Grist

Tim Baucom has done this before. The Milan Cortina Games will be his third Olympics as a wax technician for the United States’ cross-country ski team, a job characterized by long flights schlepping tools and duffel bags of gear halfway around the world, and even longer days prepping skis. His objective is to help American athletes gain even a fraction of a second in competition. But for the first time at an Olympics, he won’t have what was once one of the most powerful tools in his kit: fluorinated ski waxes.

In sports where a gold medal can be decided by inches, downhill and cross-country skiers and snowboarders across the competitive spectrum have used so-called “fluoros” since the 1980s. Typically sold as powders or blocks of hard wax, these lubricants are renowned for their ability to wick water and shed grime, making it easier to glide through snow with minimal resistance, especially in warm conditions. “There’s nothing in the chemical world that I’m aware of that can replicate their hydrophobic and dirt-repelling properties,” Baucom said.

But the reason these products work so well is that they contain PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This class of 15,000 so-called “forever chemicals” is notorious for their harmful effects on human health and the natural world. After years of mounting concern over human exposure and environmental contamination, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, known by its French acronym FIS, banned the use of fluoros in 2023. “I think it kind of is our duty as a winter sport to have some concern for the environment,” said Katherine Stewart-Jones, a cross-country skier who will represent Canada at the Games, which begin tomorrow. 

Katherine Stewart-Jones of Canada competes during the Individual Sprint Quali in the FIS Cross-Country World Cup on January 24 in Goms, Switzerland.
Leo Authamayou / NordicFocus via Getty Images

While athletes have had two World Cup seasons to get used to the change, this marks the first Winter Games without the advantage conferred by these once-ubiquitous products. It will be the highest-stakes test yet for racers and wax technicians’ ability to work with products that are less effective and more sensitive to what’s happening on the trails and slopes. 

“There are a lot more unknowns with the new waxes,” said Julia Kern, a U.S. cross-country skier who has won two World Championship medals and hopes to add Olympic hardware to her collection. “I definitely think it makes it more challenging.”

A technician performs a basic ski wax at Mountain to Sound Outfitters in Seattle. The technician (1) melts hot wax and (2) irons it deep into the ski, then (3) scrapes off the excess wax and (4) brushes it into a smooth layer.

People have been lubricating skis for centuries. The History of Lapland, published in 1704, describes Sámi skiers using pine pitch or rosin to create a smooth, waterproof surface for their wooden skis. By the 1800s, athletes were experimenting with glycerin, whale oil, kerosene, and spermaceti, and the early 1900s brought water-repellent shellacs. In the 1940s, the Norwegian company Swix — a portmanteau of “ski” and “wax” — helped popularize petroleum-derived paraffin waxes.

PFAS proliferated after the 1938 invention of Teflon — the stuff used in nonstick pots and pans — and were added to everything from takeout containers and outdoor clothing to firefighting foam and upholstery. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that PFAS made their way to skiing and snowboarding. These chemicals promised greater speed with less fuss in changing conditions. California entrepreneur Terry Hertel was among the first to dabble with the stuff after buying a fluorocarbon sample from the chemical company 3M. After realizing they made skis “faster than anything before,” he began adding fluorocarbons to his company’s waxes. Companies like Toko and Swix quickly followed.

Nathan Schultz, a former U.S. cross-country racer who now owns a ski shop in Denver, remembers trying fluoro formulas for the first time in the mid-‘90s. “You put that stuff on your skis and it was like you were floating,” he said. Quantifying the exact advantage they conferred was difficult, since cross-country, downhill, and snowboard courses vary widely and race-day conditions differ from season to season. Still, he said, the effects were tangible, especially on wet snow. At first, fluoros were predominantly used by racers at important events because of their high cost. But by the time Schultz retired in 2006, everyone was using them. 

“If you tried to do a race without fluorinated wax, you would not be competitive,” Schultz said. “The amount of speed you could buy on your skis was really ridiculous.”

An article from the January 1989 issue of Ski Magazine alludes to the exclusive advantages that come from expensive fluorinated waxes. Gary Hovland / Ski Magazine

There was only one problem: The world could no longer ignore the dangers of PFAS. The chemicals were turning up everywhere, contaminating soil, food, and drinking water. Studies increasingly linked exposure to thyroid disease, developmental problems, and cancer.

Baucom experienced that growing awareness himself, first as a collegiate racer and, starting in the late aughts, as a professional cross-country ski tech. Talk of the health risks was swirling through his sport’s often cramped and poorly ventilated wax rooms, where techs heated fluoro wax and ironed it into ski bases, kicking vapors and particulates into the air along the way. Wearing a mask or cracking a window provided only so much protection. “Any time you’re breathing in fumes and smoke, no matter what it is, it’s probably not great for you,” said Baucom, who was concerned about the growing body of research on the chemicals’ health risks. “It was pretty obvious right out the gate that these products have potential carcinogenic components.”

Evidence of the risk mounted throughout the 2010s. One particularly alarming study from 2010 found that PFAS accumulated in the bodies of Scandinavian wax technicians, whose blood levels of the compound PFOA averaged 25 times higher than those of the general population. A 2024 study later confirmed the concentrations in people like Baucom “are among the highest of any occupation investigated to date.” 

“There was high exposure intensity, frequency, and duration,” said Kate Crawford, an author of the more recent research and an assistant professor of environmental studies at Middlebury College. 

John Steel Hagenbuch, a Nordic, or cross-country, skier on the U.S. Ski Team, recently had his blood tested and discovered his PFAS levels are higher than average. “The main concern with [PFAS] is that they’re so persistent,” he said. “They can remain in your blood or in water for a really long time.”

PFAS’s durability means these chemicals don’t break down as they move from skis to snow and then into the soil and nearby watersheds. The full extent of contamination remains difficult to quantify, but growing evidence suggests it extends well beyond wax rooms. 

Read Next The EPA is rolling back drinking water limits for 4 PFAS. Thousands more remain unregulated. Joseph Winters

In 2021, officials in Park City, Utah, detected the compounds in three wells drawing from an underground aquifer, including one near the start line of White Pine Touring Nordic Center race course. At first, water quality specialist Michelle De Haan suspected firefighting foam, but local agencies hadn’t used it. She later came across a study examining fluorinated race lubricants and, of the 14 related compounds identified in the study, 11 matched those found in the city’s aquifer. “That became a clearer picture to us,” De Haan said. While not definitive on its own, the finding suggested a likely link — one echoed by sampling in Europe that has found elevated PFAS levels on ski slopes there too.

The impact can be especially significant when ski racers bring PFAS to places that might not otherwise be contaminated. “In some instances, people would be [using fluorinated waxes] in relatively pristine areas,” said Crawford. “It becomes a relatively significant environmental problem.”

For years, these issues with ski wax lurked in plain sight. But as scientists learned more, the ski and snowboard community found itself caught between the knowledge that fluoros carried serious risks and the desire for easy speed. 

Nicolas Bal of France competes in the 2002 Olympics Ski Jumping event in Park City, Utah. Years later, PFAS chemicals linked to ski wax were detected in Park City’s well water. David Madison / Getty Images

By the late 2010s, the unease surrounding PFAS had begun to shape policy that impacted, or even targeted, ski waxes. Regulators in the U.S. and Europe restricted some of the most-studied PFAS, in part by requiring manufacturers to get formal approval before using them in new applications. A handful of smaller races implemented their own fluoro bans — “wax truces,” as Schultz described them — though it remained difficult to compete without them in events that didn’t participate.

Momentum grew in 2019, when the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS, announced plans for a blanket ban covering all 7,000 Nordic, Alpine, and snowboard competitions under its purview, including the World Cup. The decision elicited “surprise/shock,” said Lars Karlöf, the sanctioning body’s technical adviser, but it was intended to “limit the environmental impact of our activities as much as possible.” 

That’s when Swix disposed of its stockpile of fluoro waxes, says Geoff Hurwitch, commercial director for Swix USA. While he’s not sure exactly how much the company got rid of, or how it did so, he knows it was “a lot.” But, he said, it was no longer in compliance with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards and the company knew it wasn’t going to be able to sell it anyway. Jeremy Hecker, chief of operations at the ski division of another wax company, Rex Wax, said the move away from fluoros resulted in up to $30,000 in “dead inventory” — containers of fluoros that have either been destroyed or are collecting dust in storage.

