization, like having plumbers work on restoration or outreach.

“Early on, the issue was … a lot of unknowns in our contracts,” the water department’s deputy commissioner, Michael Grillo, said at a webinar last fall. “We are trying to be smarter with our contracts that go out, be more specific, eliminate those unknowns.”

Plumbing companies overbid to cover worst-case scenarios in those early contracts, he said. The water department’s Vidis confirmed via email that the city has implemented four new contracts this year, focused on improving equitable access for small businesses to replace lead service lines, but said the goal of those contracts was not to reduce per-line prices. 

Grillo also blamed labor costs for part of the city’s high price tag. But that explanation doesn’t appear to pan out. 

The base prevailing wage for a union plumber in the Chicago area is $99.52 per hour. By contrast, it’s about $97 in Minneapolis and roughly $121 in New York City, both of which replace their lead pipes for less than half of Chicago’s costs.  

“I have a hard time believing that the prevailing wage would be the cost factor,” said Betony Jones, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and former director of energy jobs under the Biden administration.

The city says a lack of robust, flexible funding is compounding the problem. Chicago has to cobble together funding from a patchwork of local and federal sources in the form of grants and low-interest loans, which bring red tape and restrictions.

The Biden-era Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act delivered a historic $15 billion for lead pipe removal, with Illinois getting about $1.2 billion, according to Duckworth’s office. This month, Duckworth’s office announced a separate $22 million federal grant earmarked for Chicago’s majority-Black Austin neighborhood — where 92 percent of service lines require replacement, according to last year’s lead service line inventory. At Chicago’s price point, the state estimates that $22 million will only replace about 650 lines out of the nearly 17,000 reported in city data for Austin last year. 

“Chicago needs to explain where the money is going and justify the cost,” wrote Elin Betanzo, a national drinking water expert who helped uncover the Flint water crisis, in an email.

Read Next He’s the only comprehensive lead tester in this contaminated neighborhood. He graduates next month. Anna Mattson

Betanzo, who has done extensive research on cost-saving tactics, said she has not seen a realistic cost breakdown that demonstrates why Chicago is paying as much as it is.

“They need to figure out how to complete the most cost-efficient lead service line replacements in the country, not the most expensive,” she added.

With funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act set to run out this year, public health experts have been calling for more local, federal, and state dollars to fund replacements, especially in overburdened cities like Chicago.

“It’s a critical part of the infrastructure,” Betanzo said. “It’s that final piece of public health protection.”

Amy Qin and Cam Rodriguez contributed data analysis to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why is it so unusually expensive to replace lead pipes in Chicago? on Jun 30, 2026.

Amid the many political casualties of 2025 — mass federal layoffs, shuttered agencies, and clean energy spending cuts — the passing of one of the last decade’s defining political projects went almost entirely unnoticed. On December 31, 2025, the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of climate, labor, and social justice organizations, officially died. 

The coalition wasn’t intended to last forever, but its demise was sped up by the political mood that got President Donald Trump reelected in 2024, when the momentum that the movement had enjoyed under Joe Biden’s administration seemingly evaporated overnight. As Trump launched an all-out assault on environmental regulations and climate policies, the climate movement was left at a loss, unsure how to push for change with the public increasingly focused on other issues, like the cost of living, and a federal government hostile to its cause.

“The conditions under which the Green New Deal Network was founded have fundamentally changed,” the coalition’s site said, explaining its decision to fold. “The mission of climate, jobs, and justice is far from over — but the structure built to win a specific moment is no longer the right vehicle for what comes next.”

Saul Levin, who was the network’s director of campaigns and politics, knew what was next for him personally: fighting AI data centers. The artificial intelligence boom has created a surge in construction of giant facilities that process digital information, and communities across the country are working to stop them from being built, concerned about water usage, soaring energy bills, and Big Tech taking over. Over a year ago, Levin had started a Signal chat to help people opposing data centers get organized. Now his chat has about 350 members across 40 states, and he’s busy with his new podcast, “The Hum,” capturing their stories and highlighting successes.

