Grist

At 26, Isaiah Taylor had accomplished more than most people do by the time they’re twice his age. The founder of Valar Atomics, a Southern California-based company that aims to make small-scale nuclear reactors, Taylor, a father of four, has government contracts, invitations to Mar-a-Lago, and investments from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley venture capital. His goal is nothing less than to usher the United States into an era of nuclear power domination — becoming the next Elon Musk while he’s at it. “We do not appreciate SpaceX enough,” he tweeted last year. “If it were not for a single highly motivated American startup, China would be preparing to simply own outer space. Now they’re playing catch-up. I plan to make Valar Atomics the equivalent for energy.”

The political winds appear to be at his back. “Unleashing nuclear energy is how we will power American artificial intelligence,” posted U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on X last year. “Nuclear energy provides the constant energy needed to power data centers and release the full potential of American innovation.” Last September, the DOE named Valar as one of four companies to participate in a pilot program to build nuclear fuel lines; two months later, the company became the first-ever venture-backed startup to reach the nuclear milestone of splitting atoms using its own reactor. “This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering — one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership,” Taylor said of the achievement in a press release. Max Ukropina, Valar Atomics’ Head of Projects, added, “America should be thrilled but wanting more.”

Taylor’s trajectory has been as unconventional as it is meteoric. The high-school dropout’s path to success included a controversial Christian nationalist church and an assist from a Russian-American power broker with ties to both the Kremlin and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — but practically no experience with nuclear energy. Nuclear experts have raised red flags about both the feasibility of Valar’s goals and its safety claims — but those concerns do not appear to faze Taylor, who went on the offense last year, entering Valar into a lawsuit against the U.S. government over what it considers a prohibitively restrictive interpretation of U.S. nuclear safety rules. As Taylor put it in a tweet last November, “Civilization is an inconceivably precious thing. But the way to keep it alive is by continually treating it as a frontier, not covering everything in bubble wrap.”

But those rules have not stopped the Trump administration from working with Valar — earlier this month, the U.S. government announced a partnership with the company to test its reactor for government use. “President Trump promised the American people that he would unleash American energy dominance,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright enthused about the partnership with Valar on X. “This is the next chapter for U.S. energy.”

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Since the advent of nuclear energy in 1942, the field has been controversial, largely because of high-profile accidents such as the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Tight safety regulations make large-scale reactors expensive and cumbersome to build, and people don’t exactly jump at the chance to host one in their neighborhood.

Taylor founded Valar to address these barriers — smaller, more nimble reactors, he reasoned, would be both safer and more convenient. While the larger, traditional reactors typically produce enough power to fuel up to a million homes continuously, Taylor’s units are much more modest, big enough to power only about 5,000 homes.

Small-scale nuclear reactors like the ones that Taylor aims to build are not new — in fact, during the Cold War, both the United States and Russia used them to power satellites. Building them on land, however, has always proved prohibitively expensive; it’s much more cost-efficient to build one big reactor than a series of small ones, explains Nick Touran, a nuclear engineer who runs the informational site whatisnuclear.com. But that thinking is beginning to change: Small reactors could come in handy for AI data centers and also on remote military bases, where shipping fuel is both expensive and dangerous. In theory, small, portable reactors could act like batteries, powering a data center or a base for years without the need for more fuel.

The handful of nuclear experts I spoke with all acknowledged that small reactors would be desirable, but they weren’t sure Valar could manage to make them both cost-effective and scalable. “It’s not a new technology, but nobody’s been able to make it successful in electricity markets,” said Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission who currently heads the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She referred to Taylor and other nuclear startup founders as “nuke bros” who “don’t know what they don’t know.” Touran said he thought it was possible for Valar to make good progress on small reactors, but he had his doubts that they would succeed in making them profitable. “I think high risk, high reward,” he said. “It’s unlikely to be economically competitive, in my opinion.”

The long odds don’t seem to bother Taylor, who sees himself as fitting in the grand tradition of an old-fashioned rags-to-riches American story. In a 2024 post on X, Taylor described growing up poor in Kentucky and teaching himself to code on the family computer before he was even in high school. When he was 12, he wrote, his father promised to buy him a laptop if he would agree to pay his own way through college. Taylor took him up on the offer and proceeded to drop out of high school. By 16, he claimed that he was “making six figures.” By 17, he had moved with his family to Moscow, Idaho, where he started an auto-repair shop while living on his friend’s couch. “The business was deep in the red and barely hanging on,” he recalled in the post on X. But he persevered, and eventually the shop succeeded. “My software career did well too,” he wrote. “Life is more comfortable now, monetarily. I still work like a dog, but I don’t think about the next rent payment as much as I did.”

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Small-town Idaho may seem like a strange place for an ambitious young coder, but he stayed there for a compelling reason. As Taylor explained on X in 2023, he lived in Moscow “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community.” That community was the fiefdom founded by Doug Wilson, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor of Moscow’s Christ Church. In a 2023 tweet, Taylor described Wilson as “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson said he first met a teenage Taylor when his family relocated to Moscow; Wilson described Taylor as “a go-getter.” Taylor didn’t respond to our request for comment on his relationship with Wilson and other details of this story.

Wilson has attracted widespread media attention for his controversial statements, including his remark to CNN last year that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” As I wrote in 2024:

He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.

While running the auto repair shop, coding, attending Wilson’s church, and starting a family, Taylor spent the next six years on “nights and weekends of research,” he told the tech publication Infinite Frontiers in 2024, he decided to tackle the problem of making nuclear power profitable — large reactors often scare off investors because they can cost billions to build and can take more than a decade to come online. Taylor says his interest in nuclear power runs in the family; his great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, worked on the Manhattan Project as a nuclear physicist. In 2023, Taylor founded Valar Atomics in the Southern California defense tech hub of El Segundo. Although Taylor hasn’t explained publicly why he chose the name, in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the Valar are angelic guardians who helped create the world and control nature.

In El Segundo’s macho scene of young, conservative Christian founders, Taylor fit right in. With his friend Augustus Doricko, founder of another buzzy El Segundo startup, the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, he began attending a nearby church in the denomination Wilson founded. On social media, Taylor sometimes posts scripture — for Christmas last year, a bible verse about the birth of Jesus appeared on the Valar house account, accompanied by a photo of its nuclear reactor prototypes wearing Santa hats.

In El Segundo, Taylor quickly scored connections to an exclusive network of high-powered tech investors. He secured a pre-seed round of $1.5 million from the firm Riot Ventures, and just over a year later, in 2025, he announced a seed round of $19 million, with funding from Silicon Valley power players such as investor and author Balaji Srinivasan. Later that year, he obtained a $130 million funding round.

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And here is where the story departs from the more familiar tech entrepreneur-scores-a-big-win narrative, with an unusual Venn diagram of Taylor’s professional, religious, and personal interests converging on an unexpected protagonist. A co-leader of that round was Day One Ventures, a firm that says it aims to “back early-stage companies with customer obsession in their DNA.” Day One’s founder, visionary leader, and sole general partner is Masha Bucher, a one-time pro-Putin Russian political activist-turned Jeffery Epstein publicist-turned Silicon Valley kingmaker.

Before Bucher came to the United States in 2014, she still lived in Russia and was an enthusiastic supporter of Putin. There is a well-circulated 2009 photo of her as a teenager kissing Putin on the cheek; it became the subject of the 2011 documentary Putin’s Kiss. It’s unclear how she landed a gig doing publicity for convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 2017, but her name comes up several times in the recently released batch of files of Epstein’s communications. On one occasion in 2017, when she still had her original last name, Drokova, she asked Epstein to connect her with “adequate Russian oligarchs.” In 2018 Epstein wrote in an email to Bucher that her friend had “told me about the project she is doing researching a really bad guy that gets children for sex sent to his island … she almost fainted when I told her that person is me.” He asked her for nude photos of herself 11 days before he was arrested for the second time in 2019. Bucher, who did not respond to our request for comment, has claimed that she was never paid by Epstein for the work she did.

Bucher apparently already had some of those connections to wealthy Russians that she had asked Epstein to arrange — and in fact, she introduced Epstein to one of them. Her first boss in the world of tech venture capitalism was Serguei Beloussov, who later changed his name to Serg Bell. “Connecting you here,” she wrote to Epstein and Bell in 2018. “You both are one [sic] of the most intelligent and fun people I met in my life. Super smart and special.”

Bucher worked for Bell at two firms Bell had cofounded: Runa Capital and Acronis. In 2022, Bell was one of a handful of Russian expats living in the U.S. who were tracked by the U.S. government for allegedly attempting to export U.S. tech developments to Russia. The government did not find evidence of a security breach, but it did bar Acronis from sensitive government contracts last year. (Bell recently told the Washington Post that he never worked for Epstein, and that he advised others against doing business with him; he has also disavowed his Russian connections.)

According to reporting by the Washington Post, early fundraising materials for Day One Ventures show Bucher boasting of her connections to Russian billionaires Alexander Mamut and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, though she later denied writing the fundraising materials and has said she never took money from Russian oligarchs. She has said she left the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi in 2010, and she recently posted on X that was branded a traitor by Russian state media in 2017. “I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime,” she wrote. Yet sleuths on X have found evidence that those statements may not be true. Reporting by Russian-British investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh shows Bucher speaking at a pro-Putin event in 2019, years after she claimed to have disavowed him. According to records obtained by Pevchikh, she still holds a valid Russian passport, though she told the Washington Post in 2022, “I deeply regret ever joining Nashi and supporting Putin and his government.”

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Bucher, who has also invested in Taylor’s friend Doricko’s company, seems to be more than just a funder for the companies she supports. A Day One pitch deck boasts that the firm is “actively involved in its portfolio companies and play a real, tangible role in helping them grow.” In an interview last year with TechCrunch, Bucher said her goal in founding the firm was to provide not only funding but also PR help to the companies she invested in. She also appears to enjoy a close relationship with Valar executives, posting photos of herself on social media attending parties with them. While Doricko cut ties with Bucher after the most recent Epstein disclosures, Taylor has done no such thing.

Bucher said that Taylor himself drew her to Valar. “I can’t think of a better founder,” she told TechCrunch. The decisions she would trust him with, she added, are “literally life-and-death.”

Not everyone is as bullish as Bucher about Valar’s prospects—nuclear experts have raised serious questions about the safety of the company’s technology and the qualifications of its leadership. In April 2025, Taylor boasted in a post on the Valar website that the company’s spent fuel was so safe that holding it in one’s bare hands for five minutes would result in a dose equivalent only to that of a CT scan. On X, Tuoran, the nuclear engineer, challenged the claim. “This statement cannot possibly be true,” he wrote. “Any nuclear reactor of the power you’re referring to makes spent fuel [that] would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful of spent fuel.” Another nuclear engineer, Gavin Ridley, chimed in with his own calculation: He found that Valar’s spent fuel would deliver a lethal dose in 85 milliseconds of direct contact. Taylor posted in response, “I will follow up with a detailed writeup tonight or tomorrow, back to back today. Should be fun …” He never did.

Although there are now some seasoned nuclear engineers in the company’s leadership, some of the top brass appear to have as little nuclear experience as Taylor. Kip Mock, a fellow member of Wilson’s Idaho church and a co-founder of Taylor’s auto repair shop, is now Valar’s head of operations. Another church member, Elijah Froh, serves as Valar’s director of business operations. (A story last year by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project revealed that Mock accidentally set Froh on fire in 2021 when he poured old diesel into a wood-burning stove and caused an explosion.)

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Questions about safety apparently have not deterred Taylor, who appears to be as determined as ever to forge ahead. Last April, Valar announced it was joining several other companies and a handful of states in filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission over what they claim is an overly broad interpretation of safety regulations around testing nuclear reactors. In a post about the lawsuit, Taylor argued that the rules should allow Valar to test its reactor prototype, the Ward One. “Operating Ward One in a remote testing area within the United States would not pose a threat to the health and safety of the public or impact national security based on any reasonable accident scenario,” wrote Taylor. “However, because the NRC has failed to implement rules which would exempt this small test reactor from full NRC regulations, we are building and testing this reactor in the Philippines instead.” Mock, Taylor’s employee who accidentally set his buddy on fire in Idaho is heading the Philippines project. Taylor told Business Insider that the company planned to move “really fast” on it. Separately, last May, the state of Utah, a fellow plaintiff in the lawsuit, announced that it had won a “tight race” — through its Operation Gigawatt program aimed at attracting nuclear companies — with other states to host Valar’s first test reactor for the DOE.

The Trump administration is on board with nuclear, too. In an executive order last May, Trump vowed to have three test reactors up and running by July 4th of this year. In a recent interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Taylor called that goal “unbelievably exciting.” Last fall, the Trump administration quietly pushed through a suite of major changes to the laws that govern U.S. nuclear facilities. The new rules, which weren’t made public but were only shared with companies with government contracts, dramatically loosened requirements around safety, accidents, and environmental protections, according to reporting by NPR.

In his interview with Ryan, Taylor lavished praise on Trump and his administration. “You have to give President Trump credit for that in bringing this unbelievably talented, motivated group of people together,” he said. “Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.”

His enthusiasm turned out to be warranted. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that it had chosen Valar’s reactor for a contract with the Department of War and the Department of Energy. On February 15, the reactor was transported on a special flight from March Air Reserve in Riverside County, California, to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. “The successful delivery and installation of this reactor will unlock significant possibilities for the future of energy resilience and strategic independence for our nation’s defense,” a DOW press release stated. “This event is a testament to the ingenuity of the American spirit and a critical advancement in securing our nation’s freedom and strength for generations to come.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration’s favorite nuclear startup has ties to Russia and Epstein on Feb 28, 2026.

Relations between states are becoming so strained over their different approaches to fossil fuels and renewables, some politicians are calling for a “divorce.”

Utah Republicans celebrated last week when PacifiCorp, one of the largest utilities in the West, announced it would stop serving customers in Washington state. PacifiCorp mainly operates in Utah, but also in Wyoming and Idaho — and, to the chagrin of some Utah legislators, blue states like California and Oregon. Utah legislators had previously pressured to break their utility’s ties with states with more aggressive climate policies. Now, PacifiCorp is handing over its 140,000 customers in Washington — along with two wind farms, a natural gas plant, and other energy infrastructure — to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion. 

“We want a divorce from the three states that don’t look like Utah,” said Mike Schultz, Utah’s Republican House Speaker. “This is the first step forward.”

In announcing the sale, PacifiCorp noted that navigating “diverging policies” among the six states it serves had “created extraordinary pressure,” a challenge that had affected its financial stability. Utah is still heavily reliant on coal, while California, Oregon, and Washington have been moving forward with policies to shift away from fossil fuels. Washington, for example, aims to slash greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030, using 1990 levels as a baseline. As of January, Washington required PacifiCorp to stop charging Washington customers for coal generation, reducing costs for ratepayers by $68 million compared to the status quo — and potentially shifting coal-related costs back onto states like Utah.

It’s not just money driving the wedge, but also identity. “Absolutely, this seems like a culture war thing,” said Matthew Burgess, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming who studies political polarization. He sees Republican politicians playing up cultural tensions to appeal to their base, particularly in places where coal’s long-term decline has fueled economic anxiety and resentment. “Some of this rhetoric that blames maybe what’s happening in the industry on coastal progressives and their climate histrionics — you can see how that sort of message might be resonant or cathartic with those communities that are having real problems,” Burgess said.

As the divide grows between blue states demanding clean energy and red states seeking to protect coal, oil, and natural gas, the economic realities of sharing the grid have become a point of contention. This is all unfolding at a time when concerns about rising costs have gripped the country. Electricity prices have climbed, with the average U.S. home’s energy bill 30 percent higher in 2025 than it was 2021 — a steep rise, but still in line with overall inflation. While Republicans often blame environmental regulations for rising electricity prices, Democrats typically blame Trump’s attacks on clean energy or the rise of energy-hungry data centers.

Protesters gather during a Monopoly-themed rally to protest utility-driven rate hikes and obstacles to renewable energy at the corporate headquarters for Rocky Mountain Power in Salt Lake City in April 2025.
Bethany Baker / The Salt Lake Tribune

The tension over sharing energy costs with blue states rose in Utah in 2024, when Rocky Mountain Power, Utah’s largest electricity provider and part of PacifiCorp, proposed a 30 percent rate increase for most of the state’s customers. The utility said the increase was needed to cover the costs of building new infrastructure and complying with regulations in different states. Utah Republicans grilled Rocky Mountain Power and suggested it could break up with PacifiCorp, its parent company, because of the progressive climate policies it had to comply with in California, Oregon, and Washington. Last year, Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, signed a resolution encouraging an “interstate compact for regional energy collaboration” with Wyoming and Idaho. 

“Sadly, we know Utahns are paying more for power because of decisions being made in coastal states, places like Oregon and Washington,” Cox said at the time. “But this is so much more than that.”

This theme has popped up in other parts of the country. Last September, five Republican-led states — Montana, North Dakota, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas — asked federal regulators to stop a $22 billion transmission expansion designed to connect cities in the Upper Midwest to the Great Plains. They argued that sharing the cost of the project would effectively force their ratepayers to subsidize wind and solar for the benefit of Democratic states’ clean energy goals. 

Yet as Republicans complain about the costs of building clean energy, Democrats are blaming the costs of keeping fossil fuels alive, noting that the Trump administration is forcing expensive coal plants to stay open past their retirement dates in Washington, Colorado, Indiana, and Michigan. The Michigan coal plant cost ratepayers $80 million in the first four months of running it beyond its planned retirement date, according to the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission.

“Clean energy is just the way we’re moving,” said Meredith Connolly, director of policy and strategy at Climate Solutions, a clean energy nonprofit in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s really a question of just how fast we get there, and do you create these headwinds that slow down the transition or try to give an unfair leg up to fossil fuels? Those are the silly things we’re seeing that actually drive up electricity costs.”

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There are plenty of pressures affecting utilities — market forces, the scramble to procure more electricity to power data centers, and even climate-driven risks. In many states, particularly in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, replacing outdated equipment, protecting power lines, and other measures to withstand more extreme weather conditions is the main driver of rising costs. In California, infrastructure upgrades to reduce wildfire risk (and thus liability costs) are a key factor behind the soaring electricity bills. PacifiCorp, for instance, has faced a slew of lawsuits accusing it of sparking fires in Oregon and California with poorly maintained equipment and has agreed to pay $2.2 billion in settlements.

Some climate advocates worry about what would happen if splitting up the energy market along partisan boundaries became a trend. “Our fates are tied across the energy market,” Connolly said. “And so these would be pretty artificial lines.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The culture war is coming for your electricity on Feb 27, 2026.

The Colorado River currently supports 40 million people and $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity in seven U.S. states and Mexico — but it was never intended to be stretched so thin.