The FIS ban, while announced in 2019, did not take effect until the winter of 2023. Other sanctioning bodies, resorts and even towns across North America and Europe followed suit. Park City, for example, went fluoro-free in 2023 and allowed skiers and snowboarders to swap their stash for eco-friendlier options. TIn the fluoro ban’s first year, the city collected more than 600 pounds of the polluting wax during the ban’s first year.

Technicians wax skis at the Falun World Cup in 2023.
Leann Bentley / U.S. Ski & Snowboard

Overall, the transition has worked “relatively smoothly,” said Knut Nystad, a wax technician for the Norwegian Ski Association. Kern, the U.S. cross-country skier, attributes that in part to the culture of the sport. “People in the cross-country community are very environmentally conscious,” she said. “They want to have clean water, they value their health a lot.”

That broad buy-in, however, doesn’t mean the change has been seamless.

One complication involves testing and enforcement. Because fluorinated compounds do not break down easily, traces can linger even on skis and snowboards that have been thoroughly cleaned, leading to false positives. But the steepest learning curve has been for the teams as technicians and athletes adjusted to a new generation of waxes. 

“It took a while for technicians to learn the new chemistry,” said Julia Mehre Ystgaard, who works withcoordinates Canada’s Nordic World Cup team. Schultz said early fluoro-free waxes were “very inferior” to fluorinated options. “It was kind of crazy,” he said. A ski might feel “pretty good” in one sunny stretch of a course and “terrible” in a shadier section.

The modern alternatives still tend to be slower, and as U.S. cross-country skier Hagenbuch put it, they don’t do as well in late-season snow that’s warm and wet “like mashed potatoes.” He said it has become more common for his team to “miss the wax,” meaning skis aren’t well matched to the day’s conditions. Kern agreed, adding that the effect is especially noticeable on downhills. “You’re right behind [someone] at the top of a hill, and then they just pull away even though you’re in the draft where you should be pulling up on them,” she said.

That impact can be compoundingly decisive: Less glide at the bottom of a hill makes it harder to crest the next one, and less lubrication demands more effort to maintain speed. Suddenly an athlete is off the podium. Alpine and snowboard races are generally much shorter than Nordic events — minutes versus potentially hours — but the high speeds and friction also make wax choice critical. 

“Fluoros were easier because fluoros were fast,” Hagenbuch said. “[They] have been referred to as, like, a ‘great equalizer.’”

John Steel Hagenbuch, a cross-country skier on the U.S. Ski Team, says professional skiers are struggling to adapt to non-fluorinated waxes. Hagenbuch describes fast fluorinated waxes as “a great equalizer.”
Dustin Satloff / NCAA via Getty Images

Hurwitch, at Swix, says the new class of waxes are three to five years away from being as fast as the fluoros, and that company chemists are putting in thousands of kilometers of testing to reach that goal. Until then, however, the great equalizer is gone and other determinants of speed have taken on outsize importance. That, of course, includes physical conditioning and technique. You have to “make sure you have the steak first before you add the salt or the pepper,” said Nystad. But choosing the right equipment has become more important too.

The art of grinding skis has become especially critical. The process involves passing a ski or snowboard over stone, to inlay a pattern designed for a specific snow condition, or set of conditions, like a tire tread. Zach Caldwell, a former Nordic racer and owner of a Vermont ski shop, said this is one reason he’s seen a “dramatic” increase in the number of cross-country skis teenage racers buy: so they can have pairs optimized for different circumstances. Baucom, the wax tech, said these pre-wax decisions once accounted for 80 to 90 percent of a Nordic setup’s speed, but without fluoros they now account for as much as 97 percent.

The shift has raised concerns about competitive balance. While fluoros weren’t cheap, they were less expensive than perfecting grinds on an ever-larger armada of skis. Grinding machines alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and require tremendous expertise to run. Some athletes worry that this gives an advantage to countries like Norway — home to many major ski and wax companies — with deeper research budgets and larger wax tech teams.

Hagenbuch said fluoros “brought the delta between how good people’s skis were together.” Without them, the gaps are remerging. He pointed to a December skiathlon in Trondheim, Norway, where his teammate Gus Schumacher was in contention for a medal yet finished 21st. Something similar happened at a 50-kilometer race last March, where only one athlete on Schumacher’s brand of skis finished in the top 20. 

“It wasn’t the wax. It wasn’t the athlete. … That was the skis,” said Hecker, with Rex Wax. And anyone with the wrong skis in Milano-Cortina will almost certainly miss their shot at the podium — something no amount of non-fluorinated wax will fix.

Fluorinated ski wax, once ubiquitous among professional skiers, will be banned from the 2026 Winter Olympics over concerns of PFAS pollution. Jesse Nichols / Grist

Even as fluorinated waxes disappear from competition, some athletes and technicians caution against assuming all problems have been solved. Nystad was among several people who noted that there’s no guarantee replacement products are benign. “A lot of people think that a fluoro ban means that now all waxes are healthy and you can almost use it as a jam on your sandwich and eat it,” he said. “But that’s not the case … You could have other chemicals in there that are not equally harmful, but that are harmful to nature and to individuals.”

Because formulas are proprietary, it can be difficult to know exactly what newer waxes contain. They likely include petroleum-derived ingredients that can transfer to snowpacks. Even so, some industry insiders question how much attention wax deserves compared with snow sports’ other environmental implications. “It doesn’t make sense to me to discuss the environmental impacts of this until we have really cleared house on the environmental impact of travel, and the food we eat, and the clothes that we wear,” Caldwell said.

Ski and snowboarding wax is also a minor contributor to the PFAS problem, globally. Crawford called it a “comparative drop in the bucket,” pointing to the fact that almost all commercial carpeting in the world is laden with PFAS. But the relative success of the ban in ski waxes is unique and could offer lessons — and hope — to anyone trying to get the chemicals out of other products.

“There are always options,” said Hurwitch, noting that none of Swix’s new products — from outerwear to waxes — contain PFAS. “The water repellency in jackets may not be as good as it was with a PFAS based product but it’s still a great product. The wax may not be quite as reliably fast, yet, but for the vast majority of us skiers, it’s still plenty fast. It will come though.”

The Olympic cross-country schedule begins Saturday with the women’s skiathlon. Kern will be racing at her second Games in temperatures that are expected to hover around freezing, where wax could be crucial. “We’re pretty much always testing skis,” she said. “We have to rely on and trust our wax team.”

Hagenbuch will make his Olympic debut in Milan Cortina. The ban creates additional stress, he admits, but he believes it’s worth it. “For Tim and the other service technicians and for me and for our groundwater and for the environment, yeah, I think it’s good that we don’t do fluoros,” he said. “Do I miss them? Yeah, a little bit.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Olympics are ditching PFAS waxes — and the ‘ridiculous’ speed they gave skiers on Feb 5, 2026.

When then 31-year-old Brazilian culinary student Letícia Dias walked into Eleven Madison Park on a Sunday evening last August, she had no idea a meal was about to change her life. A longtime vegan, it was her first time dining at the world-class New York City luxury restaurant, which in 2021 made the bold move to ditch meat and dairy and offer a fully plant-based menu. When her lips met the deceptively simple-looking corn velouté, something new clicked between her taste buds and brain. 

“I drank that, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is insane,’” Dias recalled. “Like, I understand why this is different than other places that I’ve been to.”

It wasn’t just the food that made the dinner unlike any she’d ever had. It was also the ambience and level of personal attention — the mid-meal tour of the famously quiet kitchen, the waitstaff appearing seemingly from nowhere to refill her water glass between sips, and the stories that accompanied each dish down to the ingredient.

Eleven Madison Park, also known by its initials, EMP, has long been considered a bucket list destination for serious foodies. In 2017, it appeared at the top of a list of the world’s 50 best restaurants. After it dropped meat and dairy, it became the first restaurant in the world to be awarded three Michelin stars for a fully plant-based menu. For vegan cooks in training like Dias, who does not want to work with animal products, EMP’s shift away from meat opened up an elite career opportunity. The restaurant has long had a robust training program that helps aspiring chefs cut their teeth and gain valuable skills for the luxury food world and beyond. 

“It’s a teaching institution,” said Matt Ricotta, owner of the plant-based cottage bakery Manifold in Venice, California, who was a pastry intern at the restaurant in 2022. “It’s one of those famous, famous places where everyone wants to go and learn.” 