Many climate activists are following a similar path. Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, and social justice fit organically into the growing anti-data center movement, which has attracted a much broader, bipartisan coalition than the Green New Deal ever did. “The climate movement is increasingly realizing that this is a fight that’s both an important fight and a strategic fight,” said Evan Sutton, an anti-AI advocate who’s helping connect people who oppose data centers. 

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

Take the Sunrise Movement, whose members stormed Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018 to demand a Green New Deal, catapulting the idea into the national conversation. “We’ve definitely seen a surge of interest in data center fights around the country,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director. Local Sunrise hubs have been mobilizing to stop data centers in Dallas, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Lansing, Michigan, Shiney-Ajay said. 

There’s a logical reason for the climate movement to get involved: These hyperscale data centers are poised to cause carbon emissions to spike. A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers could account for about one-third of the growth in U.S. electricity demand between 2024 and 2030. This thirst for energy is driving the expansion of infrastructure for natural gas, a fossil fuel. A typical AI data center demands as much electricity as 100,000 households, but some of the largest ones being built may use up to 20 times that, according to the International Energy Agency. The rapid expansion of data centers threatens to “undo a huge amount of the progress that we made in terms of moving toward clean energy,” Shiney-Ajay said. “If we don’t really seriously start to pass policy that mitigates that, then they could be a disaster for our climate.”

Sunrise Movement protesters call for a Green New Deal at Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in Washington, D.C., in 2018. Michael Brochstein / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Some established environmental organizations have gotten on board with suspending hyperscale data center construction. A letter sent to Congress this month calling for a nationwide moratorium was signed by more than 500 groups, most of them related to the environment, climate change, or environmental justice — such as Greenpeace USA, Third Act, GreenLatinos, and Food and Water Watch. But some of the biggest names of the U.S. environmental movement were absent from the list, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy.

That’s not to say they’re pro-data center, though. “The speculative rush to build data centers is harming ratepayers, our climate, and community health, which is why we urgently need protections from states and the federal government,” Jeremy Fisher, the Sierra Club’s principal advisor, said in an emailed statement. The organization advocates for holding Big Tech to a higher standard in terms of environmental and health impacts and argues that companies should invest in clean energy to run their facilities instead of fossil fuels. “Data centers can and should be powered with renewable energy that does not threaten our environment and our health, our wallets, or our environment,” Fisher said.

Read Next A solution to data center backlash? Put them in oil fields. Jake Bittle

Thomas Meyer, the organizing projects director at Food and Water Watch, which led the letter to Congress, said that powering data centers with clean energy doesn’t solve the problem. In Washington state, for instance, Amazon outbid the utility Puget Sound Energy in an auction for an enormous Oregon solar farm, leaving the utility concerned about competition for renewable resources as Amazon races to build energy-hungry data centers. “What about the things that that solar power would have gone to power instead?” Meyer said. “You haven’t grown the pie. You’ve just shifted it from one place to another.”

Big green groups may also be taking cues from Democratic politicians, many of whom, like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, have been friendly to data center development. “The unfortunate reality is that some organizations tend to follow rather than lead, especially when it comes to mainstream positions of Democratic Party leaders or elected officials,” Meyer said.

Meyer witnessed a similar dynamic a decade ago when working as a field organizer on campaigns to ban fracking: a disconnect between grassroots energy and mainstream institutions. Established environmental groups tend to move more slowly than bottom-up movements, said Valerie Costa, co-executive director of the Oil and Gas Action Network, a nonprofit that supports grassroots groups working to move the U.S. beyond fossil fuels. “One of the things that grassroots movements do really well is shifting when there are more immediate threats, and being able to respond quickly,” Costa said.

That was recently in play in Seattle, where the climate activist group 350 Seattle joined the push to pass a moratorium on new large data centers after the news broke this spring that five major facilities could be coming to town. If all the projects were actually built, they would require about one-third the amount of power that Seattle uses on a typical day. The Seattle City Council passed the moratorium unanimously earlier this month, making it the largest city in the U.S. so far to suspend approvals. For local activists working on an issue as amorphous and overwhelming as climate change, it was invigorating to get involved in a mission with a concrete, local outcome. 