A century-old legal framework promises those users more water than there is to go around. The river’s flow has shrunk by about 20 percent over the last century as climate change has made the West more arid. As water has vanished, states have clashed over how to divide up what remains. The core dispute is between the sparsely inhabited mountainous states of the “Upper Basin,” where hay farmers and a few major cities like Denver draw water from the river and its tributaries, and the far more populous “Lower Basin,” which diverts water to support most of the nation’s winter vegetable farmers as well as megacities like Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Now, as the region weathers its driest winter in recent history, a reckoning has arrived. By the end of September, the seven states need to agree on a new set of rules that will determine how to divvy up the river’s flow during dry years.

Since the river’s reservoirs almost collapsed in 2022, however, the state’s lead negotiators have been arguing in boardrooms and on Zoom calls with little to show for it. They missed a negotiation deadline in November and another one in February, with each state publishing catty press releases blaming the other side for a breakdown in talks: Colorado’s representative said that the Upper Basin was “being asked to solve a problem we didn’t create with water we don’t have,” while Arizona’s said that the Lower Basin had “offered numerous, good-faith compromises” and that “virtually all of them have been rejected.”

Meanwhile, a nearly snow-free winter is pushing reservoirs toward record lows. The river could grow so dry this year that its massive Lake Powell reservoir will stop producing hydropower.

Without a deal, the Trump administration will need to get involved. So far, Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has shown little willingness to impose the river’s first-ever unilateral water delivery cuts, which could bring the river into balance. But time is running out. The administration has said that, in the absence of a seven-state deal, it will distribute water on a strict “priority” basis, meaning those who have earlier historical claims to the river would be spared cuts. That would mean cutting off almost all water to the junior rightsholders in the Phoenix metro area — with staggering consequences for the region’s massive economy. That said, any federal intervention would almost certainly only be the first salvo in a legal war that would likely reach the Supreme Court. 

What happens after that is a mystery to all involved.

The Biden administration confronted an earlier version of this crisis in 2022, when water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Lower Basin’s other major reservoir, dropped to historic lows. The feds tried to broker an emergency deal between the Lower Basin states to keep the reservoirs from bottoming out. The combatants were California, the river’s largest user, and Arizona, which had junior rights to the river and stood to bear the brunt of the pain.

Biden’s Interior Department escaped a total collapse of the system in part thanks to a deus ex machina: Snowpack in early 2023 was sufficient to refill Lake Mead and Lake Powell to decent levels, and then-Senator Kyrsten Sinema secured billions of dollars in drought relief money that compensated California farmers for forgoing their water and leaving some fields unplanted.

The terms of debate are very different this time. Now, the seven states need to cut their way through the present drought and agree on rules for sharing the river over the next two decades, when no one knows how much water will be available. Arizona and California are united in arguing that the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico need to commit to permanent reductions in their entitlement. The latter have rejected that argument at every opportunity, leading to a bitter breakdown in the talks.

Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, said the disagreement boils down to what counts as a cut in water delivery.

“The disagreement really centers around whether the Upper Basin is willing to contribute to reductions in use,” he said, “and the Upper Basin says, ‘Hey, we already contribute,’ through what are known as ‘hydrologic shortages.’”

These “hydrologic shortages” have become the third rail of the debate. The argument goes like this: The Upper Basin’s water comes from the natural flow of rain and snowmelt, which travel down the river’s tributaries on the way to Lake Powell. The farmers and cities who use this water siphon it out of the tributaries before it ever makes it to a major reservoir. When less snow arrives, there’s less water in the rivers, so the farmers and cities end up using less by default. 

That’s very different from the Lower Basin, where the three states and Mexico take water from the central “bank” in Lake Mead. These states reduce their withdrawals during dry years according to a strict schedule of cuts — which they’re able to do because they can easily measure their exact usage. The negotiators for these states have strenuously argued that a long-term solution to the river’s problems must involve the Upper Basin agreeing to mandatory usage reductions during dry years, rather than operating on the long-held assumption that they’re already automatically taking cuts just because less snowmelt happens to come their way. 

“We have offered to do more,” said Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s top water official, in a statement following the collapse of the seven-state talks. “But we simply cannot take on the task of saving this precious river system on our own.”

An irrigation canal carries water from the Colorado River to irrigate a farm growing leaf lettuce and broccoli near Yuma, Arizona. Jon G. Fuller / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Upper Basin states insist that they already contribute by taking involuntary cuts during dry years. They want the Lower Basin to increase its projected cuts in order to resolve the river’s perennial deficit. Most experts believe this argument is disingenuous, or, as Udall says, “a little deceitful.” Studies show that the Upper Basin is using around 4.5 million acre-feet of water annually, a number that doesn’t change all that much from year to year even during dry spells. (An acre-foot of water is around 326,000 gallons, or enough to supply about three households for a year.)

But Upper Basin representatives don’t see it that way. Steve Pope, the manager of the irrigation district that serves the Uncompahgre Valley in Colorado, says farmers in the valley have already struggled with water scarcity over the past few decades. He says growers take a huge financial hit when they get less water than they expect.

“We don’t know what we’re going to get,” said Pope. “These [farmers], it’s tough for them. They’ve got a lot of money invested in certain types of crops, so they just have to fallow ground.” Given that uncertainty, Pope says the idea of the district taking mandatory cuts is “ridiculous.”

Trump’s Interior Department suggested in January that it can only regulate the operations of the two main reservoirs, and that it has no authority to order Upper Basin farmers like Pope not to farm.

“[The federal government] is very timid about going out on a limb at all for things that might set a precedent,” said Ted Cooke, the former manager of the Central Arizona Project, the canal that brings Colorado River water to the state’s population centers. “This timidity really limits their effectiveness.” (Cooke was nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Bureau of Reclamation last year, but his nomination was withdrawn over what he believes were politically-motivated concerns that he might be biased against the Upper Basin in adjudicating the river.)

If Secretary Burgum sticks to his position that he can’t resolve the debate between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin, his only option for avoiding a collapse at Lake Powell will be to roll out unilateral cuts on the Lower Basin. This would likely trigger litigation between Arizona and the federal government. But if Burgum changed course and imposed unilateral cuts on the Upper Basin, a state such as Colorado would likely sue the feds instead. And even if Burgum did nothing at all, it’s likely that the Lower Basin would sue the Upper Basin. Inflows to Lake Powell may fall so low by the end of the year that the Upper Basin will be in default of its obligations under the 1922 river compact, which requires that the river’s flow be split half and half between the basins. This would allow Arizona to demand makeup water from its northern neighbors. 

Though litigation seems inevitable without a seven-state deal, no water user actually wants to go to court. Once water divisions are in the hands of a judge, no state can be sure that its interests will be protected.

“The idea that your state is going to come out a winner — and you’re confident of that — makes no sense,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager at the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates.

“What it does is it puts your water users at extreme risk.”

Even if Burgum plays it safe and only imposes cuts on the Lower Basin, these cuts will force him to choose between California’s priority rights and Arizona’s arguably greater need. The Interior Department has already suggested it would feel bound to direct most of the pain to Arizona. The department said in January that “absent new agreements” it would distribute cuts according to legal priority, which would take away more than 1 million acre-feet of water from Phoenix and its suburbs. That would likely lead developers to abandon potential subdivisions, force farmers to rip up their fields, and could cause a resumption in the depletion of Phoenix’s fragile groundwater aquifer. 

Arizona state leaders have already threatened litigation over this possibility, and a political advocacy group has begun airing local television ads that criticize the Interior Department’s priority plan. Plus, even this draconian cut wouldn’t necessarily prevent a collapse of the river, because it would cap the total amount of cuts at around 1.5 million acre-feet spread across Arizona, California, and Nevada. The federal government’s own modeling found that this plan would only have a 25 percent chance of avoiding a hydropower shutdown at Lake Powell, and around a 58 percent chance of avoiding a similar “minimum power pool” at Lake Mead. 

A bleached “bathtub ring” on the banks of Lake Mead near Echo Bay, Nevada. The Colorado River’s two main reservoirs are emptying out again after a dry winter.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Not everyone thinks the seven-state deal is a dead letter. John Entsminger, the lead negotiator for Nevada, expressed optimism about at least a short-term deal as recently as the end of January. Last summer, the states rallied around the idea of measuring the river based on its “natural flow,” dividing up the three-year average of the river’s recent water volume as opposed to a static estimate of its theoretical contents. This plan has the benefit of being responsive to climate change, which has already contributed to a 20 percent decline in the Colorado River’s annual flow over the past century. 

“We would not be over-promising water, which has led us in past years to draw down our reservoir storage,” explained Elizabeth Koebele, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies the river. “People get promises and they hold on to them very strongly, even if the water is not there.” 

Despite Trump’s declarations that climate change is a “hoax,” his Interior Department has given strong consideration to this climate-informed “maximum operational flexibility” plan. It modeled a version of the plan in January, but said it didn’t have the authority to implement it without agreement from all seven states. The plan would see all states reduce water usage even during average years, as opposed to only in dry years under the current system. It would parcel out cuts more evenly between Arizona and California. It would also include some contributions from the Upper Basin — in one potential breakdown, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming would reduce their usage by around 250,000 acre-feet when the Lower Basin had cut usage by more than 2 million. 

Although the coming year is likely to be chaotic, many of the basin’s biggest water users have been preparing for this era of permanent cuts for some time. Arizona has already announced its intention to start investing in coastal desalination plants in coordination with California and Mexico, which would free up more river water. The state has also stepped up its spending on water reuse projects. Las Vegas has paid residents to rip out their grass lawns. Utah has established a voluntary conservation program that pays farmers not to farm.

But the long-term solution will likely involve a bigger reshuffling of water in order to forestall an economic crisis in the Phoenix metroplex. Arizona may look to California for salvation: The large urban water district that serves Los Angeles, the farming district in the Imperial Valley, and the winter vegetable farming district around Yuma all hold rights to more water than they need, and they might be willing to deal some of their water to central Arizona, albeit at a high price. There are also two tribes in Arizona, the Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Gila River Indian Community, who each hold about half a million acre-feet of water.

Even with all this rejiggering, cities like Phoenix will end up having to pay much more for water, said Cooke. The rush on water supplies will force difficult cuts in water usage for farms, lawns, swimming pools, and unbuilt homes.

“We’re going to have less water and what we do have is going to be a lot more expensive, and that happens right now, in the next twelve months,” he said. “Even with all of these political and contractual disagreements, the surface water is just not there anymore.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Colorado River is nearing collapse. It’s Trump’s problem now. on Feb 27, 2026.

Venice’s landmarks teem with tourists — so many, in fact, that the city has had to implement restrictions, like banning guides from using loudspeakers. But just outside the famous canals and resplendent architecture sits an ecosystem that teems with less obnoxious forms of life: the Venetian lagoon. For millennia, its marshes have hosted a bevy of flora and fauna, and for centuries have protected the city from invasion by its enemies.

Now, protecting this habitat, and others like it, can help protect people and the planet. Traipsing through the wetland and sampling plants, researchers identified a carbon-capturing powerhouse, known as sea lavender, of the genus Limonium. By restoring these biomes, conservationists would not only boost local biodiversity, but also ensure its ability to trap that planet-warming gas. “Salt marshes are not only sites of carbon sequestration,” said Tegan Blount, a geoscientist at Italy’s University of Padova, lead author of a new paper describing the research. “Their conservation also protects many other ecosystem services, which are vitally important from a local to global scale.”

Aboveground, sea lavender is a stunner. True to its name — though technically it isn’t lavender — it produces lovely purple flowers that attract pollinators, thus supporting biodiversity. Unlike terrestrial lavender, though, Limonium tolerates salty, water-logged conditions, allowing it to thrive in the wetlands of the Venice lagoon. “During summer, the salt marsh meadows are tinted purple by an undulating mass of sea lavender flowers, rife with bees and other insects,” Blount said.

Sea lavender’s root system holds a surprising amount of carbon. Photo courtesy of Tegan Blount

While Limonium is great to look at and all, these researchers were more interested in what’s belowground. Instead of a network of fine filaments, sea lavender’s mature rhizome system grows like a hand reaching up from the soil, with foliage sprouting from the fingertips at the surface. (That’s them in the photo.)

This impacts the Venetian marshes in several ways. With its sturdy root system and foliage, sea lavender anchors the waterlogged soil, generates organic material, and traps sediment, which reduces erosion and habitat loss in the face of pressures like sea level rise. It also can create a more stable and amenable environment for other salt-tolerant species, further boosting biodiversity. “So it can also be a stepping stone,” Blount said.

Even after it dies, this marvelous plant’s root system can persist for long periods, continuing to engineer the mud. The study found that compared to other marshy species in the area, like those in the genera Sarcocornia and Juncus, Limonium creates much more biomass below the ground than above it, and markedly enhances the organic carbon content of the sediment. In fact, sea lavender can retain 12 times as much biomass underground as you see growing topside. 

By protecting these ecosystems, sea lavender can prosper alongside other species, so conservationists wouldn’t need to constantly tend to them, Blount said. Species of Limonium grow all over the world, too, from the coasts of North America to Africa to Asia. Restoring those habitats, then, would benefit biodiversity while enhancing carbon sequestration and storage. Additionally, healthy wetlands help absorb the force of hurricane storm surges, mitigating the inundation of coastal cities.

Properly restored, coastal ecosystems can be self-sustaining. Infrastructure like sea walls, on the other hand, is expensive to construct and maintain, especially as ocean levels rise. Given enough space to creep inland, wetlands can adapt. “These systems can keep up pace with sea level rise, as long as they can migrate backwards,” said Emily Landis, global climate adaptation and resilience director at The Nature Conservancy, who wasn’t involved in the study. “That means they can still provide that essential adaptation, flood reduction benefit.”

They bring economic benefits too, when conservationists work with Indigenous communities to determine how they use these ecosystems. Subsistence fishing, for instance, can be done in a measured way that ensures piscine populations don’t crash, which would be terrible both for the ecosystem and the humans that rely on it. “They know how to take care of their coastline,” Landis said. “They know what is sustainable.”

In the Venetian lagoon, fishers have long used valli da pesca, essentially ponds that function as artificial ecosystems. This provides shelter for baby fish to grow big enough to harvest. Taking animals out of these habitats may sound counterproductive, but in a way it incentivizes protecting these areas. “So conservation is not just a matter of preserving the environment, but also to have something back,” said Alice Stocco, an ecologist at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, who studies the valli da pesca but wasn’t involved in the new paper.

The value of sea lavender, then, isn’t just how much carbon it captures in the Venetian lagoon, but the habitats — and therefore economic and ecological benefits — it provides. “An ecosystem — nature in general — has its own value, which is intrinsic and sometimes cannot be measured,” Stocco said. “Healthy ecosystems allow for healthy people.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The beautiful Venetian plant with a secret climate superpower on Feb 26, 2026.

This winter’s snow cover is the lowest on record in the Western United States. While that could cause a torrent of trouble come spring — more wildfires, less water for farms and fish — at the moment, there’s one thing on many Westerners’ minds: skiing.

In Colorado, less than a third of Arapahoe Basin’s runs are open. In Washington, Mt. Baker Ski Area canceled an annual snowboard race “due to an unworkable snowpack.” In Oregon, Hoodoo Ski Area and Mt. Ashland Ski Area temporarily closed for weeks due to lack of snowfall, while college ski championships were moved from Montana to Utah. 

What’s a ski resort to do? Make snow, presumably, though details about resorts’ snowmaking are scant. Alterra and POWDR, two major ski resort conglomerates, didn’t respond to questions. Vail Resorts, which owns and operates 42 ski areas across the globe, said that while the company doesn’t share specific snowmaking data, “weather conditions, particularly temperature, influence how much and how long we make snow.”

Despite the dismal conditions, Steven Fassnacht, a professor of snow hydrology at Colorado State University, said that it would be difficult for Western resorts to ramp up snowmaking in a major way. Doing so would require resorts to purchase additional water rights, an expensive and complex legal process.

Historically, ski resorts in the West have relied on snowmaking much less than those in other parts of the country. Fewer than 10 percent of the region’s skiable acres, on average, are covered by man-made snow, compared to more than 50 percent in the Northeast and around 80 percent in the Southeast and Midwest.  

But as climate change makes winters increasingly warm and unpredictable, snowmaking is likely to become more important in the region, bringing with it environmental consequences and other challenges.

Snowmaking’s origins can be traced back to 1949, when the owner of a Connecticut ski resort spread 700 pounds of ice on a single run. It only lasted about two weeks, but it gave a group of engineers — and failed ski entrepreneurs — an idea. “Outside their defunct ski factory, they connected a 10-horsepower compressor by garden hose to a spray-gun nozzle that they’d been using to paint skis,” wrote John Fry, a ski historian.

Today, snowmaking’s core technology remains the same: spraying highly pressurized water into the air, where it freezes. Energy and water use are the main environmental concerns, although the potential impacts range from soil degradation to chemical exposure. There’s also Indigenous opposition that generally focuses on the desecration of sacred places by wastewater.

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Lots of energy is necessary to push water uphill and pressurize air. One study of 10 ski areas across the country estimated that snowmaking accounts for 18 percent of a resort’s energy use on average.

Then there’s the water that’s used to make the snow. Palisades Tahoe, for example, uses “50 to 70 million gallons of water for snowmaking annually, enough to cover about 60 acres of terrain in 1.5 feet of snow,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Although 70 million gallons is nothing to sneeze at — it’s what 50 American families might use in a year — Fassnacht emphasized that an estimated 80 percent of the water used for snowmaking returns to streams and rivers. The remainder is lost to evaporation.

While that water comes from the same supply used by cities and farms, the demand is at a different time of year, Fassnacht said. Ski resorts typically make snow in the late fall and early winter, and agricultural and municipal needs don’t ratchet up until the late spring and summer. And if there ever weren’t enough water available, ski resorts are junior rights holders, meaning they would have to get in line behind those with senior water rights. In Colorado, snowmaking accounts for an estimated .05 percent of the state’s annual water consumption, whereas agriculture accounts for about 85 percent.

Still, machine-made snow differs from natural snow in an important way: It does not contribute to the regions’ water supply at scale. According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, 75 percent of the water Westerners depend on comes from mountain snowpack, so even if snowmaking helps snow-hungry skiers, it doesn’t make up for dry winters where the water’s really needed. 

People ski and snowboard at Bear Mountain Ski Resort in December in Big Bear, California. Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

“Snowmaking should be considered a temporary storage on the mountain, instead of in a reservoir,” Fassnacht said. “The water is not really taken out of the system, just stored somewhere else. It does not replace snow that falls from the sky.”

Fassnacht’s biggest concern about snowmaking is its timing — when the resorts decide to take water from streams. If the water is taken at times of low flow, he said, it could have a detrimental impact on aquatic life.

To reduce their consumption of fresh water, some resorts, including Big Sky in Montana, have begun making snow from treated wastewater. While one conservation group called the practice “a win-win for the health of our rivers and the resort economy,” it can be controversial.

Flagstaff’s ski area, for example, began using wastewater to create machine-made snow in 2013, spraying sewage on a mountain that is sacred to local Indigenous people and members of 13 Native American tribes. The practice — and the protests — continue to this day.