A maître d’ at Eleven Madison Park in New York City checks the dining room before dinner in 2017.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images

By the time her meal was over, Dias had decided she wanted to apply to EMP for her externship — a temporary, entry-level kitchen job required by many culinary schools to help graduating students gain experience and valuable industry connections. After the staff found out she was a vegan culinary student, one of the chefs even gave her their business card. 

So it was a shock when, just three days after Dias’ visit, Eleven Madison Park chef and owner Daniel Humm announced that the restaurant would be adding a limited amount of meat and dairy back to the menu — say, an optional cameo of lavender-glazed duck here, an if-you-want-it lobster course there — starting in October 2025. Humm told The New York Times that the change was meant to attract a wider base of guests, both for financial reasons and to reflect a hospitality philosophy of wanting to welcome everyone.

As the news spread, concern grew among the members of Dias’s cohort at the Institute of Culinary Education, where she was enrolled in a program geared toward vegetarian and vegan chefs. Just the day before, one of her classmates, Autumn Henson, had sent their completed externship application to the institute’s career adviser to forward to the restaurant. An experienced vegan baker, Henson had wanted exposure to plant-based haute cooking at a place with name recognition: “It’s important that there’s [vegan] representation at all levels,” they explained. 

But as soon as Henson heard the news, they rushed to a computer and quickly shot off a follow-up message. “The subject line was, ‘Don’t send in my application to EMP.” 

Likewise, Dias decided to put aside her partially finished EMP externship application and look for employers with a fully vegan menu. “The options for if you want to do plant-based fine dining are few and far between, and getting fewer,” she said. 

Even before Eleven Madison Park’s menu change, opportunities to train in exclusively plant-based, high-end kitchens were scarce. The short list of such restaurants in New York City — a city with more vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants than anywhere else in the country — already meant cooks like Dias and Henson have a harder time finding their place within the ultra competitive food industry. As more elite kitchens step back from fully plant-based cooking, the ripple effects go beyond individual careers: Fewer chefs trained in plant-based techniques means fewer restaurants able to execute them at a high level, and fewer chances for plant-forward dishes to shape what ends up on menus more broadly. 

At a moment when experts say cutting back on meat and dairy is essential to a sustainable diet, the loss of these training grounds could slow the cultural shift needed to make that future feel both desirable and delicious.

Kimberly Elliott / Grist

Even for more established vegan cooks, part of what made Eleven Madison Park’s return to meat so upsetting was that it had once represented the ultimate achievement for sustainable cuisine, the ascent to the top of the American cultural food chain. 

Within the world of fine dining, vegan kitchens share many of the same hallmarks as traditional haute dining establishments  — prix fixe menus, meticulous presentation, premium ingredients, and a price tag that’s typically north of $100 per person (before drinks!). And yet the concept of a luxurious, formal, plant-based meal is still a culinary outlier in many parts of the United States, with many top-tier restaurants only emerging within the last few decades.

Like the Michelin star system itself — a rating guide that has become the go-to barometer for ranking the world’s best restaurants — special occasion food has historically been dominated by French culinary tradition, which is heavily reliant on meat and dairy. The 1960s through 1980s saw the rise of nouvelle cuisine, a lighter style of French cooking that emphasized simplicity and freshness and ditched heavy sauces, yet remained firmly tied to animal products. 

That’s not to say delicious vegan fare didn’t exist, of course. Yet in popular culture, it was largely associated with healthful self-denial. In many restaurants, diners who eschewed meat often found themselves poking at plates of steamed vegetables over brown rice — hardly cause for gastronomic celebration. 

But in the early 1990s, that started to change. Millennium Restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area was an early pioneer of upscale vegan cooking when it opened in 1994, offering world cuisine-influenced dishes like tempeh glazed with Filipino-style banana barbecue sauce and a cornmeal-crusted maitake mushroom over grits drizzled with Calabrian chile sofrito oil. In the late aughts, vegetarian fine dining restaurant Dirt Candy in New York City gained national acclaim for its trailblazing playfulness with vegetables, like sweet cauliflower chilaquiles for dessert. Next came Vedge in Philadelphia, Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles, Avant Garden in New York, and other elevated vegan restaurants that helped nudge plants from the appetizer menu to the main course in the 2010s. 

Then came the COVID pandemic. While American restaurants in general struggled, interest in plant-based diets peaked. During the pandemic, the plant-based food industry expanded by 27 percent, according to a survey conducted by the consumer group Strategic Market Research. Whether they were motivated by concerns over health, the climate impacts of meat and dairy, or the ethics of consuming animal products, increased consumer demand for plant-based products could be seen in grocery aisles and white tablecloth restaurants alike.

But it wasn’t until Eleven Madison Park’s 2021 divestment from meat and dairy that vegan fare became associated with the ultimate level of culinary luxury, which has since come to also include other plant-based dining destinations such as Fabrik in Austin, Texas; Astera in Portland, Oregon; and Michelin-starred MITA in Washington, D.C. 

Chef Miguel Guerra (right) confers with guests in the dining room at MITA restaurant in Washington, D.C., in 2024. Scott Suchman for The Washington Post via Getty Images

For the last few years, upscale vegan restaurants have provided new training grounds for the next generation of vegan chefs and bakers, many of whom have taken those plant-based lessons beyond the haute dining scene. 

Internships and externships in vegan fine dining kitchens teach budding plant-based cooks things that omnivorous kitchens teach, too — like how to chop vegetables on a very, very, very even dice — which you can either call fundamentals or grunt work. (Both descriptions are true.) But these experiences also usually teach some of the skills that are especially important for vegan haute cookery. 

More so than meat dishes, cooking fine plant-based fare requires an advanced understanding of what ingredients are at the peak of their season and ripeness, and how to prepare them in ways that accentuate their flavor, said Dan Marek, director of plant-based culinary and content development at Rouxbe Online Culinary School. Cooks training in haute vegan restaurants might gain specialized skills that are highly tailored to the chef’s approach or to the cuisine the restaurant serves. If they’re at a fancy vegan sushi place, they might learn how to roll vegan sushi. Elsewhere, maybe they’d learn spherification, a molecular gastronomy technique that forms tiny, liquid-filled pearlettes that look like caviar but can taste like anything — Key lime, passionfruit, a peak September tomato. 

Whole roasted carrots with black lentils and green harissa prepared by Rich Landau of Vedge in Philadelphia and his wife, co-owner Kate Jacoby.
Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post via Getty Images

At the pastry station of many high-end vegan kitchens, pastry cooks need to be versed in using plant-based baking substitutes, especially butter. Ricotta of Manifold Bakery said his internship at Eleven Madison Park helped him grasp the importance of using acidic ingredients and generous amounts of salt to heighten flavor, plus exposed him to vegan substitutes and thickeners — part of what he believes sets apart his plant-based baking style today. 

“All that came from my time there,” he said. Ricotta said that if he were seeking an internship today, the presence of meat on the restaurant’s menu wouldn’t dissuade him, so long as the pastry program remained fully vegan. Eleven Madison Park says it will “at this time.”

Vegan fine-dining chefs who stay in that part of the field and open their own restaurants also need to eventually learn, or at least consider, the extra element of performance that some restaurants leverage to help vegetable-only dishes feel worthy of a lofty price tag. Eleven Madison Park brought that to the plant-based culinary scene with dishes like its famous carrot tartare, ground at the table and mixed up by the diners themselves, like a big, playful wink at steakhouse expectations. 

But for all its innovation in the kitchen, plant-based eating recently began showing signs of trend fatigue. Meat is making a cultural and political comeback in America. Carni-bros, farm-to-table acolytes, and people looking for easy, protein-filled weeknight recipes alike are on the bandwagon. In January, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released updated federal dietary guidelines that championed red meat and dairy in a major reversal of previous recommendations. 

It wasn’t the ideal professional landscape for Dias and Henson, as they looked for other plant-based externship options in New York last August. Going down the list of high-end plant-based restaurants in New York, they discovered their options were rapidly dwindling. In 2025, at least 20 well-known vegan restaurants in the city closed permanently, two others closed temporarily, and another two, including Eleven Madison Park, de-veganized. 

While restaurant turnover is part of the food industry, it’s notable that most of the recently shuttered vegan businesses in New York are not being replaced by new vegan eateries. Marek attributes a broader nationwide contraction to an overly saturated market: The U.S. restaurant scene got to a point where there were more plant-based eateries than the market of vegan and vegan-curious eaters could actually support. “We’re seeing a lot of closures in the past year,” he said — more than can be attributed to the inherent challenge of targeting a niche clientele. 