Audrey Wang Gosselin, a member of the Soapbox Project and a board member of 350 Seattle, speaks in favor of a data center moratorium at a Seattle City Council meeting. Courtesy of Renaissance

“For us, it was a very good on-ramp for people who just want to do something and want to turn that powerlessness into something meaningful,” said Nivi Achanta, the founder and CEO of Soapbox Project, a local climate action group that advocated for the moratorium. The group’s Signal chat buzzed as the city council weighed the policy: “People were, like, pulling out drinks and grabbing their popcorn and actually watching these city council politics unfold in a way that’s so much more fun than anything I’ve experienced outside of this, in the general climate movement,” Achanta said. 

In Washington state, known for its progressive climate policies, new natural gas infrastructure driven by power-hungry AI data centers threatens to produce an additional 13.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, about 14 percent of the state’s current annual emissions. That could derail its attempt to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, as required by the state’s Climate Commitment Act. Even in a blue state, there’s an understanding that opposition to data centers has to be bipartisan if it’s going to be successful, especially since most data centers are being proposed in rural areas. “We can’t just rely on the West Coast, or on the blue corridor from Bellingham down to Vancouver, Washington, to get something done,” said Lauren Redfield, a voluntary organizer with the Washington AI Resistance.

As climate activists join local fights, they may find themselves teaming up with people they don’t agree with on everything, or on much at all. Data centers are a rare issue that unites Americans across the political spectrum, with 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans opposed to building data centers in their area, according to polling from Gallup. All kinds of people — punk musicians in Utah, farmers in Oregon, beauty salon workers in Maryland — are coming out for all kinds of reasons, according to Levin, the host of “The Hum.” But their differences aren’t stopping them from working together. 

“Again and again, we hear from organizers who are like, ‘I don’t care if you’re here for climate change, and I’m here because I think it’s going to be ugly, and that person’s here because they hate AI’ — all of us think this is a bad project,” Levin said.

In the first three months of this year, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 facilities worth nearly $130 billion. One reason this resistance has been effective is because of its people power — the hundreds of thousands of people who are turning out to town halls, meeting up on porches, and otherwise showing up to fight. In an age of loneliness and political disillusionment, it’s a sign that something is changing. 

“I’m really hopeful that this is the thing that gets communities re-engaged in local politics,” Redfield said. “We’ve seen a lot of apathy over the last several years, and I’m really hoping that this civic engagement can help us build that community that can help us stitch our society back together.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate activists take on a new foe: Data centers on Jun 29, 2026.

At first glance, Lent Hill Dairy Farm in Steuben County, New York, looks like most other industrial dairies. There are red buildings that house some 4,000 cows, a staggering manure pit, and two gigantic dome-like structures that serve as anaerobic co-digesters.

These giant machines break down manure and local food waste to produce biogas. This renewable natural gas, or RNG, is then typically transported for use as electricity, heating, and fuel. But at Lent Hill, the gas produced isn’t just heating homes or running tractors. It’s also powering an on-site cryptomine.

The operation, run by Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy, is the first of its kind in the country. The company claims the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste could be a game-changer, not only in powering crypto, but data centers, which currently use 4.9 percent of the country’s electricity, a figure that could double by 2030.

“At the end of the day, our model is providing value to the rural area that we are in,” Rashi Akki, the founder and CEO of Ag-Grid Energy, told Sentient.

The project claims to recycle more than 45,000 gallons of food waste per day and the manure of 4,000 cows. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” Akki said.

While Ag-Grid Energy wants to work with midsize dairies to create on-site power generation for small-scale data centers, the world’s largest technology players have bigger visions. Tech giants are increasingly searching for fossil fuel alternative fuel sources to power hyperscale data centers that won’t put a strain on the grid.