Overall, snowmaking can be seen as an adaptation to climate change, but researchers wonder if it is actually a maladaptation — one that contributes to worsening climate change.

The authors of a 2022 paper in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism concluded that snowmaking’s environmental impacts depend greatly upon a resort’s location. In areas with relatively clean electric grids and high water security, such as Washington, snowmaking has much less of an impact than in states like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming, where electric grids are more carbon-intensive and water stresses are higher. Although most of those states have plans to decarbonize their grids in the next few decades, water scarcity is projected to increase over that period, too.

The researchers also said that snowmaking’s impact on travel can’t be ignored. On average, they found that skiers have to drive just 36 miles before they emit more carbon dioxide in transit than they do at a ski area. So if snowmaking encourages skiers to stick to nearby mountains rather than fly across the country, they said that could actually be a net-positive for the planet.

In any case, the prognosis for skiing, especially in coastal states and at low elevations, is grim.

“There’s a level to which, to put it bluntly, the ski industry is screwed,” said Jesse Ritner, an assistant professor of history at Georgia College & State University, who is writing a book on snowmaking. “That said, snowmaking is only going to become more and more important.”

The industry sees the writing on the wall. In 2019, Vail Ski Resort bought 421 new snow guns for its mountain in Colorado, a move the resort called the “largest snowmaking expansion in North American history.” Other resorts, like Bogus Basin in Idaho, are turning to snowfarming, the practice of collecting and storing snow for the following winter.

But even efforts like these can’t completely shield companies from bad winters: Earlier this year, Vail Resorts told investors that dismal snowfall in Western states had led to a 20 percent decrease in visitation across its North American properties.

Snowfarming operations at Bogus Basin, Idaho. Last year, the ski resort covered snow in insulation over the summer. Courtesy of Bogus Basin Mountain Recreation Area

“Bad years were a real rarity, now they’re becoming more common,” said Michael Pidwirny, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who studies climate change and skiing. “They’re going to even increase more in the future, and if it’s too warm, how do you make snow?”

Snowmaking only works when it’s cold enough: The “wet bulb temperature,” a combination of humidity and air temperature, must be below 28 degrees.

Pidwirny predicts that Whistler Blackcomb, the famous Vail-owned resort in his home province, will probably “reach a situation where one out of two years are really too poor to support good skiing in about 2050 (or) 2060.”

The resorts will just have to adapt, Pidwirny said. “And the way that they’ll adapt is they’ll recognize that it’s not guaranteed that they’re going to have a ski season every year.”

Perhaps not even snowmaking can change that.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Ski resorts are increasingly reliant on snowmaking. But at what cost? on Feb 26, 2026.

Regina is haunted by the specter of mold. 

She found the insidious spores in the closet, behind the refrigerator, and around the bathtub for two years after the dishwasher flooded her apartment in Asheville, North Carolina. 

The infestation only got worse after Hurricane Helene. Rainwater rushed into her son’s third-floor bedroom at the Evergreen Ridge Apartments through gaps in the window frame, warping and discoloring the wall. After the 2024 storm, faint brown spots dotted the panes, and the trim appeared loose. When the A/C went out last summer, she worried the mess would spread in the hot, humid air. Her son has had allergic reactions to mold before, including itchy eyes and coughing, and the threat of it happening again kept her up at night. She scrubbed the apartment weekly, only to watch the spores creep back. As a single mom who works long shifts as a nurse, she felt she couldn’t keep up with the creeping damage. 

“My cabinets are falling apart,” she said. Regina, who asked that her real name not be used for fear of repercussions, walked through her bathroom, pointing out where the damp persisted. “You can touch it,” she said. “It falls apart. And that’s from water damage, obviously.”

Signs of mold and water damage permeate the complex, which is nearly a century old and once housed a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. Tenants attribute a lot of it to leaky pipes, but Helene made things worse. Though the complex was on ground high enough to avoid inundation, tenants said Helene’s more than 12 inches of rain poured through windowsills facing the west. The walls of a utility hallway were black and crumbling, a condition, tenants said, that predated Helene, but may have worsened since. Same with the ceiling in the lobby, which sagged under the weight of water damage. An overpowering, musty smell permeated the building and wafted into the apartments. There are three large buildings in the complex, where many apartments are rented by the elderly, those with disabilities, and families with young children. 

Regina’s apartment and floor show signs of leaky pipes and water intrusion – a common problem in aging rental housing throughout the Southeast.

Regina’s apartment and floor show signs of leaky pipes and water intrusion – a common problem in aging rental housing throughout the Southeast. Laura Hackett / Blue Ridge Public Radio

Regina’s apartment and floor show signs of leaky pipes and water intrusion – a common problem in aging rental housing throughout the Southeast. Laura Hackett / Blue Ridge Public Radio

Regina’s apartment and floor show signs of leaky pipes and water intrusion – a common problem in aging rental housing throughout the Southeast.

A property manager at the complex declined to comment, and its owner, Shadow Ridge Associates, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Mold is a type of fungi, which are moisture-loving in general and thrive in the kind of heat and lingering dampness residents of Evergreen Ridge describe. Outside, these organisms tend to be harmless. Black mold lives in the soil beneath our feet; spores float unnoticed through the air. But when mold infiltrates homes, it thrives in conditions many people find ideal — temperatures between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity above 70 percent. 

In the wake of the rains and floods that have repeatedly inundated the Southeast, mold is growing harder to avoid and harder to eliminate. Climate change and the impacts it brings — heavier precipitation, frequent flooding, and increased heat and humidity — are creating the perfect petri dish for mold to thrive, exposing more people to its health impacts.

Despite its prevalence, mold receives shockingly little study. It is expensive to fix, largely untracked as a public health issue, and subjected to building codes and housing safety regulations that lag behind a problem that is no longer confined to the aftermath of disasters. As mold’s ideal conditions grow more prevalent, it remains a big gray area in public knowledge, and both state and federal policy.

Regina’s health concerns finally prompted her to break her lease in December. She’s spending more than she’d like on a new place, but said the peace of mind is worth it.

IIn the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Duke University scientists saw a chance to fill some of the gaps in what we know about mold. The team, calling itself the Duke Climate and Fungi Research Group, or CLIF, went through flooded buildings in Black Mountain, North Carolina, a small town outside of Asheville, collecting air samples and scraping residue from walls. Floodwaters had reached 27 feet and left a mist that settled into homes and workplaces when they receded. Residents soon began reporting headaches, coughing, and respiratory problems.

Researchers often encounter common indoor molds like penicillium or aspergillus after a flood, but there are innumerable species, and their impacts on human health vary widely. The organisms produce a variety of chemicals. Some, called mycotoxins, remain stable in the environment, while others, known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, disappear quickly. Both can affect the human body, including the lungs, liver, and kidneys, but VOCs have been the subject of less study.

How mold affects people depends on more than just the species. It also varies with how much is present and how well-ventilated the space is. Someone’s preexisting conditions also shape their response. For most healthy adults, mold may cause mild symptoms, but for children, older adults, and those with respiratory issues or compromised immune systems, mold-related irritation and infection can be serious and persistent.

“For people with chronic respiratory illnesses or conditions like asthma, substances produced by fungi may worsen their symptoms. That’s what we’re trying to understand,” said Asiya Gusa, a microbiologist at Duke University studying the problem with CLIF.

A 1963 Center for Disease Control and Prevention radiograph shows a fungus ball in the upper lobe of the right lung — a fungal infection caused by the fungus Aspergillus.
Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images

Environmental factors beyond temperature also play a major role. It’s not just heat that aggravates mold — it’s flooding itself, according to Gusa. What once grew on riverbanks, in trees, and other outdoor locations can now be found indoors.

In addition to her work with Helene, Gusa is also studying long-running accounts of conditions like “Katrina cough,” a suite of respiratory symptoms that include a runny nose and dry cough that Louisiana residents began reporting after Hurricane Katrina.

Understanding the full, moldy picture requires more than expertise in microbiology. It also takes engineers and architects to understand how mold affects structures and test mold-resistant building materials while others analyze fungal DNA and chemical emissions. That’s why the CLIF team takes a multidisciplinary approach and includes engineers and architectural experts. “For scientists,” Gusa said, “we have, like, tunnel vision.” By working together, the team can connect the dots between flooding, building conditions, fungal growth, and human health — an approach that a single-discipline study could easily miss.

Gusa said the team is still studying the fungi the CLIF team found in Black Mountain. So far they’ve identified 65 species, from common varieties often found in water-damaged environments like aspergillus to more mycotoxic examples like ​​Penicillium citrinum. The next step, she said, is to determine if the species are in fact as dangerous to human health when they grow on different building materials. “We plan to test whether these ‘opportunistic fungi’ are resistant to antifungal drugs used to treat disease,” she added in a follow-up email.

The results of those tests could provide a better idea of the threats mold poses to human health and the role climate change might play in its propagation. When Gusa studied cryptococcus — which can infect the brains of the severely immunocompromised — in the past, she found that the heat threshold for the fungus was rising. “Their ability to change their DNA to adapt was much higher when they encountered higher temperature,” Gusa said.
Translating these findings into public health guidance will be the next challenge. Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledge general risks, but questions about which molds cause which health effects — and under what conditions — remain difficult to answer.

Mud and mildew cover the walls of a house damaged by Hurricane Helene in Swannanoa, North Carolina, as seen on September 21, 2024. Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Part of the problem is that mold’s health impacts are difficult to track. Fungi aggravate preexisting conditions and cause what are known as nonspecific symptoms like itching, sneezing, and coughing that can be hard to pinpoint and monitor. In other words, mold doesn’t cause a specific disease that health departments can easily track, said Virginia Guidry of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. People like her can only watch for increases in the respiratory ailments, infections, allergies, and other ailments that mold can exacerbate.

“We don’t actually have a great way to track mold cases because those symptoms are fairly non-specific, and it doesn’t often send people to either the doctor or to the emergency department,” Guidry said. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that mold-related symptoms show up most often in people who already have breathing problems. Among those studied, about 3.5 out of every 10,000 people with private insurance and 8.5 out of every 10,000 people on Medicaid reported mold-related symptoms.

Some residents of Evergreen Ridge Apartments report persistent sinus problems and other respiratory symptoms. Those who can afford to move have. But in a state like North Carolina, where legal protections for renters are limited and affordable housing is scarce, many people have nowhere else to go. One Evergreen resident, Dana, said she wakes up every morning with congestion, something she began experiencing after moving in three years ago. It started occurring nightly after Helene, and she regularly coughs up mucus each morning.

“I don’t want to have to wake up every day like that,” said Dana, who asked that her real name not be used for fear of repercussions from her landlord.

Asheville remediation expert Dylan Hunt, who works for a company called Green Home Solutions, has seen extreme weather cause an explosion of household mold. After Helene, he saw black mold appear in places it hadn’t before. Even minor flooding can trigger growth within 24 to 48 hours if it isn’t cleaned up immediately — and when water damage goes unnoticed, mold can continue spreading for months. Depending on how much water a home takes on and how humid it stays inside, spores can spread throughout an entire house within weeks, turning what might have been a small cleanup into a much larger problem.

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The crisis grew worse over the summer. The region saw a long stretch of hot, humid weather, including Asheville’s hottest July on record (tied with the summer of 1993). Homes that hadn’t experienced flooding started smelling musty, and Hunt’s phone began ringing with complaints of damaged furniture, headaches, and coughs. Drainage pathways shifted after Helene, changing how water moves through the area. Now even light rain can cause water intrusion in some homes.

“Water’s hitting homes in places where it hasn’t hit before,” Hunt said. “A lot of homes, especially the lower levels of homes, will just erupt in a coating of white, fuzzy mold.” Because the damage isn’t always immediate or visible, some people wait months to respond. By then, what might have been a $5,000 cleanup might have grown into a $30,000 remediation project — a frightful amount of money, especially when insurance isn’t always an option. Most companies won’t cover the problem unless it’s the result of a “covered peril” like a burst pipe. 

Despite mounting costs and health concerns, mold remains largely unregulated. The EPA does not have an exposure limit, so there’s no federal support for mold testing. Instead, states are left to decide how seriously to take the problem — with about 15 setting their own standards. 

That lack of oversight can leave renters with few options. For some, it can even mean starting over. When Helene flooded the three-bedroom house they rented near the French Broad River, Ginger and Amanda Simmons packed up and left. More than a year later, their search for a home has become a frustrating cycle of hope followed by doubt. Many of the rentals they have toured show signs of water damage — a particular concern because their 8-year-old daughter is sensitive to mold and has a history of respiratory problems. In several cases, a place smelled musty or affected their breathing within 20 minutes of being inside.

“I’m nervous to get a rental out here because at this point so many of these houses have had water damage,” Ginger said. “I just don’t know if the owners will disclose it, or fix it, or even know about it.”

When remediation is delayed, incomplete, or simply does not occur, tenants are often left with few options. In North Carolina, the main recourse is to request, in writing, that the property owner address the problem. Turning that into a repair is often an uphill battle, said David Bartholomew, an attorney with Pisgah Legal Services in Asheville.

Because of the high cost, property owners are sometimes reluctant to address the problem, especially in the absence of enforcement. 

For renters, requesting a repair means asking a landlord to incur serious expense — and because there’s no federal mold exposure standard, not every state or municipality is ready to back renters up when that happens.

An old utility hallway in an Asheville apartment complex shows mold growth pre-dating Hurricane Helene. Laura Hackett / Blue Ridge Public Radio

Bartholomew guessed that there are “easily thousands of people” in Western North Carolina who have had mold issues exacerbated by Helene. Since last spring, he’s seen a 35 percent increase in mold-related legal cases from residents throughout the region. The lack of state and city laws overseeing mold places a heavier burden on tenants seeking remediation, he said.

Tenants must show that a landlord has a duty to rectify the problem, and prove who is at fault, he said. They must also document harm, often with expert testimony about the type of mold involved and medical records showing health impacts and costs. “That can be difficult,” he said.

For tenants living in moldy homes, the risk has become a worry somewhere between bills, work, and life’s other demands, one that grows insidiously with time. As heavier rains and longer stretches of hot, humid weather settle into the South, that mold is becoming less an isolated household problem and more a predictable consequence of a changing climate — one advancing faster than the protections meant to keep pace with it.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A hotter, wetter South is becoming a breeding ground for mold on Feb 25, 2026.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday about whether state or federal court will have the final say on the future of the controversial Line 5 pipeline, which carries crude oil and natural gas liquids across the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan.

The case dates to a 2019 lawsuit by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who moved to shut down the pipeline by revoking the easement that allows it to cross the Straits, citing risks to the Great Lakes. (Over its 73-year lifetime, Line 5 has spilled over a million gallons of oil along its inland route.) A shutdown is supported by all 12 federally recognized tribes in Michigan, though they are not involved in the suit. Many tribal nations say the pipeline threatens their waters, treaty rights, and ways of life.

On Tuesday, the justices asked tough questions of both the attorney general’s team as well as lawyers representing the Canadian pipeline company, Enbridge Energy, on the opposing side. Though the question before the Supreme Court is a procedural one — whether courts can excuse Enbridge from missing the deadline to request moving the case to federal court — the justices recognized that the decision could have far-reaching ripples, including for U.S.-Canada relations. (The Canadian government opposes the pipeline’s shutdown, as Line 5 provides half of the oil supply for Ontario and Quebec.)

“If this proceeds in state court, and the state court issues a preliminary injunction against continued operation of the pipeline, it could be a long time before this issue involving treaty rights, which is a federal question, could be reviewed here,” noted Justice Samuel Alito.

Since 1953, Line 5 has transported oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario — with a critical 4 1/2-mile segment along the bottomlands in the Straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan. Enbridge wants to move the case to the federal court, which the company argues is better suited to weigh in on federal pipeline safety regulations and international agreements.

On the opposing side, Nessel argues that Line 5 belongs in state court because the pipeline concerns state laws around the use of natural resources for the good of the public. Nessel and anti-pipeline groups worry about the environmental, economic, and health consequences of an oil spill in the Great Lakes.

Ryan Duffy, a spokesperson for Enbridge, said in a statement before the oral arguments that there would be “significant implications for energy security and foreign affairs if the attorney general continues to pursue the lawsuit now in state court.”

Enbridge first argued that the case should be moved to federal court in 2021, sparking litigation around whether the company had missed the typical 30-day deadline to change venues. A federal district court judge in western Michigan ruled in favor of Enbridge due to “exceptional circumstances” around related lawsuits involving the pipeline. However, later the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court ruled in favor of the state.

Read Next The Supreme Court hears a Line 5 oil pipeline case with high stakes for treaty rights Anita Hofschneider

On Tuesday, Enbridge lawyer John Bursch compared the deadline to a statute of limitations and argued that exceptional circumstances could justify an extension.

“I don’t think it was clear to anyone that there was necessarily federal jurisdiction at the outset of the state court case,” Bursch said.

Ann Sherman, a lawyer representing the state attorney general, argued that the 30-day deadline is a firm rule on court venue, unlike the statute of limitations. “Enbridge seeks an atextual escape hatch,” she said.

A decision from the Supreme Court on Line 5’s jurisdiction is expected before the court term ends in summer. If the court rules in favor of Michigan, it would uphold the Sixth Circuit’s decision that Enbridge missed the deadline and make Line 5 an issue for state court, said Andy Buchsbaum, a lecturer at the University of Michigan Law School.

However, “if the court decides that there is wiggle room in the 30-day deadline, there’s lots of ways this could go,” he said. The justices would likely settle on a standard allowing the deadline to be excused. From there, they could ask the Sixth Circuit to reevaluate the facts of the case with the new standard in mind, as Enbridge’s lawyer argued before the Supreme Court. Or the justices could apply their own standard and come to a decision for or against the state.

“To know what’s at stake and hear the court considering that just on a procedural basis, gives me a lot of concerns,” said Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, after oral arguments. The tribal nation in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is involved in separate litigation against Line 5.

“Line 5 continues to remain a clear and present danger to the Great Lakes and every tribal nation in every community that relies on them,” Gravelle said.

While the Supreme Court case plays out, Enbridge is moving ahead with plans to replace the existing dual-pipeline infrastructure in the Straits with a tunnel that would house a new segment buried under the lakebed. The company is awaiting permits from federal and state agencies. Separately, next month the Michigan Supreme Court will consider a lawsuit from tribes and environmental groups seeking to overturn an existing state permit.

Enbridge insists that Line 5 is safe and the tunnel project would make the pipeline segment even safer. Line 5 opponents like Liz Kirkwood, executive director of the Michigan-based legal nonprofit For Love of Water, disagree.

“We should be thinking about the future and the transition away from fossil fuel. And move towards a future that is sustainable and more equitable,” Kirkwood said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tough Supreme Court hearing brings little clarity on Line 5 pipeline’s fate on Feb 25, 2026.

When the developer Novva first announced that it was building Utah’s largest data center campus just south of Salt Lake City, the company’s CEO touted the many advantages of the region: among them a low risk of disasters, an expanding international airport, no sales tax on equipment, and the high altitude cold of the desert landscape, which would help keep cooling costs down. Perhaps most importantly, power would be cheap. Utah has some of the lowest electricity costs in the country. 