“The bigger the swell, the bigger the fall.”

Kimberly Elliott / Grist

Though the vegan restaurant scene has shrunk compared to its post-pandemic high, it’s by no means gone. There are still about a dozen high-end meatless restaurants in the Big Apple alone. A few — like Dirt Candy, Bodai, and Omakaseed — are formal fine dining, centered on tasting menus. Others, like abcV and Avant Garden, are upscale, with enough gastronomic ingenuity to be listed on the Michelin guide. Dirt Candy is the lone one in the bunch with a Michelin star, one of just a few meatless restaurants nationwide with the honor.

Before applying to Eleven Madison Park, Dias had applied to almost all the city’s high-end vegan kitchens, including Omakaseed and the vegan restaurants owned by the groups Overthrow Hospitality and City Roots Hospitality. But by the end of August, she hadn’t gotten any replies. She decided to look beyond the city’s entirely plant-based upscale options, applying to abcV, which is vegetarian and is owned by renowned French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant group. The restaurant’s use of some eggs gave Dias pause, but abcV is still considered vegan-friendly. She really admired its approach to letting vegetables be vegetables instead of leaning on meat substitutes. 

“It’s like school. Sometimes the benefits outweigh whatever I may feel,” she said. 

Henson, meanwhile, had also sent an externship application to Overthrow Hospitality, which owns Avant Garden and the elevated homemade pasta spot Soda Club among others, but didn’t hear back. (Overthrow Hospitality later told Grubstreet that it plans to close almost all of its New York City restaurants “over time” in favor of launching a national chain of pizza-and-pasta locations.) After inquiring about City Roots Hospitality, they learned the vegan group doesn’t take externs. After doing a trail (or job tryout) at both abcV and Dirt Candy — two restaurants they were excited about — they learned that Dirt Candy’s sole externship spot had gone to another plant-based student in their culinary class. 

“I gotta say, it’s been a little harder than I thought,” they said to Grist about a month into their search. 

Lunchtime diners at abcV, a vegan restaurant in New York City. Deb Lindsey For The Washington Post via Getty Images

Outside the U.S., plant-based fine dining and training pathways into it for budding vegan chefs look like they may actually be expanding, inch by inch — even in France, of all places. Arpège, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris helmed by chef Alain Passard, said last summer that it would ditch all animal products except honey. The French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu, meanwhile, has launched plant-based cooking and pastry programs at its Paris, London, Malaysia, São Paolo, and other locations over the past several years.

But inside the U.S., the spotty landscape of meatless culinary school training opportunities just took a hit. While Henson and Dias were still in classes at the Institute of Culinary Education, they learned that their program, which had been entirely vegetarian, would be changing beginning with the following cohort. A previous iteration of the program had been plant-forward but with some instruction in poultry and seafood — taking inspiration from the shuttered vegetable-centric culinary education pioneer the Natural Gourmet Institute. Last fall, the institute’s vegetarian program reverted back to this model, reincorporating a few lessons with chicken, fish, and shellfish. 

That shift may not matter much for early-career cooks who are flexible on the presence of meat in their educational program. It might even be helpful for broadening their career opportunities, since they’d be well-poised for work in a vegan kitchen but could also walk into a traditional kitchen knowing how to filet a fish. Vegan or plant-forward chefs who are OK with the presence of meat in their work environment have more places to do haute vegan cooking than those who draw the line at steak. There are 20 or so Michelin-starred omnivorous restaurants around the country that offer dedicated vegan or vegetarian tasting menus — The French Laundry, Le Bernardin, Per Se, and now Eleven Madison Park among them. Many more without a Michelin star do the same. The field of vegetable-centric restaurants that serve meat is much larger. 

But for vegan chefs like Dias and Henson who really want to avoid meat due to their personal convictions, shifts like the ones at Eleven Madison Park and the Institute for Culinary Education make it harder to see themselves in the field at all. The U.S. now has only one major professional culinary school offering a vegetarian culinary diploma in person — the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Boulder, Colorado. (Escoffier didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether it has any plans to incorporate more animal products into its in-person or online program.) Marek said Rouxbe’s online programs, which he described as “1,000-percent vegan,” aren’t going anywhere.

While Dias and Henson were willing to apply to vegetarian externships, both said that they wouldn’t have attended the Institute for Culinary Education at all if their program had included poultry and seafood. “I feel kind of lucky that I got in while it was still meat-free,” Henson said.

Courtesy of Autumn Henson

That wasn’t Henson’s only break. In late September, they finally received an externship offer —  from abcV, the same restaurant where Dias was training — with a starting date in early October. 

A few days into the role, Henson started running the restaurant’s dosa station solo. Dias, who started a few weeks earlier, had recently learned how to make abcV’s Sichuan tomato broth for her favorite dish — wontons filled with late-summer sweet corn and shiitake mushrooms. She was getting additional instruction in how seasonality figured into the design of a tangy heirloom tomato salad served with fruit. She watched how the chefs chose different fruits to include, depending on what they got from the farmers market. 

“It’s always so beautifully presented,” Dias said. 

In mid-November, Dias finished her externship, which she called “very enriching.” Between her time at culinary school and abcV, she felt ready to move forward with her dream of menu consulting, developing vegan recipes for omnivorous restaurants, beginning with her family’s. By December, she was back in Brazil, feverishly developing plant-based dishes for a new pan-Asian bar-restaurant her family was opening before Christmas. 

Henson’s time at abcV looked a little different. They ended up staying at the dosa station for the entirety of their two-and-a-half-month externship due to what they described as “worker shortages.” When their training ended, they decided to leave haute cuisine and continue their vegan bakery business in California, with the goal of eventually scaling it up to wholesale. 

Reflecting back on their externship, Henson was glad they’d done it but had mixed feelings about its utility. The experience had given them new skills, including familiarity with new produce and herbs — helpful knowledge for developing their own future vegan pastry flavors. But compared to culinary school, which had given them more breadth of knowledge, they weren’t sure it had been truly necessary. They felt it would have been essential — probably more so than school — if they had gone into actual restaurant work, fine dining or otherwise.  

In the end, Henson saw their externship less as a prerequisite than as one narrow path among too few. 

Fine dining has long functioned as a testing ground for ideas that eventually reach far beyond white tablecloths and Michelin stars. Techniques, flavors, and expectations incubated in elite kitchens tend to migrate outward, influencing what other restaurants attempt and what diners come to want. As fewer of those kitchens commit fully to plant-based cooking, the question isn’t only where vegan chefs will train. It’s whether the knowledge needed to make vegetable-centered food feel ambitious, indulgent, and culturally central will continue to spread at all — or quietly slip off the menu.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Vegan fine dining had a moment. Now it’s over. on Feb 5, 2026.

President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns.

Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories.

Trump, however, has voiced strong support for the industry as part of his effort to make the United States a leader in critical mineral production. He has also pushed for U.S. companies to mine in international waters, bypassing ongoing global negotiations over international mining regulations. 

Kate Finn, a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute Center for Indigenous Economic Stewardship in Colorado, said she worries the seabed mining industry will repeat the mistakes of land-based mining.

“The terrestrial mining industry has not gotten it right with regards to Indigenous peoples,” Finn said. “Indigenous peoples have the right to give and to withdraw consent. Mining companies themselves need to design their operations around that right.”

It’s not yet clear which companies, if any, are interested in mining off Alaska. A spokesperson for The Metals Company, one of the leading publicly traded firms in the industry, said it has no plans to expand to Alaska. Oliver Gunasekara, chief executive officer of the startup Impossible Metals — which has asked Trump to allow mining around American Samoa despite Samoan opposition — said his company has no plans either. 

“We do not have current plans in Alaska, as we do not know what resources are in the ocean,” he said. “If there are good nodule resources, we would be very interested.” 

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The potential lease area under consideration is larger than the state of California. Cooper Freeman, director of Alaska operations for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the scope is so broad that it includes ecologically important waters already closed to bottom trawling, a fishing method that drags heavy nets across the seafloor. 

“A lot of these areas, particularly in the Aleutians, have been put off limits for bottom trawling because there are nurseries for commercially important fish and ecologically important species and habitat, ” Freeman said. 