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

Biogas proponents — a broad coalition of industries, including agriculture, fossil fuels, utilities, and waste management — are pushing renewable natural gas, sourced in part by manure digesters, as a sustainable way forward.

In California, Microsoft has partnered with Enchanted Rock to use RNG for backup data center power. Vanguard Renewables, a waste management company and portfolio company of Black Rock, has touted RNG as “the fuel of the AI age.” Critics, however, fear the digester-to-data-center connection will give digesters an economic lifeline at a time when they’re struggling to stay online.

Renewable natural gas from digesters are touted as a drop-in energy solution, Sarah D’Onofrio, a scholar and advocate who works with digester-impacted communities across the country, told Sentient. This means the RNG can be used without changing existing fossil fuel based infrastructure, and can be added to other fuel sources like natural gas so companies could claim they are fueling data centers sustainably, according to D’Onofrio.

But researchers like D’Onofrio argue that to truly reduce emissions, we need to transition to clean energy fuels rather than rely on renewable substitutes for fossil fuels.

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“Why would you want to incorporate that [RNG] into our fuel system during the period of climate change?” she said.

D’Onofrio has helped communities in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina defeat proposals for large-scale co-digesters. She fears data centers are creating a new, massive market for the manure-to-energy industry, which could in turn incentivize the further proliferation of factory farms.

“It attaches these industrial food operations into our energy system and makes us really dependent on them over time, because the more it becomes intermingled with agriculture, the more it’s going to concentrate agriculture,” said D’Onofrio.

Animals raised on factory farms in the U.S. produce an estimated 941 billion pounds of manure each year, which pollutes air and water in communities all over the United States. In addition to problems with leakage, digesters do not make the manure disappear. The digested waste, or digestate, is meant to be recycled, potentially into a range of products, such as fertilizer and animal bedding. But there are a number of challenges with these downstream products, from economic to environmental. Digested manure can be more polluting than manure that hasn’t been digested, according to USDA research.

In 2023, Victoria Gehrke, a community organizer who owns recreational property in Lind, Wisconsin, learned that a leader in the waste-to-energy field had proposed a co-digester in the town, touting it as a way to manage manure and reduce waste.

Gehrke and her fellow organizer Laurie Knutzen quickly discovered the impacts a co-digester would have on the community: hazardous air emissions, trucks going in and out delivering industrial food waste — and few restrictions about where that waste would come from — and water pollution. The project intended to send about 41,000 gallons of waste per day into a tributary of Walla Walla Creek, which empties into Lake Michigan.

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“These are manure and industrial food-waste processing and biogas-producing facilities, they are not ag accessories,” Gehrke said of co-digesters. “They don’t belong on ag land,” she explained, “and what they’re really doing is having our small rural communities — because we’re so vulnerable — we become sacrificial dumping grounds for the industrial waste that other big places don’t want to put in their communities.”

After more than a year of relentless community opposition, the town of Lind denied Vanguard’s application in the spring of 2024. The organizers celebrated the decision as a win for Lind, but Vanguard is still “developing and operating” more than 50 co-digesters across the country. It aims to have more than 100 completed projects by the end of 2028.

Patrick Serfass, the executive director of the American Biogas Council, told Sentient that biogas is an “excellent fit” for data centers in search of a reliable and high-capacity fuel source.

“We’re really excited about the prospect of biogas systems being able to provide power to data centers, because they can provide that reliability,” Serfass says.

Data center demand could lead to the expansion of co-digester buildouts across the country, he said. Serfass estimates that the U.S. has only built about 10 percent to 15 percent of the biogas market’s capacity.

“The data centers are going to be so hungry for power that they could eat up pretty much all of the supply that the biogas industry could create,” Serfass says.

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Vanguard Renewables makes a similar pitch. “As energy demand from data centers continues to grow, there is increasing interest in solutions that are both reliable and lower carbon,” Vanguard Renewables told Sentient in an email statement.