“We believe Utah is a hidden gem for one of the largest wholesale colocation campuses in the United States,” CEO and founder Wes Swenson said in a 2020 press release. 

But the company quickly ran into trouble. Rocky Mountain Power, the local utility, was not able to provide the full amount of energy that the data center needed until 2031 — and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. How exactly that power would be transmitted to the remote facility was also uncertain. 

Locked out of options with Rocky Mountain, Novva decided to build its own natural gas plant near its data center to provide 200 megawatts of power. But even that would take until 2027. By 2025, with the generative artificial intelligence explosion in full swing, Novva had secured a contract with a so-called hyperscaler — the tech industry term that refers to one of the massive companies building out global cloud computing. That undisclosed customer wanted to use the facility as soon as possible. So Novva turned to a solution that, despite being inefficient and highly polluting, could be deployed much more quickly: a fleet of diesel- and gas-fired generators.

To operate these generators — which produce nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and far more carbon dioxide emissions than a typical natural gas plant per unit of energy — Novva would need permission from the state. The permits it received from the Utah Division of Air Quality came with strict limits. They capped the volume of emissions the gas-fired generators could produce, and the diesel generators could only be operated 42 hours a year.

With these limits on its ability to satisfy the hyperscaler’s extreme demand for power, in March of last year, Novva appealed to a higher authority: President Donald Trump. 

The EPA had just announced that it would consider providing so-called presidential exemptions to companies requesting reprieves from environmental regulations, and Novva jumped at the opportunity. A company representative wrote to the EPA arguing that exempting the data center from Clean Air Act standards was in the United States’ national security interests. (The federal agency had created a special email account just to field the companies’ requests.) As one of the largest data center clusters, it could help the administration with its stated goal to ensure that AI is responsibly developed, the representative noted. At the time, DeepSeek-R1, China’s answer to ChatGPT, had recently been released, fueling concerns that the U.S. adversary’s AI capabilities were rapidly catching up.  

“We ask that you provide this exemption to assist in ensuring the United States’ Al supremacy,” the letter reads.  

Read Next Data centers are scrambling to power the AI boom with natural gas Naveena Sadasivam & Jake Bittle

Novva’s plea was one of hundreds submitted to the EPA’s presidential exemption inbox last spring. Grist obtained copies of these letters by filing a records request under the Freedom of Information Act. The vast majority were submitted by coal-fired power plant operators, refineries, petcoke plants, medical sterilizers, and steel manufacturers. Novva was one of two data center developers that requested exemptions. The other, Thunderhead Energy Solutions, requested exemptions for 11 data centers consuming a combined 23 gigawatts of energy across Texas, Montana, and Illinois.

Thunderhead’s request was far more brazen than Novva’s. It proposed building a 5,000-megawatt gas-fired plant in Winkler County in West Texas — a facility far larger than the state’s largest power plant, the roughly 3,700-megawatt W.A. Parish Generating Station. So far, the company has only publicly announced plans for a 250-megawatt plant in neighboring Ector County.

Novva sought a two-year exemption to run 96 diesel generators without any limits while it finishes construction of its natural gas plant, which already has approval from the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. But company CEO Wes Swenson told The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist that he never heard back from the feds and wasn’t granted the exemption. Whatever power it currently uses is primarily sourced from the grid.

But these exemption requests demonstrate some of the challenges that data center developers eager to capitalize on the AI boom are facing — and the steps they’re considering to circumvent regulatory hurdles. In the rush to secure power, many companies are installing solar arrays and batteries on-site in addition to building their own natural gas plants and deploying fleets of inefficient generators. This type of “behind-the-meter” generation is becoming increasingly common, with at least 54 data centers using this approach, according to one analysis.

Novva’s data center campus lies in the greater Salt Lake City metropolitan area, which is regularly plagued by so-called wintertime inversion pollution, an event where warm mountain air traps colder air and pollution in the valley. The area also grapples with summertime ozone smog, which forms when pollutants get baked by the sun. A spokesperson for Utah’s air quality regulator said the agency wasn’t aware of Novva’s attempt to obtain relief from federal regulations, which the state is charged with enforcing.

Read Next To power Utah’s data center boom, companies are turning to fossil fuels Leia Larsen

Swenson said he learned of the possibility of Clean Air Act immunity after his “webcrawlers picked it up.” He asserted that Trump created the presidential exemption for Elon Musk, after the billionaire built a data center in Memphis and was granted exemptions from permitting requirements. (In fact, it’s not clear if Musk’s company ever applied for federal relief, and it may be unlikely given that it was granted a separate exemption by local regulators.)

“To fast track it, they created that exemption,” Swenson said. “Why wouldn’t we apply?”

Though Novva did not receive its exemption, an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund found that of the more than 500 exemption requests that the organization was able to obtain records for, roughly a third were granted. (The group did not have complete information for an additional one-third of requests.)

The ultimate status of Thunderhead Energy’s request is uncertain; a representative for Thunderhead did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the EPA said the agency “played no role” in determining whether to grant the exemptions and directed questions to the White House. The White House directed questions back to the EPA.

The EPA required that companies applying for exemptions meet two criteria: establish that the technology to comply with the Clean Air Act rule in question is not available, and that the facility’s operation is in the national security interests of the country. The data center developers claimed they met both criteria. Novva claimed that by granting the exemption, “the United States makes a significant step forward to ‘tackl[ing] some of the world’s most pressing challenges’” while Thunderhead made the argument that its projects were “significantly accelerating national security-related computing capacity.”

“Almost everybody would claim it’s some kind of national security issue,” Swenson said in an interview. “American data should stay in America.”

Both companies also claimed that they had installed the best available technology to curb emissions but still needed an exemption to emit above allowable limits. Novva’s air quality permit from the state sets strict caps on emissions of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds. The technology to meet those requirements while installing additional generators just wasn’t available, the company claimed in its letter.

“For Novva to be able to install any additional diesel-fired generators, the associated control technologies would have to be so effective that each additional generator would effectively have zero emissions,” the company noted. “Currently, a control technology this effective is not available.”

Novva’s natural gas plant is expected to be operational in the coming months. The company is currently working on upgrading its state air quality permit. If the company is able to secure the updated permit, it will likely be allowed to increase its emissions. 

Leia Larsen contributed reporting to this story.

Editor’s note: Environmental Defense Fund is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers play no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These data center developers asked Trump for an exemption from pollution rules on Feb 24, 2026.

In Utah’s rural Millard County, Kalen Taylor is bracing for the day when the farmland across the street from his home transforms into a sprawling data center complex. 

The initial plans for Joule Capital Partners’ 4,000-acre data center site call for six buildings, each powered by 69 Caterpillar natural gas-powered generators to meet the intensive energy demands. Construction is slated to begin this spring. Once built, Taylor will likely hear the equivalent of more than 400 semi-trucks idling in his neighborhood around the clock, producing emissions year-round. 

“I just would rather look out my back door and see cornfields than a data center,” Taylor said. “I like the sound of crops rustling in the wind, not the hum of a [Caterpillar] generator making power.”

Farther north, officials in the city of Eagle Mountain have turned to massive data centers operated by tech giants like Meta to provide much-needed tax revenue. But even in this urban, rapidly growing part of the state, developers struggle to secure the power they need from Utah’s largest electric utility, Rocky Mountain Power. Google has delayed building a campus there as a result of these energy constraints. That prompted Eagle Mountain’s City Council to explore building small nuclear reactors, to the consternation of many residents.

“It means our city would become a radioactive storage site,” said Joy Rasmussen, a mom of four who bought a home in Eagle Mountain in 2022.

Last May, in Washington, D.C., Senator John Curtis, one of the state’s two Republican senators, spoke glowingly to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, about Utah’s aspirations to lead the nation “with data centers and advanced technologies” during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on artificial intelligence. Curtis noted the “challenges” that come with data centers’ insatiable energy demands. How, the senator asked, can the state protect ratepayers?

“The best way,” Altman responded, “is much more supply. More generation.”

With the growing demand for more data centers, Utah finds itself in a difficult position. State and federal officials have called AI the “arms race” of a new era, as the country looks to fend off China and forge its place as the world’s leader in technology, energy, and innovation. And Utah looks to position itself at the forefront of that fight.

The site for the Joule Energy Data Center Campus on February 5, 2026.
Rick Egan / The Salt Lake Tribune

Since 2021, Utah has added or announced plans for at least 15 new data center buildings or campuses, according to Data Center Map, joining the thousands of new data centers planned around the country.

The state’s main electricity provider, Rocky Mountain Power, doesn’t have the capacity to meet the surge in energy demand. Data center developers have instead turned to generating their own electricity, mostly using natural gas. Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, has zeroed in on nuclear as a cleaner energy solution as part of his Operation Gigawatt, an effort to more than double Utah’s power generation in the next decade.

That collision of the AI boom and limited power supplies means Utah’s rush to build data centers is likely to rely on fossil fuel energy for the foreseeable future, raising concerns about the state’s already struggling air quality. Alternative sources won’t match the demand the centers generate — potentially as much as four times what Utah residents and businesses currently consume. Small nuclear plants are at least a decade away, while the Trump administration has curtailed many incentives for solar and wind power.

Lawmakers and regulators are trying to balance the needs of energy-intensive industries without ratepayers feeling the environmental and pocketbook pains felt in other parts of the country —  like rising energy bills and polluted air and water.

“We’re kind of in a big mess right now,” said Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and energy analyst for Utah Clean Energy, “and it’s manifesting in all of these different ways.”

Rocky Mountain Power, like many private utility providers in the United States, has a monopoly as the sole electricity provider in much of Utah, but it must yield to state regulation. For decades, power providers hummed along as energy demand across the country stayed relatively flat. Conflict arose, however, when platforms like Altman’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Elon Musk’s Grok made AI a mass-market good rather than a niche product. Demand for more data centers gripped the globe, and the utilities, which plan for energy needs decades in advance, were caught unprepared and undersupplied.

Data centers use substantial amounts of energy, with rows of servers computing day and night for services that are an increasing part of daily life — streaming services, online banking, e-commerce, and the rise of AI. In arid Utah, many data centers have pivoted away from water-guzzling evaporative cooling in favor of closed-loop systems, which require much less water but more electricity to run.

Last year, the Utah Legislature passed Senate Bill 132, allowing private companies that need 100 megawatts or more to build their own generating stations that operate off the public grid used by nearly everyone else. The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Scott Sandall, a Republican, specifically cited data centers as he promoted the legislation.

“It kind of un-handcuffs Rocky Mountain Power to provide these loads for data centers, for AI, for large manufacturers,” Sandall said, “those that are coming in, and quite frankly, changing the curve of power demand.”

In Millard County, both Joule and Creekstone Energy intend to build their own massive facilities, powered by natural gas. Mark McDougal, a managing partner of Joule’s campus, said that burning natural gas is efficient and a proven technology that can run around the clock.

“We are so excited for other alternative energy sources like geothermal and solar and wind and someday, maybe even nuclear,” McDougal said. “But we can’t wait for that.”

Mark McDougal, the landowner and executive behind the massive data center complex under construction in Millard County, talks about the project at his office in Lehi in December 2025.
Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune

The developers received support from the Millard County government because of their potential to create jobs in construction, maintenance, and security, and also to boost economic development. The rural community in central Utah lost its largest employer, the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant, in 2023 — it accounted for about a quarter of all jobs in the county. The idling of the nearby Intermountain Power Plant’s remaining coal units also caused a hemorrhaging of local jobs.

Construction of the massive sites is sure to bring some jobs, but data centers generally employ a relatively small number of permanent workers.

Millard County’s location is attractive to data center developers because it lies on a fiber-optic corridor and near a natural gas pipeline. “Having both of those in the same place,” said Ray Conley, Creekstone’s CEO, “and not having a large metropolitan area that is competing for power is a very unique combo.”

The rural county also lies outside the Wasatch Front, Utah’s urban corridor and an area plagued for years by poor air quality that falls short of federal standards. In the winter, a layer of warm air, known as an inversion, keeps cooler, polluted city air trapped near the ground like a lid on a pot. 

“It’s so hard where you have inversions and trap emissions,” McDougal said. In Millard County, “emissions are able to disperse.”

Joule’s applications filed with the state indicate it will produce 1 gigawatt to start — about a quarter of the electricity Utah currently uses annually. But its own public statements indicate it eventually intends to produce more than 4 gigawatts onsite. Creekstone, less than a mile away, intends to produce 10 gigawatts, Conley confirmed.

At least a few computing campuses want to build natural gas plants on the Wasatch Front, too, despite its inversions and air quality challenges. QTS Data Centers received approval from the Eagle Mountain City Council to build a 20-acre, 200-megawatt gas plant last year, although a company spokesperson said it secured power from Rocky Mountain instead.

In West Jordan, the expanding Novva data campus received state approval to build a 200-megawatt natural gas plant in December 2024. But “natural gas” is an old greenwashing term, Mitchell said, and an attempt to make the fossil fuel sound more environmentally friendly. The fuel is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Burning it produces carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants. Nitrogen oxides mix in the atmosphere, get baked by the sun, and turn into particulate pollution in the winter and ozone pollution in the summer.

The pollutants create haze in rural parts of the state and cloud visibility at Utah’s famed national parks, from Arches to Zion.

Even data centers on the Wasatch Front that have already tapped into Utah’s existing power grid have received state approval to install hundreds of diesel-fueled generators in the last five years, including QTS, Meta, and the National Security Agency in Utah County; and eBay, Aligned, DataBank, Oracle, and Novva in Salt Lake County. Those generators would only run during blackouts and other emergencies when their campuses can’t get enough grid power, according to permit applications. But diesel emissions contain even more harmful pollutants than natural gas.

Inversion conditions in the Salt Lake Valley in 2024. Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune

In November, the federal government removed northern Utah from its list of regions out of compliance for wintertime inversion pollution after more than a decade, thanks to state efforts like banning wood burning on poor air quality days combined with stricter federal regulations on vehicles and fuel. But it continues to struggle with meeting national limits for ozone smog.

The new data centers coming online, with their diesel and natural gas generators, could bump the state right back out of compliance, environmental advocates say. “They’re eating into all of the progress we’ve made to reduce emissions from other sources,” said Mitchell from Utah Clean Energy.

State regulators said they’re not just concerned about temporary diesel generators and year-round natural gas generators taking a bite against air quality gains in recent years.

“We’re concerned about all growth,” said Bryce Bird, director of the Utah Division of Air Quality. “Everything that has to do with people also has emissions associated with it.”

State officials said growth and its associated emissions doesn’t mean Utah can’t be a tech leader. But the state’s still figuring out how to strike the right balance between affordable energy creation, environmental protection, and improving public health.

“I don’t know of a state that is not having similar conversations,” said Tim Davis, the Department of Environmental Quality’s executive director. “That’s just a mind-numbing amount of new power that they’re trying to plan for.”

Novva applied to the Trump administration for a two-year exemption from the Clean Air Act in March, under a program designed to benefit coal plants, smelting facilities, and chemical manufacturers. The company asked for the exemption so it could operate using diesel generators while it finishes building its natural gas plant, according to records obtained by Grist and shared with The Salt Lake Tribune.

Read Next These data center developers asked Trump for an exemption from pollution rules Naveena Sadasivam

The company noted that Rocky Mountain Power can’t provide the electricity it needs until 2031, and even then, it’s not guaranteed. The requested exemption aligns with national security interests, Novva wrote in its application, citing the U.S. Department of State’s assertion that AI is “at the center of an unfolding global technology revolution” and can help make Americans safer.

Novva’s CEO, Wes Swenson, said he never received a response to the exemption request. He insisted, however, that data centers like his are important for protecting “American data.” “If anybody wants to criticize data centers, look in the mirror,” Swenson said. “‘I want Netflix, I want Prime, I want Apple TV.’ … Nobody goes to the library anymore. Who uses cash? Where do people think that all comes from?”

Utah’s elected officials have honed in on nuclear power, and small modular reactors in particular, as a cleaner and more sustainable solution to the surge in energy demand. The need is not just driven by data centers, but also a hoped-for renaissance in manufacturing and the future electrification of Utah’s transportation. But Rocky Mountain’s parent company, PacifiCorp, only has firm plans for one small reactor — a plant under construction by TerraPower in Kemmerer, Wyoming. It won’t come online until around 2032, and Utah will share its projected 500 megawatts with other Western states.

Enthusiasm for small nuclear reactors within Utah’s borders appears tepid. Brigham City is the only community so far to proclaim it wants to build them. But in making that announcement in November, state leaders were light on specifics in explaining why the small city needs the power. No known data centers are planned for the area.

Ninety minutes south in Eagle Mountain, Meta’s data campus is expanding, QTS’s huge data hub is under construction, and Google is waiting to build on 300 acres it owns within city limits. The city made two attempts last year to adopt an ordinance to allow for nuclear development and other energy projects, including solar farms. After receiving mixed feedback, the efforts failed.

A data center, being built by QTS, begins to take shape west of the Meta facility in Eagle Mountain, Utah, on December 30, 2025.
Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune

Elected officials’ pivot to nuclear has environmental and clean energy advocates wondering why Utah has shied away from renewables. Cox calls his Operation Gigawatt an “all-of-the-above” strategy that welcomes all energy sources. But resources like wind and solar have faded from the conversation.

“People see renewable energy as the woke liberal energy, and we have to stick with fossil fuels and nuclear, because that’s what conservatives want,” said Ed Stafford, a professor of marketing at Utah State University whose research focuses on renewables. “Politicization of energy is just a bad thing, because, as common sense tells us, we should go with the cleanest and cheapest forms of energy that spreads the wealth around.”

PacifiCorp intends to bring no new solar, wind, or battery storage online in Utah over the next two decades, according to the latest draft of its long-term resource plan. Meanwhile, the utility isn’t factoring large energy consumers, like data centers, into its projections, to Mitchell’s frustration.

“Rocky Mountain Power should be planning for the reality of the future,” Mitchell said, “rather than creating a fictional reality that indicates they don’t have much load growth, and they’re not going to build new resources.”

A spokesperson for the utility said their future planning does include some customer requests for large loads. “We generally model only projects that have a high probability of being constructed,” the spokesperson said. “Many of the large load inquiries the company receives have a high degree of uncertainty.”

Data center developers and operators interviewed for this story said they support transitioning to cleaner energy sources. But they also need consistent and reliable power, when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. The Trump administration has delayed and stifled renewable energy projects across the United States. 

“The economic rebates and incentives are going away, which is why it’s not as in fashion as it was before,” said Conley, Creekstone’s CEO. “But a lot of [data] customers are willing to pay a premium for green energy instead of dirty energy.”

The site for the Creekstone Energy Data Center Campus on February 5, 2026.
Rick Egan / The Salt Lake Tribune

Conley’s company recently applied to the Utah Office of Energy Development to operate the Intermountain Power Plant’s remaining coal units, which went idle this year after the plant’s customer base in California decided to transition to cleaner energy sources. Coal offers Conley another energy source that’s ready to deploy besides natural gas. “Diversification,” Conley said, “reduces risk.”