In its announcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, the agency responsible for regulating deep-sea mining, said the proposed area included depths more than 4 miles deep near the Aleutian Trench and the abyssal plains of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, at depths as low as 3.5 miles. “BOEM is particularly interested in areas that have been identified by [the U.S. Geological Survey] as prospective for critical minerals as well as heavy minerals sands along the Seward Peninsula and Bering Sea coast.”

The waters are off the coast of a state that is home to more than 200 Alaska Native nations. Jasmine Monroe, who is Inupiaq, Yupik, and Cherokee, grew up in the village of Elim in Alaska’s Bering Strait region. She said she became concerned about what the proposal could mean for the seafood her community relies on after learning the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management opened up a 30-day public comment period last week on potential leases.

“We eat beluga meat, we eat walrus, we eat seal, we eat whale,” she said. “Whatever happens in the ocean, it really does affect our way of life.” 

“It just feels like we don’t have any say on whether it happens or not,” she said. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us.” 

The Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization representing Indigenous peoples of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.

Monroe, who works on water quality issues at the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, said she feels disempowered by what she described as a top-down approach and short timelines for public input. 

Kate Finn from the Tallgrass Institute said Indigenous peoples have the right under international law to consent to activities in their territories and warned that U.S. federal regulations alone may not be sufficient for companies to meet international legal standards, particularly amid deregulation. 

“Companies will miss that if they’re only relying on the U.S. federal government for consultation,” she said. 

Finn added that Indigenous nations have their own economic and cultural priorities and that some have chosen to work with mining companies under specific conditions. 

“There are Indigenous peoples who work well with companies and invite mining into their territories, and there is a track record there as well,” she said. 

Monroe said she recognizes that seabed mining could supply minerals used in technologies like electric vehicle batteries, similar to other mining proposals she’s opposed in Alaska including a graphite mine that could pollute waters. But she doesn’t see electric vehicles in her community, and said the environmental and cultural cost is too high.

“It really feels like another false solution,” she said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters on Feb 5, 2026.

The Montezuma Wetlands drape across 1,800 acres of Solano County, California, where the Sacramento River empties into San Francisco Bay. Once drained and diked for farming and grazing, the marsh has been rehabilitated over the past two decades, and in 2020, tidal waters returned for the first time in a century. Today, the land teems with shorebirds, waterfowl, and other wildlife in a rare example of large-scale habitat restoration.

But just as the ecosystem is on the mend, another makeover may be coming. A company called Montezuma Carbon wants to send millions of tons of carbon dioxide from Bay Area polluters through a 40-mile pipeline and store it in saline aquifers 2 miles beneath the wetland. Approval could come in as little as 12 to 18 months once the county approves a test well, with what its backers call “limited disposal” coming one year after that. If the project proceeds, it could be the Golden State’s first large-scale, climate-driven carbon capture and storage site. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency approved Carbon TerraVault, a smaller project in Kern County, California, that would store carbon dioxide in depleted oil wells.

Proponents say the area’s geology and proximity to regional industries make it an ideal place to stash carbon, and the company notes its facilities will be “well away from the restored wetland areas and far from sensitive habitats.” Residents and environmental justice groups argue that the project is being steered toward a low-income, working-class county long burdened with industrial development, and they worry about safety, ecological disruption, and whether the technology is a distraction from more effective and affordable climate solutions. Their fight over risk, consent, and who must live with climate infrastructure will help define not just the future of this project, but how California decides who bears the costs of decarbonization.

Long before becoming a showpiece of ecological recovery, the wetland in question was treated as expendable. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Montezuma Wetlands were transformed into farmland and shielded from natural tidal flows. By the end of the 20th century, much of the area functioned less as a marsh and more as a repository for industrial waste.

That began to change in the early 2000s, when University of California, Berkeley professor and environmental scientist Jim Levine led a remediation effort that used sediment dredged from the Port of Oakland to restore the wetland. The project was praised by regulators and conservationists and reestablished tidal habitat, altering the trajectory of a landscape long defined by extraction.

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Levine’s involvement with the site evolved, eventually placing the Montezuma Wetlands at the center of a vastly different environmental experiment. Around 2010, scientists with Shell and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory identified the area’s shale composition as potentially suitable for storing large amounts of carbon dioxide. As California’s climate targets grew more ambitious, Levine began promoting the site as a place where those geological conditions could support a large-scale carbon capture and storage project.

In May 2023, Montezuma Carbon sought an EPA permit to inject CO2, sourced from refineries, hydrogen plants, and power plants, into the Montezuma Wetlands. The project, designed by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley lab, Stanford University, and UC-Berkeley, stalled last spring as Levine’s health declined. After his death in September, its technical lead, seismologist and Berkeley professor Jamie Rector, wanted to “do right by Jim” and reignite the proposal, positioning it as both a climate solution and a research-driven test case — even as scrutiny and opposition have intensified.

“Solano County historically has long been treated as a waste dump for the region’s polluters,” said local pediatrician Bonnie Hamilton. “We have a beautiful area and don’t want to see it messed up for the sake of rich people wanting to get richer.” 

Opponents frame Montezuma Carbon’s proposal as a question of who controls their land and who absorbs the risks of decarbonization. The county is home to roughly half a million people, including the Bay Area’s largest per capita populations of veterans and residents with disabilities, and it is among the most racially diverse counties in the nation. Limited resources can make navigating regulatory and legal processes difficult, heightening concerns about meaningful consent. Those worries are compounded by a history of industrial violations, including an $82 million penalty levied last year against the Valero refinery in Benicia for years of unreported toxic emissions and other air quality failures.

Within the next three years, the project’s architects hope to be depositing up to 8 million tons of carbon annually, a significant stride toward the state’s goal of capturing 13 to 20 million tons by 2030. Rector believes the site could store at least 100 million tons over its 40-year lifespan. The site’s compacted mud, silt, and clay, he said, would provide a natural cap that could keep the pollutant locked underground indefinitely, while its location alongside Bay Area industries would reduce carbon transportation costs.

The Sleipner carbon dioxide gas processing and capture project, the world’s first commercial sequestration operation, has stored 20 million tons of the gas about 3,000 feet under the North Sea.
Daniel Sannum Lauten / AFP via Getty Images

The National Energy Technology Laboratory, which leads the Energy Department’s research on carbon capture and storage, points to key advantages of the site like minimal environmental sensitivity and low population density. The nearest community, Rio Vista, is 10 miles away. Rector added that advanced pipeline monitoring systems, such as acoustic, pressure, and temperature sensors, can quickly detect and contain leaks. Unlike enhanced oil recovery — where pressurized CO2 is injected to extract oil, with regulations aimed primarily at protecting groundwater — EPA rules for climate-driven sequestration require operators to demonstrate that injected carbon will remain buried. The project’s proponents also argue that decades of experience pumping carbon underground — including more than a billion tons injected in the U.S. for commercial use, such as for beverage carbonation, since the 1970s, and over 20 million tons that have been safely stored at Norway’s Sleipner project since 1996 — suggest that Montezuma is a low-risk site.

Pipeline safety has drawn heightened scrutiny since 2020, when a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured in Satartia, Mississippi, casting a dense cloud of gas near the ground and hospitalizing dozens of residents. Although that pipeline was federally regulated, critics and regulators alike later acknowledged those rules were inadequate for managing the public safety risks of large-scale CO2 transport.

Rector quipped that the project would leak “when pigs fly,” but identified pressure-induced seismicity as the principal peril, given the wetlands’ position between the Kirby Hills and Midland faults — though the National Energy Technology Laboratory has said a devastating event is unlikely. To reduce that risk, Rector has proposed drawing down water from a nearby reservoir to ease subsurface pressure and create more capacity for injected gas, with the water potentially redirected to farmers and industries facing chronic shortages.

Carbon capture and storage is widely seen by policymakers, industry leaders, and many scientists as a necessary — if imperfect — tool for meeting state climate goals, even as environmentalists argue it diverts attention from cheaper, cleaner solutions. California Governor Gavin Newsom has said “there is no path” to carbon neutrality without the technology, a point the California Air Resources Board echoed when it told Grist it “could not weigh in on specific projects, but carbon management is a critical piece of the state’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.” This institutional support is reflected in legislation like SB 614, which stresses the technology is central to California’s effort to reach net-zero emissions.