The company is yet to partner with any data centers directly, but they have partnered with energy delivery companies like TotalEnergies and Enbridge, and both of these companies have relationships with hyperscalers and data center operators. In November 2025, TotalEnergies signed a 15-year deal with Google to provide solar energy to support the company’s data center operations in Ohio.

Anaerobic digesters are not new. They have long been hailed as a way to reduce emissions, capture methane and manage waste — a solution to agriculture’s methane problem with few tradeoffs.

The technology has received billions in subsidies at both the federal and state level. The California Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, a climate program implemented to incentivize the production of alternative fuels, funds nearly 200 digesters across 16 states; in 2023, Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act provided over $150 million in funding to biogas projects across the country; and the Michigan Strategic Fund has approved more than $100 million in private bonds for digesters.

Akki said tax credits are incredibly important in making Ag-Grid Energy’s projects a reality. While most of the subsidies given to digester projects have been to support electricity and fuel for transportation, she wants to see fiscal support specifically for co-digesters that power AI.

Read Next A solution to data center backlash? Put them in oil fields. Jake Bittle

“Tax credits — just like what we had with the Inflation Reduction Act — for electricity production for AI would really support our projects,” Akki says.

But using tax-payer dollars to support digesters has lost favor with the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture. In May, the USDA extended a 90-day moratorium on loans for anaerobic digesters through the end of the year amid environmental concerns and delinquent loans. According to a review of USDA lender data by Inside Climate News, 11 percent of the 746 project lenders across the country were considered over 90 days delinquent.

On top of this, a growing body of research raises questions about whether digesters make economic or environmental sense.

Government subsidies for digesters create a “perverse incentive where the value of manure or animal waste starts to compete with the value of the milk,” Brent Kim, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Liveable Future, told Sentient. In other words, farmers are incentivized to produce waste for profit, not to produce milk for human consumption.

Kim and his colleagues published a scientific review of the touted benefits and downsides to the controversial technology. “The reality is nuanced,” he said of digesters. While they can reduce methane emissions in the short term, they may also lead to an increase in ammonia emissions, toxic byproducts, and other pollutants released into the environment, a phenomena Kim calls “pollution swapping.”

“So sure, all else being equal, you do have a reduction in methane, but if they’re incentivizing growth in the industry, the larger herd size is going to release more methane,” Kim said.

Some research suggests digesters aren’t always effective at reducing methane either. As Sentient has previously reported, research from the World Resources Institute found that digesters offer limited climate benefit given their cost. Digesters reduce methane from manure storage by only about 25 percent, the WRI research finds.

A report from Friends of the Earth found that dairies with digesters increased herd sizes by 3.7 percent annually, or 24 times the growth rate of dairies without digesters. In Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, herd sizes grew by about 58 percent since they were installed.

The trend comes as no surprise to Lynn Henning, a soybean farmer in Michigan who lives near a Chevron-owned co-digester. When manure becomes “more valuable than the milk,” it creates incentive for growth, and changes what farming is all about, she told Sentient.

“The system is changing farming. They’re shifting from producing food for people instead to producing manure so they can be paid more by the government,” Henning said.

Kathy Morrison, a farmer in Fremont, Michigan, has similar concerns. She lived next to a co-digester for years, and it significantly impacted her quality of life. The smell was unbearable, sometimes so bad it woke her up in the middle of the night. She described it as being at a giant music festival and all the Porta Potties are overflowing. That smell was digestate, the liquid solid waste that’s left over and spread on fields after the digestion process.

Morrison is not against the technology of digesters themselves, particularly at the local level, but with so many private companies looking to make a profit, equitable implementation and scale is hard to control. Data centers (which come with their own environmental impacts) would likely expand those opportunities for profit.

“I would be all in favor of small, very controlled, community-size digesters, but when they’re large scale like this, and they’re operating for profit, corners get cut,” she said. But this is something else, she said. “All the different industries that have come together to turn this into something insanely profitable. …There’s just so many industries behind this. It’s wild.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cow manure could be the next data center fuel on Jun 28, 2026.