Risk is at the forefront of at least some Utahns’ minds, particularly as news stories cite concerns that data centers will drive up the cost of power for all ratepayers. Utilities build new generating plants and upgrade decades-old grid equipment to meet rising demand, then spread the costs among all their customers. An October report, “What we know about energy use at U.S. data centers amid the AI boom,” from the Pew Research Center, estimated that both data centers and cryptocurrency mining could cause the average U.S. electric bill to grow 8 percent by 2030.

In Utah, however, Senate Bill 132 seems to serve a dual purpose of helping data center developers get the energy they need off the public grid and behind the meter, while protecting other customers who still use the traditional grid.

“There’s very little evidence that data centers have impacted rates to date,” said Michele Beck, director of the Office of Consumer Services, a utility watchdog part of the Utah Department of Commerce.

Beck called the bill one of the “best ideas out there” for protecting power customers in the nation. But, she said, it’s important for Utahns to remain vigilant. It’s not just utilities struggling to catch up to new demand. Regulators have struggled to keep pace, too.

“The industry in general is speeding up,” Beck said. “It just compounds everything.”

Grist reporter Naveena Sadasivam and Tribune reporter Addy Baird contributed to this story. 

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 '); 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 To power Utah’s data center boom, companies are turning to fossil fuels on Feb 24, 2026.

Forests are great and all, but in one way, they don’t come close to the raw power of peatlands. Sprawling in the Arctic and elsewhere, like tropical regions, these soils are loaded with plant matter that’s resisting decay, turning into ultra-concentrated carbon. Though they comprise just 3 percent of Earth’s area, peatlands store 600 billion metric tons of the stuff — more than all the planet’s forests combined — making them critical tools for preventing even more global warming.

On the face of it, then, we might welcome the findings of a new study that shows these carbon sinks are indeed expanding in the Arctic, as scientists have suspected. The region is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, encouraging the growth of plants, just as precipitation up there is also increasing, creating waterlogged conditions that slow decomposition. But the carbon stored in all that new vegetation could still one day return to the atmosphere as a sort of carbon burp, and the degradation of peatlands threatens to release loads of planet-warming gas sooner than that. 

“What is clear is that the more extreme climatic changes that we have, the more likely it is that they will release more carbon into the atmosphere,” said Angela Gallego-Sala, a biogeochemist at the University of Exeter and coauthor of the paper, which published earlier this month. “We see already in extreme dry years, these peatlands are going up in fire.”

Blame this on a phenomenon known as Arctic greening. As the far north warms, it loses ice on land and sea, which exposes darker earth and water, which absorb more of the sun’s energy, which drives more warming. This encourages the northward expansion of plant species, especially shrubs, which take advantage of warmer temperatures and increased rainfall. (That’s also due in part to decreased sea ice: Without that glare bouncing sunlight back into space, more seawater evaporates, loading the atmosphere with moisture.) “Things are getting greener, but they’re also getting wetter,” said paleoecologist Josie Handley, lead author of the paper, who did the research while at the University of Exeter but is now at the University of Cambridge. “That’s all really good conditions for the formation of peat.”

Extra plant material, especially sphagnum moss, is contributing to this expansion, the study found. Because peat is difficult to identify by satellite — given that it’s accumulating belowground, unlike a forest standing tall on the surface — the researchers had to venture into the Arctic, sampling the ground in transects. And because the vegetation accumulates year by year in layers, they could determine the age of the material by dating both the carbon and lead content. 

Handley and Gallego-Sala found that indeed, peatlands have been expanding in these areas in recent decades, and they may now cover a greater area than anytime in the last three centuries. But there’s also a feedback loop here, in which peat becomes self-sustaining: Because sphagnum moss excels at retaining water, even when dead, it hydrates the landscape, providing conditions for yet more moss to accumulate and resist decay. 

At the same time, frozen soil, called permafrost, is thawing, unlocking still more ancient carbon long locked in ice. Glaciers, too, are receding, opening more land for peat to colonize. “If you’ve got areas where you can retain that moisture,” Handley said, “and it gets more waterlogged, and then also if you’ve got the kind of fringes are greening because there’s more plant productivity and that sort of thing going on, then you meet all your components to make your peat.”

Indeed, the researchers found that peatlands can start as small “nuclei” that, if conditions are correct, expand and eventually merge with other nuclei. And as the Arctic warms, the growing season is lengthening, giving all this moss longer to grow and accumulate. “What’s really interesting is that they’re also showing that it isn’t all climate, that it’s also sort of local hydrology can help initiate the formation the peat,” said Mike Waddington, an ecohydrologist who studies peat at McMaster University but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “They’re hypothesizing that the peatlands, although they’re quite shallow, also are creating the conditions to continue to accumulate peat.”

Just as the Arctic and boreal regions are warming, extreme heat is periodically drying them out. That’s driving massive wildfires that are chewing through shrubs and trees, but also burning up dried peat. These extraordinarily persistent fires smolder for weeks or even months, releasing carbon all the while. They’re so relentless, in fact, that they’ll burn underground as snow covers them through the winter, only to pop up again in the spring. Hence their nickname “zombie fires.”

We’ve got an elemental tug of war, then: As the far north rapidly and radically changes, how much carbon will these expanding peatlands sequester in the Earth, but how quickly will that carbon return to the atmosphere if these new peatlands dry out and catch fire? Only time — and scientists traipsing through the Arctic — will tell.   

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a greening Arctic might be kick-starting a dangerous feedback loop  on Feb 24, 2026.

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today about a narrow procedural issue that could determine whether Michigan or federal courts ultimately decide the fate of a 73-year-old oil pipeline that many tribal nations say threatens their waters, treaty rights, and ways of life.

The case, Enbridge v. Nessel, centers on Line 5, a 645-mile oil pipeline that starts in Superior, Wisconsin, snakes through Michigan, and concludes in Ontario, Canada. More than half a million barrels of oil and natural gas flow through it daily. The pipeline has leaked more than 30 times inland, spilling over a million gallons of oil collectively. All 12 federally recognized tribes in Michigan have called for it to be shut down. 

The Straits of Mackinac, where the pipeline crosses between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, are ecologically sensitive and sacred to the Ashininaabe peoples as the waters are the center of their creation story. Five tribal nations also hold treaty rights to fish and hunt in these waters, rights that predate Michigan’s statehood and are protected by federal law. 

But tribes are not parties in this particular case, which started in 2019, when Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued to shut down the pipeline.

“What’s at stake on Tuesday is the authority for the state of Michigan to manage state resources and public trust matters like the lakebed,” said David Gover, Pawnee and Choctaw managing attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, which along with Earthjustice represents the Bay Mills Indian Community in its advocacy against Line 5. “It’s state sovereignty and what is the state’s ability to manage and protect their resources.”

The specific question before the court is narrow but consequential: Was a lower court right to allow Enbridge to move the case from Michigan state court to federal court more than two years after the typical 30-day deadline for such a request had passed? A year after Nessel sued, the state formally revoked the pipeline’s approval to operate, citing fishing and hunting rights and the 1836 Treaty of Washington, and warning that an oil spill in the Straits “would have severe, adverse impacts for tribal communities.” 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer sued Enbridge to enforce the revocation, but chose to drop her suit in 2021 to support the attorney general’s case in state court. A federal court then allowed Enbridge to move the state case to federal court, citing “exceptional circumstances.” Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether that was appropriate.

“Indian law cases often turn on gateway doctrines like standing, jurisdiction, and removal before courts ever reach treaty interpretation,” said Wenona Singel, citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at Michigan State University’s College of Law. “Those procedural rulings can quietly shape outcomes. … When infrastructure operates in waters protected by treaty rights, litigation delay has environmental and cultural consequences. A procedural extension can mean years before a court reaches the underlying substance of the case.”

Debbie Chizewer, managing attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, said an estimated 40 million people rely on the Great Lakes for freshwater and could be harmed by an oil spill. The Great Lakes hold a fifth of all the surface freshwater on Earth. “This case is really about Michigan’s ability to protect the Great Lakes from an outdated Canadian oil pipeline that’s threatening to rupture,” she said. 

Enbridge argues that concerns about pollution in the Great Lakes are overblown, noting that Line 5 continues to pass safety inspections and federal regulators have not identified any safety issues with its continued operation. The company also emphasizes that shutting down the pipeline would affect energy and foreign affairs: Line 5 supplies half the oil that Ontario and Quebec rely on, and the Canadian government opposes its closure. “The Supreme Court’s review will provide needed clarity,” an Enbridge spokesperson said.

Tuesday’s arguments are only one part of a sprawling legal and regulatory battle over Line 5. Enbridge has a separate federal lawsuit against Michigan Governor Whitmer arguing that the governor doesn’t have the right to shut down the pipeline. In March, the Michigan State Supreme Court will consider a lawsuit from several tribes and environmental groups who want to overturn a state permit to allow Enbridge to build a new tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac. Federal and state agencies are currently mulling over additional permits for the same rerouting project. 

And last week, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa asked a Wisconsin state court to review yet another permit allowing Enbridge to reroute Line 5 through their watershed. 

“The Band River watershed is not an oil pipeline corridor that exists to serve Enbridge’s profits,” said Bad River Band Chairwoman Elizabeth Arbuckle. “It is our homeland. We must protect it.”  

Wenona Singel, from Michigan State University, said while the case before the U.S. Supreme Court won’t redefine treaty rights, it still matters to Indian Country. 

“It may influence how easily powerful defendants can change courts in litigation,” she said, “and how long communities must wait for judicial resolution.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court hears a Line 5 oil pipeline case with high stakes for treaty rights on Feb 24, 2026.

For those coaxing thirsty crops like alfalfa from the parched fields and withered pasturelands in Eloy, Arizona, water is as good as gold — and just as scarce. “We’ve had nothing from the Colorado River for the last two or three years. I mean, we’ve had to cut back the volumes to the growers and have had to reduce acres and stuff to make it work,” said Ron McEachern, former general manager of the Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District, which serves the Eloy area.

The agricultural hub draws from the Colorado River basin through a vast canal network, but drought, overexploitation, and aging irrigation equipment are draining what little remains. “We got gates that are leaking and leaking downstream,” McEachern said. “The water spills and it spills, and nobody’s getting any use out of it.”

Nearly two years ago, the irrigation district was invited to apply to a new non-competitive grant program that the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Biden administration was launching to help farmers in areas grappling with devastating droughts. McEachern collaborated with the federal agency to identify what his team would do with the grant: replace and upgrade the 35-year-old deteriorating radial arm gates in their local canal system. The district needed the components to more precisely regulate water levels in the canals, but they are much too expensive for them to buy and install on their own.

Then, in late 2024, they got the break they’d been hoping for. The Central Arizona operation was one of 18 irrigation districts spread across 12 western states initially selected to receive up to $15 million each from the USDA. The agency’s Water-Saving Commodities program also earmarked grants for three tribal communities and two state associations of conservation districts. In total, the USDA planned to spend a $400 million pool of funds on the initiative. 

Gloria Montaño Greene, who served during the Biden administration as Deputy Under Secretary for USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation, told Grist that the idea for the program started back in 2021, as severe drought conditions enveloped agricultural powerhouse states across the country. The $400 million, according to Montaño Greene, was set to be distributed through the Commodity Credit Corporation, a financial institution used to implement specific agricultural programs established by the federal government. By the close of 2024, she said the Biden administration had entered final agreements with selected recipients and notified Congress of how they intended to use the money. 

“When we left the administration, we already had the signed agreements and the commitments that were going to be going through with the process,” said Montaño Greene. Based on those final agreements, the money, which was structured to be either reimbursement-based or in the form of advance payments — or both, depending on the agreement — should have started flowing last year, as part of a five-year payment plan. “Everything was done, vetted, and reviewed,” said Montaño Greene. But because this money wasn’t voted on by Congress, the USDA may have the authority to backtrack on its commitments under an earlier administration.

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Another former top USDA official familiar with the program, who requested anonymity, confirmed that the agreements were “100 percent” finalized before the end of 2024 — with the expectation that the incoming administration would need to honor them. “I can speak to the assumptions and guidance that we were working on from legal counsel at that time, which was by entering into these agreements with the districts and other partners, we’re committing those dollars to this purpose,” the former official added. “From our perspective, we were operating under a framework and counsel that we were committing those funds to the USDA partners.” 

Beginning last January, the Trump administration threw that into a tailspin. Federal monies were frozen, grant programs culled, and an unprecedented number of federal staffers were forced out of work. Many operations at USDA have since resumed to some semblance of normalcy. But the $400 million promised to the irrigation districts, associations, and tribes in 2024 remains unaccounted for, and the grant recipients have received no indication of whether the program would start or the money would be paid out. 

In fact, McEachern no longer even knew who at the USDA to ask for help. The last he heard from the agency about the water-saving grant was an email from his former point of contact to let him know they were leaving the USDA. That was over a year ago. 

“I think some of the people that were involved are probably no longer there, and nobody was really kind of pushing to get this off the ground,” said McEachern. “One thing is, they haven’t swept the money. So the money is there. It’s just getting them to release it.” 

Dan Crabtree, superintendent of Palisade Irrigation District, based in Colorado, one of the other 18 irrigation districts, has had much the same experience. “Since the election, we have not heard anything from USDA, other than to say they were evaluating the program and the application,” said Crabtree. Another recipient — Greybull Valley Irrigation District in Wyoming — told Grist in an email that it also knew nothing about the program’s status. 

Randall Winston, general manager of Hidalgo & Cameron Counties Irrigation District 9, in Texas, another of the USDA’s selected recipients, said that while they’ve been waiting, the severe drought in the Rio Grande Valley has only gotten worse. As a result, they have been forced to dramatically reduce how much agricultural land the district is able to irrigate — last year, they supplied water for roughly 8,000 acres, when on a typical year they irrigate 120,000.

“Every drop of water, we’re trying to maximize that and save as much as we can,” said Winston. Prices for the equipment they need to manage the water they do have have also continued to climb, according to Winston, further setting them back. “We are concerned because we need to know the direction to take … We’re not mad at USDA, we just need to find out where we’re at with this,” he said.

Exactly why the administration has kept the funding locked without any communication to grantees for over a year is difficult to discern, according to Food & Water Watch research director Amanda Starbuck. “Is this specifically because it’s intended to help farmers adapt to climate change, and climate change is a bad word in the administration, or it’s simply just trying to cut corners wherever they can?” said Starbuck. 

The USDA did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

During one former USDA staffer’s last few months working at the Farm Service Agency, they claim they were forced to partake in information “gatekeeping” as it related to the water-saving program. According to the staffer, who left their role in 2025 and asked to remain anonymous, “I was getting a lot of questions about, like, ‘Can we start or not?’ and I didn’t know the answer. I couldn’t get an answer. I really wasn’t allowed to communicate with them directly. Like, I couldn’t tell them ‘Your grant is frozen. Don’t spend any money because the money may never come to you.’ It was just ‘Tell them it’s under administrative review’ … And then I couldn’t get a clear answer out of my leadership, or my direct manager, or my manager’s manager, about where the program was in the review process.” 

As for the suspicion that the program may have been targeted in the way that other Biden-era programs geared toward mitigating climate change have been, the former staffer isn’t convinced. “To me, it does seem pretty neutral from a climate perspective, because a lot of the states that have water problems are not necessarily blue states,” they said. “So I don’t think it was something that someone, like a high level official, would come in and say, ‘That’s the program I want to gut.'”

Although they can’t be certain, the former staffer believes the explanation is actually quite simple: There are no employees left to distribute the money. 

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Within the first five months of the Trump administration, the Farm Service Agency lost around 24 percent of its federal workforce. “It’s very possible it’s frozen because no one who works there that interacted with the program, like all of the people who know anything about the program, have now left the agency,” they said. The former staffer also said they have “a sinking suspicion” that the internal organizational disarray at USDA may have led the agency to forget about the program, which they described as having “a pretty small footprint” when compared to other initiatives that were dismantled in the last year. “I just don’t understand why we couldn’t be more transparent. … I don’t believe that that is the role that public servants, broadly speaking, both politically appointed and career, should play.” 

As the planet continues to heat up, rainfall is becoming increasingly erratic — ushering in longer dry spells punctuated by intense, sudden downpours that can overwhelm the land’s ability to absorb too much water. The resulting whiplash between periods of drought and flood can disrupt farming operations for multiple seasons. Extreme weather fueled by warming already costs the nation’s agricultural industry billions in lost crops and rangeland every year. 

Agriculture is not only a victim of this vicious cycle, but one of its drivers. In the U.S., the sector is responsible for at least 80 percent of all water consumed. Crop irrigation, which is often done inefficiently, makes up the single largest share of freshwater withdrawals nationwide. Take alfalfa. The crop used an estimated 2.15 trillion gallons of water across the seven states in the Colorado River basin in 2024 — most of it grown to feed cattle and dairy herds. 

“At USDA, we need to do more to also shift production systems to really be lined up with the climate reality,” said Starbuck, who argues that the burden of adaptation shouldn’t fall on individual farmers, or the irrigation districts that support them, but rather to federal regulators.

Yet even as demand for water grows, the policies intended to protect remaining supplies are being systematically dismantled. Over the last year, the administration has aggressively rolled back climate and environmental safeguards — revoking the government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, proposing the removal of federal protections from the vast majority of the nation’s wetlands, and holding up billions in conservation efforts. 

Together, says Starbuck, these actions are putting at risk the very water supplies that American agriculture depends on. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Did the USDA just forget about $400M in drought aid for farmers? on Feb 23, 2026.

Jonathan Mertzig was wary when Madison rolled out a fleet of 62 electric buses in the fall of 2024. The city had tested a few of them four years earlier, and it had not gone well. Winter in Wisconsin gets mighty cold, and batteries do not like the cold. 

“Operationally, they were a nightmare,” said Mertzig, a member of the Madison Area Bus Advocates. “Every time you got on one there would be an alarm going off. You never knew when one was going to die in the middle of the road.” 

Cities across the country have experienced similar growing pains while electrifying public transit. A study conducted in Ithaca, New York, found that range can plummet by about half when the mercury hits 24 to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes Madison, which sees an average of 18 days below zero each year, a tough proving ground. Riders like Mertzig, who experiences severe migraines and avoids driving, need the buses to run no matter what.

This time, they’ve done just that.

Metro Transit, which provides about 9.1 million rides annually, installed overhead chargers on key routes, allowing buses to quickly top off at several stops. Improved battery capacity also lets them go farther between plug-ins. The real test came January 23, when the temperature dropped to -4 degrees F, shutting down the University of Wisconsin-Madison — but the buses kept running.

That said, the rollout has not gone flawlessly. Last year, the transit agency apologized when the overhead charging system malfunctioned, sidelining buses. In January, maintenance issues forced it to reduce service on two routes, but officials insist cold weather was not a factor.