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Supporters argue that the value of carbon capture is most obvious in sectors where greenhouse gases are hardest to curb, such as cement production, which accounts for roughly 8 percent of global CO2 output. While lower-carbon materials and cleaner manufacturing techniques are emerging, they will be costly and slow to deploy at scale. Even with those changes, substantial emissions would remain, said Ben Grove, a deputy director at the Clean Air Task Force, leading him to consider carbon capture a necessary complement to other climate solutions.

For Montezuma Carbon, that high-level backing has yet to translate into financial certainty. Project leaders say technological advances that could lower costs, along with government incentives and private investment, are still essential. 

Still, the company faces significant hurdles, including regulatory approval and the loss of its founder. Cost is now the “albatross around our neck,” Rector said, as the project has no financing and is estimated to require roughly $2 billion. The Department of Energy denied a $340 million grant in 2023, and Rector acknowledged that without government subsidies or a promising return for investors, funding will be difficult.

In its EPA application, Montezuma Carbon contends the project would bring jobs, tax revenue, cleaner air, and a hub for climate innovation to “disadvantaged local communities.” Residents and local environmental justice advocates don’t buy it. They also argue the technology will only perpetuate the use of fossil fuels. The International Institute for Sustainable Development considers carbon capture and storage “expensive, energy intensive, unproven at scale, and has no impact on the 80 percent of oil and gas emissions that result from downstream use.” Similar carbon pipeline schemes have failed in the Midwest because of community opposition, and Montezuma Carbon is just one of a dozen such projects under consideration in California.

Dr. Bonnie Hamilton, a Solano County pediatrician, speaks at a Sept. 9, 2025 press conference launching Communities Against Carbon Transport and Injection, a local coalition formed to block the Montezuma Carbon project. Tom Kunhardt, Communities Against Carbon Transport and Injection

Local officials are reviewing California’s first geological carbon storage project, in Kern County, as they try to understand how similar proposals have been evaluated elsewhere. County Supervisor Cassanda James “does not have a comment at this time,” according to her chief of staff, and other county supervisors did not respond to requests for comment. Alma Hernandez, the mayor of Suisun City, which is about 20 miles from the proposed site, said her staff is “still learning more” about the project and “no position has been taken.”

For many residents, the unanswered questions go deeper than permitting or precedent. They ask whether industries labeled “essential” must continue emitting carbon dioxide at all, or whether cleaner alternatives could negate the need for technologies like underground storage. And they question who gets to decide which communities should host infrastructure designed to manage the consequences of pollution generated elsewhere. “All of us want to believe the climate crisis could be solved without changing how society functions,” Theo LeQuesne of the Center for Biological Diversity said.

The Montezuma Wetlands have endured centuries of human interference, first in its destruction and then its restoration. It now faces another possible refashioning to manage emissions from an economy that still rests solidly on fossil fuels.

At the heart of the debate is not only whether carbon capture is an effective way to meet California’s climate goals, but where such infrastructure should be built, and who gets to decide. The fate of the project hinges on the weight of statewide climate ambitions, scientific confidence in the technology, and the objections of the community being asked to host it.

toolTips('.classtoolTips0','A technology that catches carbon dioxide at the point of release, preventing it from escaping into Earth’s atmosphere. CSS systems typically are installed on industrial or energy facilities, like coal-burning power plants, where the greenhouse gas is captured, compressed, and then buried deep underground.
'); 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.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the polarizing plan to stash carbon in a California wetland on Feb 4, 2026.

The conversation around energy use in the United States has become … electric. Everyone from President Donald Trump to the cohosts of Today show has been talking about the surging demand for, and rising costs of, electrons. Many people worry that utilities won’t be able to produce enough power. But a report released today argues that the better question is: Can we use what utilities already produce more efficiently in order to absorb the coming surge?

“A lot of folks have been looking at this from the perspective of, Do we need more supply-side resources and gas plants?” said Mike Specian, utilities manager with the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, who wrote the report. “We found that there is a lack of discussion of demand-side measures.”

When Specian dug into the data, he discovered that implementing energy-efficiency measures and shifting electricity usage to lower-demand times are two of the fastest and cheapest ways of meeting growing thirst for electricity. These moves could help meet much, if not all, of the nation’s projected load growth. Moreover, they would cost only half — or less — what building out new infrastructure would, while avoiding the emissions those operations would bring. But Specian also found that governments could be doing more to incentivize utilities to take advantage of these demand-side gains. 

“Energy efficiency and flexibility are still a massive untapped resource in the U.S.,” he said. “As we get to higher levels of electrification, it’s going to become increasingly important.”

The report estimated that by 2040, utility-driven efficiency programs could cut usage by about 8 percent, or around 70 gigawatts, and that making those cuts currently costs around $20.70 per megawatt. The cheapest gas-fired power plants now start at about $45 per kilowatt generated. While the cost of load shifting is harder to pin down, the report estimates moving electricity use away from peak hours — often through time-of-use pricing, smart devices, or utility controls — to times when the grid is less strained and power is cheaper could save another 60 to 200 gigawatts of power by 2035. That alone would far outweigh even the most aggressive near-term projections for data center capacity growth. 

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Vijay Modi, director of the Quadracci Sustainable Engineering Laboratory at Columbia University, agrees that energy efficiency is critical but isn’t sure how many easy savings are left to be had. He also believes that governments at every level — rather than utilities — are best suited to incentivize that work. He sees greater potential in balancing loads to ease peak demand. 

“This is a big concern,” he said, explaining that when peak load goes up, it could require upgrading substations, transformers, power lines, and a host of other distribution equipment. That raises costs and rates. Utilities, he added, are well positioned to solve this because they have the data needed to effectively shift usage and are already taking steps in that direction by investing in load management software, installing battery storage and generating electricity closer to end users with things like small-scale renewable energy. 

“It defers some of the heavy investment,” said Modi. “In turn, the customer also benefits.” 

Specian says that one reason utilities tend to focus on the supply side of the equation is that they can often make more money that way. Building infrastructure is considered a capital investment, and utilities can pass that cost on to customers, plus an additional rate of return, or premium, which is typically around 10 percent. Energy-efficiency programs, however, are generally considered an operating expense, which aren’t eligible for a rate of return. This setup, he said, motivates utilities to build new infrastructure rather than conserve energy, even if the latter presents a more affordable option for ratepayers. 

“Our incentives aren’t properly lined up,” said Specian. State legislators and regulators can address this, he said, by implementing energy-efficiency resource standards or performance-based regulation. “Decoupling,” which separates a company’s revenue from the amount of electricity it sells, is another tactic that many states are adopting. 

Joe Daniel, who runs the carbon-free electricity team at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, has also been watching a model known as “fuel cost sharing,” which allows utilities and ratepayers to share any savings or added costs rather than passing them on entirely to customers. “It’s a policy that seems to make logical sense,” he said. A handful of states across the political spectrum have adopted the approach, and of the people he’s spoken with or heard from, Daniel said “every consumer advocate, every state public commissioner, likes it.” 

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents all of the country’s investor-owned electric companies, told Grist that regardless of regulation, utilities are making progress in these areas. “EEI’s member companies operate robust energy-efficiency programs that save enough electricity each year to power nearly 30 million U.S. homes,” the organization said in a statement. “Electric companies continue to work closely with customers who are interested in demand response, energy efficiency, and other load-flexibility programs that can reduce their energy use and costs.”

Because infrastructure changes happen on long timelines, it’s critical to keep pushing on these levers now, said Ben Finkelor, executive director of the Energy and Efficiency Institute at the University of California, Davis. “The planning is 10 years out,” he said, adding that preparing today could save billions in the future. “Perhaps we can avoid building those baseload assets.” 

Specian hopes his report reaches legislatures, regulators, and consumers alike. Whoever reads it, he says the message should be clear. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US doesn’t need to generate as much new electricity as you think on Feb 4, 2026.

The year 2010 was a reckoning for Japan’s economic security. 

On September 7, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyu 5179 refused an order by Japan’s coast guard to leave disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as Diaoyu. The vessel then rammed two patrol boats, escalating a decades-long territorial feud.

Japan responded by arresting the captain, Zhan Qixiong, under domestic law, a move Beijing considered an unacceptable assertion of Japanese sovereignty. Amid mounting protests in both countries and the collapse of high-level talks, China cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan, which relied upon its geopolitical adversary for 90 percent of its supply. The move reverberated throughout the global economy as companies like Toyota and Panasonic were left without materials crucial to the production of everything from hybrid cars to personal electronics.