Just a few years ago, electric buses routinely faltered in cold conditions, reinforcing doubts about whether they could replace diesel and natural gas-burning fleets in northern cities. Now, with better batteries and strategically placed chargers, Madison is at the forefront of a small but growing number of cities testing whether those doubts still hold. Making the technology work through a long Midwestern winter could reshape how others approach electrification. Some 3.6 million commuters nationwide rely on buses to get around. With transportation accounting for roughly 28 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, transit agencies are looking for alternatives to polluting machinery that creates a particular health risk around bus stops.

Madison is among more than 100 U.S. cities that have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Electric buses are key to that goal.

Metro Transit’s first experiment came during a broader effort to launch a system that could carry more riders with lower emissions. The city rolled out three electric buses — which cost $1.3 million and were funded in part through a federal grant — in 2020 to see how they’d do in daily service. Although the pilot introduced Madison to zero-emissions transit and helped build institutional know-how, the buses, supplied by Proterra, were dogged by battery and maintenance issues. The city has since purchased coaches built by New Flyer. 

“We had no real success with Proterra,” said Joshua Marty, the agency’s facilities manager. Beyond the range challenges, his team had trouble sourcing parts and maintenance from the company, which declared bankruptcy in 2024.

Batteries have gotten significantly better in the short time since Madison decided to go electric. “Energy density has been increasing at roughly 7 percent per year over the last decade,” said Eric Kazyak, a mechanical engineer and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That boost has helped the 60-foot buses become the workhorses of Madison’s fleet. They work the city’s Bus Rapid Transit lines, and fill in on popular routes near the university campus.

A Metro Transit bus parked beneath a pantograph “quick charger” at the end of the line. Just 15 minutes during regularly scheduled layovers allows each coach to travel as far as 258 miles a day. Courtesy Metro Transit.

Buses that work Route A — which runs east to west across the city — can stay out for most of the day because they recharge during routine layovers at each end of the run. The driver settles beneath an overhead pantograph “quick charger” for about 15 minutes. That boost allows each coach to travel as far as 258 miles a day. By the time it reaches the end of the line, the battery has dropped by 15 to 20 percent — a gap the charger refills in as many minutes. At night, the fleet returns to a dedicated depot with 16 slightly slower, but still plenty zippy, quick chargers. 

The north-to-south Route B does not yet have overheard charging hardware, so buses trundle around for four hours before returning to the depot with roughly 25 percent on their battery. The city plans to add pantographs to the route at some point, a move that would nearly double the time those rigs spend carrying passengers. Still, even the coldest winter days don’t reduce range by more than 10 percent compared to a balmy summer afternoon.

Between 60 and 70 percent of the fleet is typically running at any given time, with the rest in for maintenance and cleaning or being used to train drivers — a figure that Cody Hanna, the transit agency’s transit maintenance manager, said is unaffected by weather. The biggest challenge has been getting parts for the buses, which are more complex than their diesel counterparts and trickier to diagnose when something goes sideways. “With an electric bus, it could be an inverter, it could be a motor, it could just be a bad wire, could be a bad sensor,” he said. “There’s so many different things that are talking to each other.”

While on-route charging has been a boon for Madison, it could be cost-prohibitive for smaller cities. “This is a really good idea,” said Max Zhang, a mechanical engineer and professor at Cornell University who led the study in Ithaca. “At the same time, there’s also cost issues. Those charging stations, my understanding is they’re not cheap.”  

Pantograph chargers typically cost roughly the same as the $1.5 million that Madison spent on each bus. Yet they might have actually saved the city money. Without them, Hanna said, Metro Transit would need to triple the number of buses running on Route A from 18 to 54. 

Those tradeoffs are playing out at a moment of federal retrenchment. The Trump administration has sought to curb electric bus investment. An analysis by the nonprofit advocacy organization Transportation for America found that only 3 percent of federal “low or no emission” program grants awarded last year went to zero-emission buses. 

Nonetheless, other frigid cities, including Minneapolis and Duluth — once a poster child for the technology’s failures — are expanding their clean energy fleets, and Milwaukee has embraced on-route charging.

But Mountain Line in Missoula, Montana, might be furthest down the road. Although it doesn’t get as frigid there as it does in Madison, the city experiences a week or two of temperatures below zero each year. Missoula also sits in a valley, trapping diesel exhaust. It began the transition toward electrification in 2018, and has since replaced about 90 percent of its fleet — putting the city well ahead of its goal of being entirely electric by 2034.

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Jordan Hess, the transit agency’s CEO, began working with electric buses in 2016 as transportation director at the University of Montana. Back then, the buses would recharge on the route much like those in Madison. Missoula’s coaches have batteries big enough to complete runs without topping off. It also helps that Mountain Line, like Metro Transit in Madison, uses diesel-powered heaters to keep passengers warm.

“They’re a little bit like chickens,” Hess said of the buses. If the temperature falls below zero, “they start squawking. You start taking precautions, and you start thinking about heat. I think of electric vehicles the same. [It] can get pretty darn cold before you have a lot of problems.” 

The buses have also brought changes for operators. Shanell Hayes has driven diesels and electrics in her three years with Metro Transit. Last winter, while returning to the depot to recharge, the lumbering bus suddenly topped out at 35 mph, then 20, and then just 2. She pulled over to wait for a supervisor, who followed her the last mile to the bus barn. It took an hour, testing her faith in the technology. Still, she likes how the behemoths handle snowy, icy conditions. Regenerative braking uses the motor to help slow the vehicle, sending power otherwise lost as heat back to the battery. It allows for a lighter touch on the brake pedal.

“I just take my foot off the gas and just allow it to slow down on its own,” Hayes said. “That way I can use my brake minimally without sliding.”

Rabbit Roberge was in his first week of driving when he pulled up to a pantograph charger at the western end of Route A on a cold January morning. He drives a Toyota Prius, so he’s familiar with regenerative braking and the benefits of electric propulsion. He’s a fan of the tech. “They’re smoother,” he said of the buses. “They’re not as loud. They’re just all-around nicer to drive.”

Riders, too, seem to have embraced the change, though there have been challenges. Susanne Galler, who has been riding regularly since giving up her car in 2000, was still getting around on crutches after a bike accident in 2024 when she noticed that most of the seats in the electric buses require a step up to reach them. She also has seen one bus require a tow, and another that died at a stoplight. Still, she considers the transition to zero-emissions machinery as a “positive step.”

Kira Breeden, a doctoral student at the university, regularly takes the Route A to campus, particularly when it’s too nasty to ride her bike. She finds the buses to be dependable.

“I think it’s a really good system,” she said. “I’ve heard occasionally people complain about the timeliness of buses, but I’ve never had any issues, except for one snowstorm my first year — which makes a lot of sense, because it was dumping snow.” That storm occurred in March 2024, before the electric fleet rolled out, so it was probably a diesel bus that left her stranded. It’s a reminder that cold weather can sideline any machine.

Support for this story was provided by The Neal Peirce Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting journalism revealing ways to make cities and their surrounding regions work better for all people.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Electric buses are passing a brutal cold-weather test in Wisconsin on Feb 23, 2026.

The extreme heat, high winds, and severe dry conditions that produce towering, fast-moving flames that advance by the acre are not just becoming more common; new research shows that these factors are increasingly arising in multiple regions at the same time, creating the conditions for simultaneous wildfires around the world.

In a study published today in the journal Science, researchers reported that the ideal conditions for major wildfires are now aligning across different parts of the world at more than double the rate they did nearly 50 years ago. Climate change is a major driver, accounting for about half of this increase. It’s the latest example of how humans are reshaping the nature of wildfires.

These changes have led to periods of inescapable smoke from blazes and more stress on firefighters, expanding the public health, economic, and social costs of infernos. As the climate continues to warm, these trends are likely to continue to worsen.

Wildfire smoke is already linked to tens of thousands of premature deaths in the US, and recent years have shown how this smoke can cross continents and oceans, polluting the air for people far away from the flames. East Coasters might remember how Canadian wildfires a few years ago bathed cities like New York and Philadelphia in an amber haze, triggering air quality warnings. One study found that the smoke from those fires contributed to 82,000 deaths.

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Meanwhile, the efforts to contain these devastating blazes are devouring money, time, engines, tankers, and firefighters, often beyond what local fire departments can muster on their own.

But with more wildfires burning in different parts of the world at the same time, countries will have their own blazes to deal with, and less outside help will be available.

The result is that we may see more years with multiple major blazes at the same time, and you might find it harder to find clear air to breathe for growing swaths of the year.

How more of the world is getting primed to burn at the same time

Cong Yin, the lead author of the study and a scientist at the University of California Merced, explained that research has been piling up showing that the weather conditions that favor major wildfires are becoming more common in different regions. Yin wanted to take a step back to see if there was a pattern that would emerge when he looked at the world as a whole.

Yin and his colleagues analyzed global climate and fire data between 1979 and 2024 and traced the fire weather index, a measure of fire dangers based on meteorological traits like temperature, wind, and moisture. The higher the index reaches, the greater the chances of a dangerous wildfire. The team drew on fire activity records from the Global Fire Emissions Database, which uses satellite data and ground-based measurements to track burned areas around the world. The team then counted the number of days where the fire weather index was in the 90th percentile in more than one region.

The results showed that over the study period, days with extreme fire weather conditions were increasing in places inside regions like North America, but also seeing severe fire weather line up across far-flung areas like North America and Europe. That makes it harder to coordinate firefighting efforts across borders.

We’ve seen in recent years that countries with major fires have received needed help from neighbors, and from farther away. Teams from Canada and Mexico joined the fight against the Los Angeles wildfires last year, even bringing equipment like tanker aircraft. During the wildfires in Spain last summer, the Netherlands, France, and Italy also sent firefighting aircraft. In past fire seasons, South Africa has sent firefighters to Canada. The U.S., Australia, and New Zealand have a standing firefighting cooperation agreement to share personnel and equipment between the countries.

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However, worldwide, the number of days where severe fire weather has occurred in multiple places at the same time has more than doubled over the majority of fire-prone landscapes. With more fire weather occurring at the same time, countries may not be able to lend out tools and personnel as much because they’ll need everyone on deck at home.

When Yin and his team looked closer at regions like North America, climate variability drivers like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, the periodic warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean, tended to create fire weather conditions across the continent. The planet’s boreal regions — forested areas in northern latitudes — showed the highest levels of synchronized fire weather. They tend to experience extreme heat, little rain, and high winds at the same time more often. At the same time, the research identified areas where fire conditions are becoming less aligned, like Southeast Asia. The researchers think this is likely due to increasing humidity in tropical regions as temperatures rise. That can make it harder to achieve the ideal conditions for a major fire.

To figure out the role of climate change, the researchers constructed a model of a world where the climate hasn’t changed and compared it to the observed results of the world we’re currently in. They also calculated the role of natural climate drivers like the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. When they looked at the difference between the scenarios with and without warming, they found that climate change driven by humans has led to about half of the observed increase in synchronized fire weather since 1979.

Yin cautioned that there are some caveats to consider. Even when weather conditions are favorable to fire, they aren’t a guarantee that one will ignite. Fires also need fuel and a source of ignition. Without these two ingredients, even the most severe hot, dry, and windy conditions won’t lead to a blaze. “They are more difficult to predict or measure,” Yin said. “If we want to do a better job, we need to measure all these three dimensions.”

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke

You may have already experienced how wildfires have become impossible to ignore, even when they’re far away, whether you’re breathing their smoke or paying for their damages. These results show that millions more people will likely be breathing dirty air with you when a major fire season gets underway.

Robert Field, a fire researcher at Columbia University, observed that when so many fires burn at the same time, the smoke can pose an even bigger public danger than the flames. Thousands of homes may burn, but millions of people end up breathing dirty air that takes years off their lives. And when these blazes ignite, the resources for containing wildfires may end up spread thin. That could lead to longer stretches of dirty air as well as more costly damages to property, which end up getting passed onto you through higher taxes and insurance rates.

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The increasing threat from wildfires is also taxing for firefighters, who are not just facing more dangers to their lives and limbs, but also to their mental health. Field said the study shows that everyone should start preparing for the threat of simultaneous severe fires. “I really haven’t seen a paper like this on a global scale,” said Field, who was not involved in the study. “I think it’s a prelude to what’s coming.”

It’s clear then that we can’t simply rely on firefighting to cope with this problem.

Many of the ways we measure fire risk today systematically underrate the actual threats that you might face, especially as average temperatures continue to rise and as communities sprawl into fire-prone landscapes.

Getting an accurate assessment of wildfire risk is critical, even if it is inconvenient for your property values. We also need to invest more in managing the landscape through measures like controlled burns, which can worsen air quality but prevent even worse breathing problems down the line.

And of course, we need to reduce our impact on the global climate by curbing our emissions of greenhouse gases. But until then, keep an eye on the forecast and the air-quality index, and keep an N95 mask close.

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Scientists have found another alarming pattern in wildfires on Feb 22, 2026.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is continuing to fuel its data centers with unpermitted gas turbines, according to a Floodlight visual investigation. Thermal drone footage shows xAI is still burning gas at a facility in Southaven, Mississippi, despite a recent Environmental Protection Agency ruling reiterating that doing so requires a state permit in advance.

State regulators in Mississippi maintain that since the turbines are parked on tractor trailers, they don’t require permits. However, the EPA has long required that such pollution sources be permitted under the Clean Air Act.

Any exemption for these machines “could leave these engines subject to no emission standards at all,” the agency wrote in a January final ruling.

However, thermal images captured by Floodlight — and analyzed by multiple experts — show more than a dozen unpermitted turbines still spewing pollutants at the plant nearly two weeks after the EPA’s recent ruling. 

“That is a violation of the law,” said Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA air enforcement chief, after reviewing Floodlight’s images and EPA regulations.

Thermal drone footage shows unpermitted turbines operating at xAI’s gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi, nearly two weeks after the EPA ruled such turbines require permits before they can run. (Evan Simon / Floodlight)

xAI, which is seeking permits for dozens more turbines in Southaven, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The EPA, which under Trump has initiated a record low number of enforcement actions, declined to answer questions about the turbines at Musk’s AI facilities and referred to local authorities on permits.

The first and only public hearing on the matter is scheduled for February 17, and the public comment period is still open.

The Trump administration has made AI a priority, but as data centers proliferate across the country, regulators are struggling to keep pace with the industry’s increasing reliance on custom-built power sources and their public health impacts on surrounding communities. And Southaven, where state regulators are at odds with federal guidance, is a prime example. 

xAI parked 27 unpermitted turbines in the suburban city of Southaven, Mississippi, to power the company’s nearby data center. Evan Simon / Floodlight

The turbines there help power Grok, the company’s controversial chatbot, and emit harmful pollutants linked to health problems such as asthma, lung cancer, and heart attacks.

“The risk of living next to this type of power plant is well documented,” said Shaolei Ren, a University of California, Riverside associate professor who specializes in the health impacts of data centers. “From the health perspective, we know that this is not good.” 

Southaven residents have voiced concerns for months over the noise and pollution emanating from the 114-acre site that is largely hidden from public view — a site xAI is looking to expand. 

“For them to be releasing so much pollution in such a populated area, not to mention that there are at least ten schools within a two-mile radius of the facility, is really concerning,” said longtime resident Shannon Samsa. “It’s horrifying to me that we’re allowing this in our community.” 

From Memphis to Mississippi

The Southaven turbine cluster is part of xAi’s rapidly growing footprint along the Tennessee-Mississippi border. That expansion began in the spring of 2024 in South Memphis, next to historically Black neighborhoods, with the construction of Colossus 1, which the company touted as the world’s largest AI supercomputer.

The Southern Environmental Law Center released thermal images in April revealing that xAi had been operating more than 30 unpermitted gas-powered turbines at that site.

“We were hopeful that the health department would step in,” said Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney at the SELC. “That never happened.” 

County officials in Tennessee maintained the turbines did not require a permit despite longstanding EPA policy that they do. In July, amid local pushback, the county permitted 15 turbines for use at Colossus 1.

On January 15, the EPA reiterated its decades-old policy that such machines need a permit. By then, xAi had already built a second data center in the area, Colossus 2. To power it, the company parked 27 turbines just across the stateline in Southaven, Mississippi, a diverse suburb of Memphis with higher-than-average levels of air pollution. 

“When you’re talking about these turbines, think of the jet engine,” said Buckheit.  

Thermal drone imagery captured by Floodlight in late January shows some of the 15 permitted turbines operating at xAI’s Colossus 1. Evan Simon / Floodlight

Despite the EPA’s recent directive, Floodlight’s thermal imagery — analyzed by multiple experts — shows 15 unpermitted turbines in operation at Southaven. Public records obtained by Floodlight show 18 of the 27 turbines have been used since November, at least.

“One might easily have expected, since this has been going on for some months, at least [issue a] stop work order,” said Buckheit, who served during the Republican administrations of Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. He also said the EPA could refer the case to the Department of Justice. 

“But apparently that didn’t happen.”

xAI’s gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi, has been operating unpermitted turbines since at least November to power the company’s nearby datacenter, according to documents obtained by Floodlight. Evan Simon / Floodlight Playing by a different set of rules

An EPA spokesperson did not answer Floodlight’s questions relating to its enforcement options, instead saying, “EPA does not approve the operation of gas turbines at facilities, that would be the state or local air permitting authority.” 

Air permits are traditionally handled by state agencies. However, according to its own website, the EPA is responsible for making sure these agencies comply with federal regulations and “generally will take enforcement action” if a state government fails to “take timely and appropriate action.”

xAI “violated the Clean Air Act the first time, and now they’re gonna copy and paste and do it again,” said Anderson. “I maybe had some naive hope that the regulators who are most in the day-to-day business of implementing the Clean Air Act in Mississippi would do the right thing.” 

In response to Floodlight’s questions, a spokesperson from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said the EPA’s recent rule leaves permitting decisions to state authorities. 

“The turbines currently operating at the Southaven facility are classified as portable/mobile units under state law and therefore remain exempt from air permitting requirements during this temporary period,” they said. “Nothing in the EPA’s January 15 rule altered that determination under Mississippi regulations.”

An asthmatic, Krystal Polk said she was forced to empty out the home that’s been in her family for generations and cancel her plans to retire there out of concerns for her health after xAI began operating gas powered turbines directly across the street from her property. Evan Simon / Floodight

Longtime resident Krystal Polk said she had no idea xAI was coming to Southaven until black fences were set up across the street from her house. The area, she said, was once quiet and serene, with an abundance of wildlife, but is now bombarded by ceaseless noise and pollution. 

“I do feel like xAi is playing by a different set of rules,” she said. 

An asthmatic, Polk said she was forced to empty out the home that’s been in her family for generations and cancel her plans to retire there out of concerns for her health.

“We are a casualty of the whole data center race,” she said. “I feel that my voice doesn’t matter.”

The spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said the agency takes public concern around emissions, noise, and overall quality of life seriously, and though the turbines — in their view — do not require permits, all “applicable air quality standards still apply.”

Krystal Polk’s family home (foreground) sits directly across the street from xAI’s gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi. Evan Simon / Floodlight AI’s increasing thirst for fossil fuels 

Despite lofty sustainability goals put forward by industry leaders, data centers across the country are increasingly turning to fossil fuels to power the AI boom by using custom-built power plants like the ones seen in Southaven.

Roughly 75 percent of this power comes from natural gas, according to a recent report by CleanView, which tracks clean energy and data center projects. 

“Nearly every project we reviewed mentions renewables, hydrogen, or nuclear in its public announcements,” the author wrote, but renewables aren’t scheduled until 2028 or later.

And “nuclear is a decade away,” he said.

Now, xAI is seeking to expand in Southaven, applying in January for a permit to operate 41 turbines at the site. 

The facility could emit more than 6 million tons of greenhouse gases and over 1,300 tons of health-harming air pollutants every year, according to xAI’s permit application. That would make it among the largest fossil fuel power plants in the state. The company also purchased property in Southaven for a third data center that, when completed, will make the Colossus cluster — spanning Memphis to Southaven — one of the largest data center complexes in the world.

Shannon Samsa, a physician’s assistant, had hoped to raise a family in Southaven, but the presence of xAi’s gas-powered turbines has made her and her husband reconsider. Evan Simon / Floodlight

“It would be devastating,” said Samsa, the Southaven resident. “No community in their right mind would want something like this in their backyards.”

Samsa, a physician’s assistant, had hoped to raise a family in Southaven, but the presence of xAi’s gas-powered turbines has made her and her husband reconsider. She has helped collect more than 1,000 signatures for a petition demanding Mississippi authorities shut down the plant. 

“I don’t want my children to be growing up around such massive amounts of air pollution,” she said. “I don’t want them to have to live in a place where their health and their overall well-being are not considered over economics.”

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A different set of rules’: Thermal drone footage shows Musk’s AI power plant flouting clean air regulations on Feb 21, 2026.

Coming into the Milan-Cortina Olympics, an American hadn’t won a medal in men’s cross-country skiing in half a century. A few days into the Games, though, Vermonter Ben Ogden squeaked through the classic sprint semifinals. Suddenly there was hope. In the final, Ogden pushed across the Tesero Stadium finish line in second — breaking the drought.

Asked afterward if he thought it might take another 50 years for the next podium, he said no. Five days later, he and Gus Schumacher made good on that when they took silver in the team sprint. 

With two days of competition remaining, U.S. skiers and snowboarders have already earned more than a dozen medals at these Games  — including Mikaela Shiffrin’s gold in the alpine slalom, Chloe Kim’s silver in halfpipe snowboarding, and Jessie Diggins overcoming a bruised rib to win a Nordic bronze. The cross-country ski team’s three-medal haul is its largest ever.

The hardware is historic for another reason as well: It was won despite the first-ever Olympic ban on fluorinated ski waxes containing so-called “forever chemicals.”

Since the 1980s, elite skiers and snowboarders have relied on these “fluoro” waxes, which are exceptional at repelling water and dirt. Former U.S. racer Nathan Schultz told Grist they provide a “really ridiculous speed advantage.” But they contain PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of 15,000 chemicals notorious for never breaking down. Studies have linked exposure to thyroid disease, developmental problems, and cancer.

Amid growing concern, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, known by the French acronym FIS, announced plans for a blanket ban on fluoro waxes in 2019. The policy took effect in 2023. The International Biathlon Union also prohibits them. Without fluoros, teams have had to rethink everything from ski choice to race-day strategy, making these Games the clearest test yet of whether elite snow sports can succeed in a PFAS-free era.

“These have been some of the trickiest three weeks of waxing I’ve experienced,” said Chris Hecker, who is Schumacher’s ski technician. Some days brought rain. Others were sunny and warm. Then there were those where the snow piled high. “Every variable — precipitation, sun exposure, humidity, even a one-degree temperature shift — can influence which skis and waxes we select.” 

Fluorinated waxes were long seen as a “great equalizer” that improved speed across a range of conditions, particularly when the snow was warm or wet. Without it, success depends more on ski or snowboard choice and the grind pattern etched into their base to optimize performance, much like a tire tread. 

Read Next The Olympics are ditching PFAS waxes — and the ‘ridiculous’ speed they gave skiers Joseph Winters & Tik Root

Different conditions call for different skis, and elite cross-country racers often travel with dozens — sometimes more than 100 — pairs. Still, wax is crucial. “We’re always chasing marginal gains,” said Hecker. “At this level, tiny differences matter.”

Choosing the best combination of skis and wax has meant constant testing and re-evaluation throughout the Games. Although there have been what Hecker called “small mistakes” along the way, the team quickly adapted. 

“It’s nearly impossible to have the absolute best skis every single day,” he said. “That said, we’ve had a wildly successful Olympics.”

Hecker and the cross-country team aren’t the only members of Team USA trying to rise to the post-fluoro occasion at these Games. Tanner Keim is a ski tech with the U.S. free ski team also working without the fluoro waxes he used four years ago in Beijing. 

“It was a lot warmer in Italy. Fluoros would have been popping for all the wax techs,” he said, adding that humidity also was a major factor, especially at the women’s slopestyle skiing event. The men competing in big air also seemed to be trying to find every extra mile per hour, with coaches pulling many athletes down the launch ramp to gain more speed.

After years of testing and adjustment, Keim feels that he’s got the new materials fairly well dialed in. His athletes have two silver medals as proof. But even still, he said, “I would have been a little bit more confident with the fluoros.”

While competing without fluoros has been hard enough, preventing people from competing with it has been almost as tough. In 2020, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fined the equipment company Swix hundreds of thousands dollars for illegally importing PFAS wax. A large part of FIS delaying the implementation of its ban came because testing was finicky and carried a risk of false positives.

A testing regime was sorted out two years ago, and Milan-Cortina saw the first Olympic disqualifications for violating the ban: Two South Korean Nordic skiers and a Japanese snowboarder. All of them say their positive tests were the result of accidentally using the wrong wax or applying tainted wax. In a statement to Grist, the South Korean Ski Association said “test results showed that [fluorine] was detected in one of the [fluorine]-free waxes.”

If enforcement marks the rule’s credibility, the results mark its success. For athletes, medals, of course, are the most visible validation of that, and Team USA still has two more days to build on its triumphs. For the cross-country team, that means the men’s and then women’s 50-kilometer race, dubbed a “ski marathon,” in which Diggens, Schumacher, and Ogden are expected to compete. 

After his latest podium, Ogden was again asked whether the U.S. men might slip back into a slump. “No — I don’t think it’ll be another 50 years,” he said, two glimmering silver medals hanging from his neck.

Correction: An earlier version of this story accidentally referred to fluoride instead of fluorine in one paragraph.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Team USA is proving that world-class skiing doesn’t require PFAS wax on Feb 21, 2026.

Dear Leslie,

How do I deal with the frustration and anger that comes with having family members and friends who continue to fly and pursue other behaviors that worsen the climate crisis? They know better, yet they don’t act differently.

— Frustrated Climate Activist

Dear Frustrated Climate Activist,

Your anger and frustration are deeply relatable — and they’re happening for good reason. Your values and relationships are colliding, creating a painful rupture where you most long for shared ground. And your anger may be compounded by grief for the loss of species, cultures, and futures you know could be better protected if more people, like your loved ones, would take action.

That gap also creates a lopsided moral load. You’re actively confronting the difficult realities of our warming world and responding with care, while you perceive some of the people you’re most connected to turning away from that responsibility. 

Living with that tension doesn’t just hurt — it eventually exhausts the nervous system and erodes our capacity to stay connected.

Ask a Climate Therapist tackles your questions about how to navigate the emotional side of climate change, with leading climate-aware therapist Leslie Davenport. Have a question? Ask it here!

Before we go further, it may help to widen the perspective. It’s possible your family and friends hold a different view of what personal climate responsibility looks like. All of us participate in some activities that worsen the climate crisis, even if we’re trying to mitigate our impact (or create a positive impact) in other ways. It sounds like people in your life have decided they can’t give up flying right now, but maybe for them, positive action looks like voting for climate-forward policies, reducing consumption, or supporting initiatives you don’t see. Or maybe they care about the climate crisis but haven’t yet figured out what meaningful action looks like for them. Begin with curiosity about where they are and how they understand their responsibility. 

But let’s say your family and friends claim to care, but truly are not engaging in any way — you see them strolling past the most critical issues with eyes averted. In that case, their failure to take any form of action may feel like a personal betrayal.

Here’s the hard truth: You can’t carry both the planet and your loved ones on your back. What’s appropriate in the relationships you’re talking about — people you want to stay close with — is emotional detachment without emotional withdrawal. That means choosing where your responsibility for others ends and your boundaries begin. You can continue to love imperfect people while also sustaining a fierce allegiance to caring for the climate. 

You’re not required to be the climate conscience of every encounter and every conversation. 

Try selective honesty. When you’re moved to speak, you might say something like this: “I struggle with [name the specific behavior], because it hurts to see people I love act like climate impacts don’t matter.” Then step back and let the silence do the work. You may not get the response you hope for, but you’ll know you spoke up for what matters most to you, and it’s up to you to understand when that’s enough. 

People aren’t always moved to change immediately. Your words may land more deeply than you realize in the moment. 

Letting go of the constant urge to convince isn’t giving up. It’s choosing to invest your energy where it can be amplified — for instance, in a like-minded community, an action group, or connections with other people who do share your priorities.

This is our work: staying human in a burning world without burning ourselves out. Try to find places where your clarity and commitment are shared — that in turn will make it easier to engage in other places where they are not. Let your love for the living world be fed by relationships that give your nervous system a place to rest.

Holding this with you,

Leslie

I’m Leslie Davenport, a licensed therapist, educator, speaker, consultant, and internationally recognized voice on the emotional and psychological dimensions of climate change. If you’ve got a question about climate and mental health, please submit it here for a future column.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Ask a Climate Therapist: How do I deal with friends and family who won’t stop polluting? on Feb 20, 2026.

One day, you’ll appreciate drinking recycled toilet water. 

Urban populations are growing as water supplies are dwindling, often due to worsening droughts. In response, some communities are treating wastewater, rendering it perfectly safe for consumption. It is so pure, in fact, that if a treatment facility doesn’t add enough of the minerals the filtering process strips out, it could do serious damage to the human body. And trust me — it tastes great, too.

Cities throughout the American West are already recycling water, easing pressures on dwindling supplies. Now here’s a thought experiment: How much would you pay on your utility bill for the privilege of reused water, if it meant avoiding shortages and rationing in the future? A recent survey offers one answer. Residents of small communities of fewer than 10,000 people said they’d be willing to drop an average of $49 to do so. That money would underwrite water reuse programs, including rain capture systems. “I do think it is a bipartisan issue,” said Todd Guilfoos, an economist at the University of Rhode Island and co-author of the new paper. “It’s often just cheaper than some of the other available solutions.”

Wastewater recycling is not some far-out, prohibitively complicated technology. Western states are already doing a lot of it: A study published last year found that Nevada reuses 85 percent of its water, and Arizona 52 percent. Water agencies do this with reverse osmosis, passing the liquid through fine membranes to filter out solids before blasting it with UV light, which destroys any microbes. On a smaller scale, apartment buildings can house their own treatment infrastructure, cycling water back into units for nonpotable use, like flushing toilets.

Glasses containing raw sewage, plant effluent filtered, and recycled water are displayed at an advanced water purification facility in 2015 in Los Angeles, California.
Bob Riha, Jr. / Getty Images

On the municipal level, though, it’s expensive to build such facilities and run them continuously — it takes a lot of energy, for instance, to force water through those membranes. For a small community, charging each household $49 per month wouldn’t be quite enough to get a system up and running. “While that might be enough for operating, that doesn’t include what it would cost to actually build whatever water reuse infrastructure that you would need,” Guilfoos said. That’s when a town can turn to federal or state grants, or maybe utilize municipal bonds, to break ground. “I think communities need a little bit of a bump, actually, to get there,” Guilfoos added. “I think usually it’s in the face of some crises that these things end up getting built.”

Those crises are piling up across the U.S. Droughts are forcing some rural areas to pump more and more H2O from aquifers, depleting them. Tapped unsustainably, these underground supplies can collapse like an empty water bottle, making the land above sink, a phenomenon known as subsidence. This is a particularly pernicious problem in agricultural regions — California’s San Joaquin Valley has sunk up to 28 feet in recent decades, to offer just one example. 

If supplies dwindle, a small community would have no choice but to ration water. Getting more efficient about using what we have can help, like encouraging the adoption of thriftier toilets and spraying less on lawns, as Las Vegas has done. (Those thirsty patches of green are in general an environmental mess, beyond their use of water.) But to truly get more sustainable, a community will have to recycle the H2O it has no choice but to use. 

Read Next Los Angeles just showed how spongy a city can be Matt Simon

What’s interesting about this study, says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, is the apparent overcoming of the “yuck factor.” “There’s a visceral reaction to drinking reused water, particularly reused wastewater, that’s totally understandable,” said Kiparsky, who wasn’t involved in the research. “But over time, that has faded as the notion of reusing water to augment water supplies, including for drinking water, has become increasingly legitimized.” 

At the same time, simple infrastructural improvements can capture heaps of another supply that’s readily wasted: rain. That $49 a month could fund bioswales, for instance — ditches full of vegetation that not only collect stormwater, but provide habitat for native plants and pollinators. Cities like Los Angeles are making themselves more “spongy” in this way, with roadside plots of land that collect runoff in subterranean tanks. Elsewhere, architects are building “agrihoods” around working farms that store precipitation to hydrate their crops through the summer.

In the American West, farmers are also having to contend with water whiplash, meaning years of plenty followed by years of desiccation. Generally speaking, rain is falling more heavily because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, increasing the bounty. But so too does climate change exacerbate droughts, making wastewater reuse especially welcome on farms. “All of this makes the water supply less certain in any given year, and more volatile from year to year,” said Tom Corringham, a research economist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “So any strategies that we can find that can smooth out the water cycle are beneficial.”

In addition to recycling wastewater, farmers are recharging the aquifers beneath their feet: When rains fall heavily, and there’s a surplus of water, channels divert fluid into “spreading grounds” — basically big dirt bowls built into the landscape. That allows precipitation to percolate back into the ground, reducing loss from evaporation, replacing what’s been drawn out, and helping avoid land subsidence. Then, when needed, a farm can pump the water back out of the ground, in which case it doesn’t need to draw from, say, a dam, leaving more water for others to use.

Together with wastewater reuse, aquifer recharge can help bolster the water system for the climatically perilous years ahead. As metropolises like Mexico City and Cape Town run the risk of running out of water, drinking recycled wastewater will be a whole lot more appealing than losing hydration entirely. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Would you pay $49 a month to drink recycled wastewater? on Feb 20, 2026.

Peggy Shepard walked into her living room on Tuesday morning when her husband told her Jesse Jackson, the civil rights titan from South Carolina, had died. “Immediately tears started coming,” said Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York City-based nonprofit. 

Nearly 40 years ago, Jackson had altered the course of Shepard’s life. In the late 1980s, she was working as an editor at Time-Life Books, when a colleague mentioned an organizing meeting for Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “I walked into this Saturday meeting, and I walked out on air,” Shepard recalled. “Two hours later, I’m the press secretary for the Jackson campaign in Manhattan.”

That campaign — which would prove groundbreaking for Shepard and the country — pushed issues that had rarely been centered in national politics. Jackson made environmental justice, a term Americans were largely unfamiliar with at the time, a key plank of his second presidential run. He called for a national energy policy that would make offshore oil drilling obsolete, a plan to phase out nuclear energy, measures to reduce tailpipe pollution from cars, a conservation strategy to restore the nation’s wetlands and forests, and a federally sponsored workforce in the style of the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps. (The Biden administration launched a similar program, the American Climate Corps, in 2024, but shuttered it days ahead of President Trump’s return to office last year.) 

“Being in the Jesse Jackson campaign led to everything I’m doing right now,” said Shepard of the volunteer job that took her across New York City and exposed her to stark disparities between neighborhoods, especially in pollution burdens. “If I hadn’t gone to that Saturday meeting, I’m not sure that I’d be sitting here today in this position.”

Jackson marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., transformed American politics with his two historic presidential campaigns, and inspired countless organizers — including environmental justice advocates — along the way. In his later years, he began making connections between segregation in Greenville, South Carolina, where he was born, and the toxic drinking water in Flint, Michigan. 

He died Tuesday at his South Side Chicago home, surrounded by family. He was 84. Jackson had been in declining health since a 2015 Parkinson’s diagnosis that was later revised to progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurodegenerative disorder. 

“Our father was a servant leader,” the Jackson family said in a statement. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”

Cheryl Johnson, who runs the Chicago-based environmental justice nonprofit People for Community Recovery, was about 10 years old when she first saw Jackson in person. It was a grade-school field trip to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the prominent civil rights nonprofit he founded in 1971, headquartered on the South Side. The towering figure left a lifelong impression on her. 

“I always remember he would say, ‘up with hope, down with dope,’” she said, recalling Jackson’s stockpile of charismatic appeals. “To see him fighting, at that particular time, for the right to be black in America, was an inspiration for me that I followed for many, many years,” Johnson said.  

From the television set to magazine covers, Johnson grew up with Jackson in the background. Her mother, Hazel Johnson, founded People for Community Recovery, one of the first environmental justice organizations in the country, and worked with Jackson several times during the Clinton administration. Today she’s remembered as “the mother of the environmental justice movement.” Cheryl Johnson never worked directly with Jackson on environmental issues in Chicago, but the two “would have discussions on the phone,” she said. “He got it.”

Jackson was often pragmatic, not allowing environmental concerns to outweigh what he believed Black communities needed. In 2021, he successfully urged Illinois lawmakers to propose legislation making it easier to build a natural gas pipeline to the rural Pembroke Township south of Chicago, once referred to as the largest Black farming community in the Northern U.S.  

“A secure source of energy would help kickstart other development — and in turn create jobs and generate hope,” Jackson wrote in an op-ed in support of the plan. As of this year, the pipeline is delivering natural gas to over 100 residents. 

Jackson also took an active interest in the Flint water crisis, showing up repeatedly and lending support. In early 2016, Melissa Mays filed a lawsuit against the city of Flint, Michigan, for exposing nearly 100,000 residents to unsafe water contaminated with lead, a toxic metal linked to developmental delays, cardiovascular issues, and infertility. 

Mays, a longtime Flint resident and a then-emerging clean water activist, remembers sitting in front of cameras and answering questions about her lawsuit when, unexpectedly, Jackson walked through the doors. “He walks right up to us to ask if he can say something,” she said. 

Not long after, Jackson declared that officials should put “tape around the city, because Flint is a crime scene.” Mays said the moment validated her concerns and in part kicked off a longtime friendship between the two. Jackson returned to Flint repeatedly, helping turn the water crisis into national news and criticizing the Obama administration for not sufficiently responding to the crisis. He made his last public appearance in Flint in 2024 to visit the Flint Southwestern Classical Academy to highlight the importance of voting.  