It wasn’t long before Japan gave in and let Qixiong go. The crisis, which garnered worldwide attention, became a catalyst for Japan’s push to secure a reliable supply of critical minerals. “That was the turning point,” said Takahiro Kamisuna, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Fifteen years later, that reckoning has only deepened.

China still provides 60 percent of Japan’s critical minerals, a reliance that has grown riskier as Beijing asserts its position as the world’s dominant supplier. Last month, Japan took a bold step to break that dependence when it launched a five-week deep-sea mining test off Minamitorishima Island. A crew of 130 researchers aboard the Chikyu — Japanese for “earth” — will use what is essentially a robotic vacuum cleaner to collect mud from a depth of 6,000 meters, marking the world’s first attempt at prolonged collection of minerals from great depths.

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Seabed mud off the coast of that uninhabited island, which sits 1,180 miles southeast of Tokyo, is rich in rare earths like neodymium and yttrium — distinct from the potato-shaped polymetallic nodules often associated with marine extraction. Such materials are essential for electric vehicles, solar panels, advanced weapons systems, and other technology.

The expedition, which is expected to end February 14, is being led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, which did not respond to a request for comment. It comes three months after the country signed an agreement with the United States to collaborate on securing a supply of critical minerals. It also propels Japan to the forefront of a growing debate over how far nations should go to secure these materials. Deep-sea mining “is not a new thing,” Kamisuna said, “it’s just gaining more attention mainly because of geopolitical tensions.”

The trawler incident highlighted a vulnerability that successive governments vowed to alleviate. Many criticized then-prime minister Naoto Kan of the country’s center-left party for capitulating to China, but he pledged to never again let Japan’s industrial future hinge on a single supplier. His successor, Shinzo Abe of the center-right party, was more aggressive and saw critical minerals as not just an economic issue, but a matter of national security that must be addressed even if it meant exploiting the deep sea. 

Establishing a domestic supply could help Japan reach its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, a high priority for Yoshihide Suga, who succeeded Abe. Although Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, an Abe protégé who assumed office late last year, supports the 2050 timeline, she has said the transition must not risk Japan’s industrial competitiveness and energy stability. 

Takaichi has proposed slashing subsidies for large-scale solar projects or batteries, largely because so much of that technology is imported from China. Instead, she has hailed nuclear power as the path toward carbon neutrality. With the mining experiment unfolding in the Pacific, Takaichi hopes to secure a strategic reserve of minerals to protect key industries.

But Japan doesn’t face an either-or choice, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Energy security and energy transition are closely tied,” she said.

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“To me, it’s much more about the pace, not so much the direction,” said Nakano, who has worked for the U.S. Department of Energy and for the energy attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. “I don’t find Takaichi’s way of framing this dual challenge — energy security and decarbonization — unique to Japan. A lot of G7 countries are starting to recalibrate again, so they do have to think about international competitiveness. Direction-wise, [Japan] is just aligning itself with the political establishment and the industry.”

Unlike China, Japan lacks the sedimentary geology associated with rare earth deposits, requiring it to look toward the waters within its exclusive economic zones. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Japan has the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, which includes the atoll island of Minamitorishima. 

Although the minerals to be found there lie nearly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, proponents of digging them up argue the challenge of extracting them and the cost of refining them is justified by mounting geopolitical tension. With Takaichi’s recent political jabs at Beijing, China has begun choking off its exports to Japan. Nakano said Japanese officials seem “confident” in the outcome of the experiment. “They’ve determined that it merits to have this demonstration of technologies and equipment this time around,” she said.

Japan’s foray into deep-sea mining comes amid mounting concern about the ecological cost of such technology. Scientists and environmental groups warn that marine extraction is racing ahead of our understanding of the impacted ecosystems. They are particularly concerned about sediment plumes, noise and light pollution, and damage to habitats and food webs, noting that scars left by equipment could render the seafloor uninhabitable for decades, even centuries.

“A tiny little nudge, and the whole seafloor is disturbed,” said Travis Washburn, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He studies deep-sea environments and human impacts on marine ecosystems, and he has analyzed the waters around Minamitorishima Island and represented Japan at International Seabed Authority workshops. He believes that mining rare earths from mud could have the same impact as mining nodules. “I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”

Government officials insist the ecological impacts will be closely monitored. But assessing them could be difficult, because the seafloor around the island, home to sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, and potentially rare endemic species — remains the subject of intense study. Scientists fear these ecosystems may be permanently altered before anyone assesses them. As with many extractive industries, Washburn noted, technology is often deployed before anyone fully understands its environmental impacts.

Shigeru Tanaka, deputy director general of the Pacific Asia Resource Center, is an outspoken critic of deep-sea mining. He argues that the industry as a whole disregards international law and that exploiting the seafloor will harm fisheries and trample upon the rights of Pacific Islanders who consider the sea as sacred. (The Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands have raised such concerns in opposing Trump administration plans to open the waters there to mining.) He also believes that some of the experts involved in Japan’s project “are not really taking seriously the risks to the environment and how irreversible it may be.”

Even some government officials have expressed concern. Yoshihito Doi of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy has said Japan should mine only “if we can establish a robust system that properly takes environmental impacts into account.” 

cobalt, nickel and manganese." data-caption="A geologist inspects a bucket of polymetallic nodules, misshapen black globes encrusted with metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese, collected by the research vessel MV Anuanua Moana from near the Cook Islands.
A geologist inspects a bucket of polymetallic nodules, misshapen black globes encrusted with metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese, collected by the research vessel MV Anuanua Moana from near the Cook Islands.
William West / AFP via Getty Images

It remains unclear what exactly is unfolding beneath the waves during this current test, but based upon his experience working with the Japanese government on similar research, Washburn said the top priority will be assessing whether the technology works. Researchers also will monitor how much material the system can hold and if the machinery can keep the sea mud contained without releasing a massive sediment plume on the seafloor or in the water column. 

If Japan can successfully deploy a 6,000-meter pipe that can suck up 35 metric tons of mud under extreme pressure — about 8,700 pounds per square inch, or 600 times the pressure at sea level — government officials say a broader trial, which may include polymetallic nodules, could begin in February 2027. 

One longer-term goal is to develop what’s called “hybrid mining.” Because deep-sea polymetallic nodules sit atop the rare-earth mud around Minamitorishima Island, researchers are exploring whether both could be collected and separated in a single operation.

Kamisuna said Japan faces another challenge: The energy needed to acquire and refine a stockpile. “If we want to create a sufficient reserve for rare earth [minerals], either using domestic or export, a large amount of electricity is required,” he said. “And the question is, What are we going to use, liquified natural gas or coal? What is the environmental cost?”

Using more environmentally friendly methods of extraction and processing can be expensive, he said — which is one reason many countries turn to China as a cheaper option. 

For now, Japan’s deep-sea mining experiment seems to have drawn little public opposition at home, unlike in the United States and Australia where environmental activists and Indigenous communities have pushed back against such operations, particularly around the Pacific Islands. In the meantime, the country’s test moves forward, even as the implications of success, and questions about its long-term impact, remain unresolved.

“We are not prepared,” Tanaka said. “My personal take is that by the time we are ready, when the technology and the science is set, I really do not think there would be a demand for it.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips2','A group of 17 soft gray metals including lanthanides, scandium, and yttrium, so-called rare earths form key parts of the magnets in wind turbines and are used in high-tech products ranging from consumer electronics to defense satellites.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A lightweight, silvery-white alkali metal with properties that allow it to store large amounts of energy. Lithium is a key component of many batteries, including those that store renewable energy and power electric vehicles.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips9','A conductive and heat-resistant metal that forms a key part of many battery cathodes, which allow electric charges to flow. It is used in the lithium-ion batteries that power many EVs as well as solar energy systems and wind turbine components.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips10','A scarce blue metal that helps battery cathodes store large amounts of energy without overheating or collapsing. It is a key component of lithium-ion batteries. ');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Japan’s unprecedented project could test the limits of deep-sea mining on Feb 3, 2026.

I recently ate a pig that’s alive and well at a sanctuary in upstate New York. Her name is Dawn, and she donated a bit of fat, which a company called Mission Barns grows in bioreactors, then blends with plant-based ingredients to create pork products (like the meatballs above) that taste darn near like the real thing. Its “cultivated” offerings join a herd of alternative meats — including those from mainstays like Impossible Foods and Eat Just — that are challenging the traditional livestock industry, which uses immense swaths of land and spews staggering quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.