“He was not afraid of anybody,” Mays said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Jesse Jackson’s vision for America embraced environmental justice on Feb 20, 2026.

The first thing Andy Barrientes noticed when he showed up for his shift at RMS Foods on Valentine’s Day, 2005, was the cloud of black smoke emanating from the building. 

A fire had started in the factory around 4:20 p.m., not long before Barrientes was scheduled to clock in as maintenance manager at the food manufacturing plant in southeastern New Mexico. The blaze had caught his coworkers coming off the day shift by surprise; they reported smelling the smoke before seeing the flames. When Barrientes arrived, he saw the staff huddled together at the park across the street. “Everyone was holding hands,” he said. “And we were just … the fire was so big.”

Barrientes had only been working at the factory for a few years. The job was something of an odd one: RMS Foods had once been a prominent meat processor in Hobbs, New Mexico, supplying local hotels and restaurants with cuts of beef and pork. But the company had recently started producing soy-based veggie burgers under the Boca Burger brand — an unlikely pivot for a part of the country better known for its cattle ranches, steakhouses, and dairy farms. Barrientes was hired around the same time as this change, and in the years since, veggie burger production had taken off. 

On the day of the fire, the entire staff evacuated without injuries, allowing the fire department — which arrived within four minutes of receiving the call — to immediately set to work containing the inferno. 

By 5:30 p.m., the clouds of smoke had mostly dissipated, but the building was gone. The roof of the factory had collapsed, and all but three pieces of food-processing equipment were damaged beyond repair.

Among those standing across the street in the middle of Humble Park were Sam Cobb, president of RMS Foods, and his wife, Rhonda. Cobb’s father had founded the company 46 years prior, and the plant had been standing proudly on North Grimes Street for nearly as long. The family business all but burned to the ground in about an hour. Cobb, who had taken over after working under his father for years, promptly began thinking about how to support his employees in the face of such a loss, but he had few details for what came after that. “We’ll assess the damages and see what we can do to get back in business,” he told a local reporter for the Hobbs News-Sun.

His uncertainty didn’t last long. The following day, Cobb informed the News-Sun that he was at work on a plan to continue paying his nearly 100 employees for as long as it took to rebuild the facility — although he had yet to meet with the insurance company or inform them of such a plan.

In less than a week, Cobb had negotiated a deal between the insurance company, a local construction company, and his staff. All RMS Foods employees would immediately be eligible for state unemployment benefits, and roughly a third would also be hired back to assist with the reconstruction. “From the day we started, we were actually building: running wires, putting up red iron, putting up walls, pouring concrete, doing 17 hours a day,” said Barrientes, who worked on the factory reconstruction and is still employed at RMS Foods today. “We got it done quick,” he added. The arrangement was typical of Cobb, according to Barrientes and other current employees. “He’s never said no to us. He’s always taken care of every one of his employees, and that’s why we’re all so dedicated to him,” he said, “because he’s dedicated to us.”

Just eight months later, the facility was operational again — and Boca Burgers were flying down the factory line.

Tucked away in the southeastern corner of New Mexico, just minutes from the Texas state line, Hobbs lies in the middle of the Permian Basin. Most jobs in the city of about 40,000 residents are in mining, quarrying, or oil and gas extraction, according to the local economic development council. Animal agriculture — both cattle ranching and dairy farming — also figures significantly in the region’s economy and culture. 

These industries shape local attitudes toward eating; barbeque joints abound in the area and steak dinners are common. “Here in oil patch/cattle country, it is probably difficult to find people who will give any type of endorsement to any burger labeled vegetarian, or worse yet, vegan,” Robert Hamilton, a local Hobbs librarian who doesn’t eat red meat, told me.

Against a backdrop of pumpjacks and stretches of desert sky, RMS Foods is a total anomaly. “You would be surprised how many people don’t know that this is here,” said Arnold Langley, a production manager at RMS Foods who has been with the company since 2006. Langley is something of a food-manufacturing veteran — having previously worked at a french fry factory that shut down in Washington state, he was hired by RMS to help scale Boca Burger production. “I’d say I came down to Hobbs to go to work for Sam,” said Langley, “and I never looked back.”

The RMS Foods factory, which produces the meat-free Boca Burger, sits in a nondescript building in Hobbs, New Mexico. Frida Garza / Grist

Seated in his office, in the same building his employees helped rebuild more than 20 years ago (now dedicated to Rhonda, who died in 2018), Cobb wears a crisp button-down with his salt-and-pepper hair combed back neat. On the walls are photos of friends and family, plaques for business accolades, and black-and-white shots of his days in college at Texas Tech University. An official portrait of Cobb at City Hall sits on a nearby table; Cobb served as the mayor of Hobbs from 2012 to this past January. To illustrate the evolution of RMS Foods, he pulls out various marketing materials he’s kept from over the years. There are promotional catalogs of beef and pork products, followed by cheeky magazine ads for Boca Burgers. (One reads: “The way Bob devoured his burger, you’d think no one told him it’s meatless with 70 percent less fat.”) 

How Cobb reconciles his relationship to these dueling food industries is curious — his venture into the plant-based burger space only came about because of his expertise with meat processing. Cobb is aware of the paradoxes inherent to his career’s trajectory. In our first phone call, over a year ago, he conceded that non-animal sources of protein will become crucial to food security in years to come. “There’s no way that as our global population grows, everybody can have a T-bone steak every night,” he said. Additionally, greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture, particularly beef production, are a major contributor to climate change. Research has shown more people embracing a plant-based diet is a crucial step to reducing global emissions. But for Cobb, animal agriculture and plant-based protein have long existed alongside each other, and in his case, one supports the other. He likes to say: “I make veggie burgers for a living so I can afford to be a cowboy.”

A gallery wall in Sam Cobb’s office illustrates his life’s story, from his relatives in the meat industry (top), to his college education in animal science (right), to the factory and employees of RMS Foods (left). Frida Garza / Grist

Cobb himself is a fourth-generation rancher. In the late 1880s, his great-grandfather Gatlin Hall Cobb acquired land and started a ranch in Haskell County, Texas, which is still in the family today. Sam Cobb’s father, S.G., lived through the Great Depression and a drought in the 1950s, two events that showed him the financial precarity of raising cattle for a living. It soon became clear that the Cobb family didn’t make enough money off of the family ranch to support both generations. So S.G. left Texas and headed west to New Mexico in 1959, with the hope of one day buying his own ranch. 

S.G. had a no-nonsense way about him, according to his son, and when he arrived in Hobbs, he opened a franchise of Rich Plan Corporation, a frozen-food company that sold and delivered bulk orders directly to households and even offered freezers to hold months’ worth of food. According to Cobb, when the national Rich Plan Corporation went bankrupt, S.G. maintained his relationships with livestock farmers and rebranded his company as Rich Meat Services. The company transitioned into a meat processing business, selling beef and pork products to a number of hotels, restaurants, fast-food chains, and food service distributors around the country.

But the dream of starting another family ranch never left his father, said Cobb, and in 1978, after nearly 20 years in New Mexico, S.G. and a business partner bought some land off a “longstanding ranching family,” in Lea County, where Hobbs is located. That family, too, was struggling with the economics of their chosen profession. “What happens with ranches is the families grow, but there’s not enough ranch income to feed everybody,” said Cobb. “So then they start selling it off.” For Cobb, raising cattle is still a family affair: His oldest son lives on the ranch and Sam comes out on weekends to help with branding, castrating, and corralling cattle. His granddaughter from Austin occasionally comes into town for workdays, too. The ranch, along with the family land in Texas, holds tremendous symbolic value to Cobb, whose father instructed him never to sell it.

After graduating from Texas Tech in 1976 with dual degrees in animal science and business, Cobb came back to New Mexico to work for his father at Rich Meat Services — first as a salesman, and then in operations. He had a knack for keeping clients happy by staying level-headed in a crisis. David Pyeatt, who was once a customer of Rich Meat Services, said, “Sam’s incredibly intelligent and witty as heck. And he always takes a complex problem and comes up with a very obvious and simple solution.” But the move away from sales may have been for the best; Pyeatt suggested that Cobb can be buttoned-up to the point of coming across as awkward. Tall, careful with words, and with near-perfect posture, Cobb sometimes has the air of a chaperone at a school dance. “When you first meet Sam, you may think he’s a turd, you know?” said Pyeatt, who, it must be said, considers Cobb a dear friend. “Am I saying that nicely?”

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As a businessman, Cobb’s superpower is his pragmatism. In 1980, he took over RMS Foods as president, and the company soon became the largest supplier to Dairy Queen franchises in the Southwest. Years later, Cobb struck a deal with a Japanese trading company to export high-quality cuts of beef and pork to Japan — taking the company he inherited from his dad to new heights. 

But he always had an eye on growing the business even more, and in the late ’90s, that meant looking beyond red meat. The company Boca Burger, started by a natural-food restaurateur in Boca Raton, Florida, was successful at capturing the public’s attention with a better-for-you veggie burger, at a moment when diet culture ran rampant. In 1995, then-president Bill Clinton made headlines for stocking Boca Burgers on Air Force One, after reportedly being introduced to the vegetarian product by a heart specialist. The trend caught Cobb’s attention, too.

In 1997, through a fortuitous chain of connections — and on the strength of his reputation as a meat purveyor — an invitation to join a group of investors and purchase Boca Burger came to Cobb’s desk. According to him, it was a no-brainer. RMS already had most of the necessary manufacturing equipment to get started. The titular Boca Burger — made primarily of soy protein concentrate and wheat gluten — essentially comes together using “the same manufacturing process as a ground-beef burger,” said Cobb. The only difference is the ingredients. “Instead of blending animal protein, we’re blending plant protein.”

Sam Cobb in the RMS Foods factory in 1980. Courtesy of Sam Cobb

Initially, Cobb became an employee of Boca Burger, sold off his Dairy Queen business, and ceased producing meat products at RMS Foods. When production of Boca Burger moved to Hobbs, RMS was manufacturing about 60 percent of the brand’s soy patties. “We started growing exponentially,” said Cobb, enough for the conglomerate Kraft Foods (now Kraft Heinz) to notice. Sales went from $20 million in 1998 to $40 million the following year. On the strength of that growth, Kraft bought Boca Burger in 2000 for an undisclosed amount. “I saw an opportunity in the plant-based category,” said Cobb, and it paid off. By 2002, Boca Burger sales reached $70 million. 

After the 2005 fire, representatives from Kraft Foods visited Hobbs and were so impressed by Cobb’s operations that they decided to designate RMS the exclusive manufacturer of Boca Burgers. “Sam got a letter from Kraft telling him that,” said Barrientes, and the company president read it out loud to his staff in the newly rebuilt office conference room. His father stood beside him for the announcement. “They were in tears, because they were coming back,” said Barrientes.

Every morning Cobb is in the RMS office, he eats whatever plant-based product is being made at the moment for breakfast. It’s a daily ritual shared by many of the staff members, who sample the veggie patties all day to inspect the quality. The faux-meat burgers are good, employees admit, but of course, they aren’t … well, meat. (“I mean, I love my steaks,” said Barrientes.) Cobb isn’t planning on giving up meat anytime soon, and doesn’t expect others to immediately do so, either. “I’m an omnivore,” he said. 

As a planet, we dedicate roughly half of all our habitable land to growing food. But the majority of that land — nearly 80 percent — is ultimately in service of raising livestock. That’s because livestock need pasture land to graze, but they also depend on animal feed — and growing enough corn and soy for all those farmed animals also takes a lot of land. Cattle and other ruminants pose a big problem for the planet in the form of greenhouse gas emissions; these animals have stomachs with multiple compartments, and their digestive process produces methane, which is then released when the animals burp. But the amount of land needed to raise animals for human consumption also means the global demand for meat drives a tremendous amount of deforestation and biodiversity loss. That’s why so many plant-based protein advocates argue mitigating the effects of the climate crisis rest on everyone eating less meat.

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When it comes to matters of persuasion, however, Cobb understands that nobody has ever changed their diet unless they themselves wanted to. “I’ve got friends that wouldn’t put a plant-based burger in their mouth with a gun to their head,” he said. This awareness may be a business advantage for someone like Cobb — even if the uncomfortable truth may strike fear into the hearts of plant-based evangelists and climate advocates. 

In the 2010s, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods went all-in on developing veggie patties that supposedly tasted and bled like real beef. At the time, much of their messaging touched on the environmental case for swapping out beef for soy. “I know it sounds insane to replace a deeply entrenched, trillion-dollar-a-year global industry that’s been a part of human culture since the dawn of human civilization,” said Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown in a TEDMED talk, referring to animal agriculture. “But it has to be done.”

Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown speaks at an event in 2019. While companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat experienced double-digit growth during the pandemic, demand for meat alternatives has been falling dramatically in recent years.
Amanda Edwards / Getty Images

The plant-based protein category enjoyed double-digit sales growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the Good Food Institute, a think tank that tracks the alternative protein industry. But since 2022, demand for these products has been falling. For Brown and others, this style of practically pleading with consumers to change their habits spectacularly backfired. Beyond Meat’s stock price tanked by more than 99 percent in 2025 compared to five years prior. The company reported a net loss of $110.7 million in the fiscal third quarter of last year, its most recent earnings report. Its total outstanding debt is $1.2 billion. Beyond has never once turned an annual profit. There are a number of theories as to why Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods’ gamble on ultra-realistic fake meat failed so hard — including their inability to compete with beef on price and taste. 

“Our thesis is that a bunch of products launched during the pandemic that weren’t ready for mainstream adoption,” said Caroline Cotto, head of NECTAR, an organization that runs taste tests with plant-based and animal-protein products in order to help the former achieve taste parity. “A lot of consumers tried those products and had a really negative experience because they were paying more for a product that didn’t deliver,” she added. “So they really soured on that category and have stopped revisiting it.”

Cotto argues that the plant-based meat industry is something of a “valley of disillusionment,” and it’s hard to disagree. This stunning market failure carries a lesson for the plant-based industry that the broader climate movement and environmental experts have long known: Information alone, even a lot of it, even the really dire stuff, is insufficient to lead to a change in how most people behave. Some industry leaders may now be actively running in the opposite direction of mentioning climate and sustainability: Peter McGuinness, the former CEO of Impossible Foods who stepped down last month, argues this sector struck out with consumers by becoming too “woke” and “partisan.” The future of Impossible, now, is cloudy. The company recently announced it is experimenting with protein-packed grains and pastas.  

The plant-based burger category as a whole has slumped, and as a result, RMS is also producing fewer units of Boca Burgers these days. Barrientes estimates the plant makes less than 4 million pounds of soy-based burgers for Kraft Heinz every year, when in previous years, it was moving almost 20 million. Based on all his experiences in Hobbs, Cobb understands that part of selling plant-based food comes down to how you talk to people. “It’s the old adage. You can lead a horse to water, but you’re not making him drink,” he said. But he also reckons that the answer is simpler — that the role flavor plays cannot be understated. “If you want a hamburger, and you want a big old greasy hamburger, it’s hard to duplicate that with a plant-based product,” said Cobb. Cotto agrees — but thinks these product categories can achieve taste parity, or even become something consumers prefer over meat, with more research and development. “The biggest opportunity across the board is just making sure that these products taste great,” she said.

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Cobb regularly goes out to eat with a small group of friends, including David Pyeatt, his former customer from his meat-supplier days. For someone in the food business, even casual meals can function as informal, but telling, focus groups. 

At a dinner last October, when I asked the group whether they like faux-meat burgers, nervous laughter sputtered around the table. John, a rancher based in Hobbs, said there was nothing about “synthetic meat” that appealed to him, and said he didn’t think he would ever try it. 

Pyeatt shared a story about how his wife had recently made two versions of sloppy Joes — one with ground beef, and another for his mother-in-law that used vegan crumbles from Boca. Pyeatt tried both, and loved the plant-based one more than the tried-and-true original. It simply, in his words, “tasted better.” But ultimately, he said, “if you put a steak in front of me, I’m going to like a nice steak.”

“Nobody here eats Boca Burger,” said Cobb, though his guests quickly contradicted that. Someone suggested that Boca Burger patties aren’t bad if served with a bit of mayo. The conversation underscored how, at the end of the day, people want to eat things that taste good — and the promise of something truly delicious can tempt even the staunchest meat-eaters among us. The servers began to bring out people’s orders, and when the last plate dropped, Cobb and his guests picked up their forks and knives and began to cut into their steak dinners.

Cobb believes the plant-based burger is functionally dead. Back at his office, speaking from behind his desk, he explained his view that faux-meat patties will never fully go away, but that demand is unlikely to return to the levels it reached during the pandemic. 

Whether or not vegan brands should try to replicate the taste and texture of meat is “a really big debate right now in the space,” Cotto said. But breaking free of conventions set by meat-eaters and industrial animal agriculture will demand new ways of thinking, cooking, and dining. “We don’t have a name for it,” said Cotto, but the plant-based protein industry could also explore “a third-space product that’s sort of like — the closest equivalent I can think of is tofu, right? It’s a center-plate protein, but it’s not fitting into a narrow box for consumers.” 

Whether or not plant-based brands will pursue that route, for now, remains to be seen. Either way, Cobb isn’t out of the game. When I asked him about the future of the industry, I was struck by his pragmatism. Ever the entrepreneur, he is still out looking for opportunities to bring in new plant-based manufacturing business. He argues that the concept of swapping veggies for meat could catch on “as long as it’s price competitive.” Last year, on top of its Boca Burger production, RMS began a new partnership with the Seattle-based Rebellyous Foods, a brand of plant-based chicken patties and nuggets that sells directly to food service and school districts. (Disclaimer: Former Grist CEO Brady Walkinshaw is an investor in Rebellyous Foods. He had no editorial role in this story.) The ingredients are nearly identical to those in Boca Burgers, employees told me, but the manufacturing process varies slightly, giving the faux chicken products a juicier, more delicious texture. Employees at RMS seem to love it: “It’s actually good stuff,” one told me.

Cobb said he’s interested in exploring the so-called emerging product category of “blended proteins” — think: sausages and hot dogs that replace some of their meat content with whole-cut veggies or soy. Plant-based advocates like these products because they help lower consumers’ overall meat consumption, even if they never give up meat entirely. But Cobb noted this practice is nothing new. “I used to put soy in hamburger patties. We used to do that for cost savings,” he said. 

He reminded me that all of the technical equipment and expertise that RMS has acquired over the decades of being in the food-manufacturing business means the company is well-positioned to produce other vegetarian appetizers and snacks, like falafel. These, he reckons, can appeal to meat-eaters, as long as they taste good. 

When it comes down to it, Cobb has been successful because he pays attention to what consumers want and, quite simply, makes it. When I asked Cobb if he would ever go back to processing meat, he answered: “I would if the opportunity presented itself and it created jobs for my employees and people in Hobbs.” He paused and added, “Yes, I’ve considered that.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The cowboy who got rich selling veggie burgers on Feb 19, 2026.