In his new book Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food — and Our Future, Bruce Friedrich, founder and president of the Good Food Institute, catalogs the extraordinary costs of conventional meat production and the vast potential for alternative culinary technologies. Grist sat down with Friedrich to talk about the progress, challenges, and potential of the fledgling industry. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. It’d be great to get a rundown on — if you’ll pardon the pun — your beef with meat.

A. Conventional meat production has significant external costs. In 2006, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization released a more-than-400-page report called Livestock’s Long Shadow. It said that animal-product production is responsible for all of the most serious environmental harms at every scale, from local to global. It looked at deforestation, climate change, air pollution, water pollution, water depletion, loss of biodiversity, and said that the inefficiency and extra stages of production involved in producing animal products made meat, dairy, and eggs a significant contributor to all of those, including being the number one contributor to deforestation.

All of those environmental consequences have gotten worse. If it takes 9 calories of feed to get 1 calorie of chicken, or 10 or more calories of feed to get a calorie of farmed fish or pork, and even more calories to get a calorie from a ruminant animal — a cow or a sheep or a goat — that’s an inherent inefficiency that really is 800 percent food waste, or more. All of the inefficiency adds up, and that’s why the latest numbers are that roughly 20 percent of climate emissions are attributable to animal agriculture. 

Q. We’re at an interesting point in which the technology has gotten extremely advanced when it comes to replicating what is grown in an animal in a field somewhere. What are the options for alternative meats? 

A. It’s very much similar to how we think about renewable energy or electric vehicles. There is a recognition that the world is going to consume more energy, the world is going to drive more miles. The world is also going to eat more meat. In the last 25 years, meat production is up about 65 percent. It will probably be up something like 65 percent again through 2050, and that means all of the external costs of meat production continue to get worse.

Just like if you’re talking about energy, we need an all-of-the-above strategy. So we want everything from more energy-efficient light bulbs to houses, but we do need renewable energy as one of the tools in the toolkit. Here, the solution is to figure out how we create plant-based meat that is indistinguishable and less expensive, and how we grow actual animal meat in factories rather than on live animals. 

Q. You talk in the book about a number of ways this can be incentivized, though there are many states that have already done things like ban cultivated meat. What could be done in these early days of alt meats that could accelerate both the science and the adoption?

A. One very encouraging aspect of a shift in the direction of plant-based meat and cultivated meat is that because they are so much more efficient, there is a massive profit motive. And there is also a massive food-security motive for countries like China, Japan, and Korea that have significant food self-sufficiency concerns. Countries that cannot feed themselves recognize that that is a significant national security threat and are highly motivated to figure out how to feed themselves. These countries recognize that if they can produce meat with a fraction of the inputs required to produce animal-based meat, that will be a boon to their national security. And in the United States, we’re also seeing bipartisan support for alternative proteins for economic competitiveness reasons.

Q. One challenge now is that there’s a backlash in the United States against ultra-processed foods. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have been struggling financially lately, perhaps as part of that. Is that a surmountable challenge for the industry?

A. The first thing to say is that the plant-based meats are significantly healthier than what they are replacing. All of the plant-based meats that consumers like best, relative to animal-based meat, have less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, more fiber, and more protein. All of the plant-based meats are significantly less calorically dense than the animal-based meat they’re replacing. The indictment against ultra-processed foods works, generally speaking, as shorthand for products that are low in fiber, calorically dense, high in fat, high in sugar. But comparing plant-based meat to Doritos and Coca-Cola doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are some questions around some of the other ultra-processed foods, but the science is clear that the meat and dairy alternatives do not lead to bad health outcomes.

Q. You make the point in the book that these companies should collaborate with the traditional meat industry, reforming the industry instead of replacing it. Why? 

A. The goal of the meat industry is to produce high-quality protein profitably. Figuring out how to produce that same end product far more efficiently is going to be extremely profitable for the companies and countries that lean in. If you’re sort of analogizing to photography, nobody wants to be Kodak. Everybody wants to be Canon, and to seize the opportunity rather than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the future of meat production is in vats, not farms on Feb 3, 2026.

Last spring, the Environmental Protection Agency made a surprise announcement: President Donald Trump would consider giving some polluters exemptions from a handful of Clean Air Act rules. To get the ball rolling, all it would take was an email from a company making its case. The EPA set up a special inbox to receive these applications, and it gave companies about three weeks at the end of March to submit their requests for presidential exemption. Hundreds of companies wrote in, including coal plants, iron and steel manufacturers, limestone producers, and chemical refiners. 

One industry was particularly eager for exemption: medical device sterilizers. About 40 of the roughly 90 device sterilization plants that operate nationwide, along with their trade association, wrote in, arguing they shouldn’t have to comply with an air quality rule limiting how much toxic material they could emit. That’s because these facilities sterilize medical equipment with ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen that studies have linked to cancers of the breast and lymph nodes.

In 2024, the Biden administration issued regulations requiring sterilizers to cut their emissions by about 90 percent. Companies were given two years to comply, and many had begun installing new monitoring equipment and pollution-control devices to meet the standard. But last year, after President Trump took office, the EPA gave these companies a way out; they could request a presidential exemption. About 40 facilities, many of which are located in residential neighborhoods close to schools and day cares, took advantage of the offer and were granted the exemption through a presidential proclamation last summer.

Now, a coalition of national environmental groups and community nonprofits is suing Trump and the EPA, seeking to overturn the ongoing exemptions. Maurice Carter, president of the Georgia-based environmental advocacy group Sustainable Newton, which signed on to the suit, told Grist that financial interests of sterilization companies shouldn’t override public health concerns about ethylene oxide. Any policy change should account for that, he argued. 

“You have to do that in ways that are not harmful to the people that live here and to the planet that our children are going to inherit,” he said. Carter lives about a mile away from one of the exempted facilities.

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The suit was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., and assigned to Judge Christopher R. Cooper, an Obama appointee. Trump’s Justice Department, which represents federal agencies in court, has 60 days to respond.  

Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson for the White House, told Grist that the president had used “his lawful authority under the Clean Air Act to grant relief for certain commercial sterilization facilities that use ethylene oxide to sterilize critical medical equipment and combat disease transmission.” The Biden-era rule would’ve forced facilities to shut down, Rogers argued, “seriously disrupting the supply of medical equipment and undermining our national security.” A spokesperson for the EPA said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.  

A provision in the Clean Air Act does allow the president to grant facilities narrow exemptions from one section of the law. But presidents can only grant an exemption if the technology to meet the standard is not available and the exemption is in the country’s national interest. The sterilization facilities claimed they met both criteria. In a letter to the president the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association, the industry’s trade organization, claimed that companies would not be able to meet the 2024 rule “due to the limited number of equipment manufacturers and workforce shortages.” Supply chain constraints and the time it would take to install and validate equipment meant that the control technology needed “is functionally unavailable within the required timeframes,” the group said. 

When the EPA finalized the rule in 2024, it determined that only 7 out of a total of 88 sterilizer facilities “already met the emission standards and will not need to install additional emission controls.” Several others met one or more requirements of the rule. Nearly 30 facilities would be required to install so-called Permanent Total Enclosures, which are among the most expensive pollution-control technologies and seal facilities so that ethylene oxide can be trapped and burned.

Georgia has the highest concentration of exempted sterilization plants; all five of the state’s facilities were granted exemptions. By comparison, only two of the facilities in California, which has the largest number of sterilizers in the country, received exemptions. According to records submitted to the state environmental agency, nearly all California facilities already meet the vast majority of requirements laid out in the 2024 rule. One facility in Atlanta met the standards as early as 2022 — yet it nevertheless received an exemption. 

“These are facilities that have been making changes to their processes in their facilities to comply, and yet they received exemptions anyway,” said Sarah Buckley, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the environmental groups suing. (Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.)

“That shows that the president was not making any good faith determination, was not basing this on an actual assessment of the facts on the ground and the capabilities of these facilities, but instead was just looking for excuses essentially to hand out free passes to avoid the rules,” Buckley added, calling the exemptions a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”

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James Boylan, head of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s air protection branch, said the agency had been working with companies to install upgraded control equipment and revise permits to comply with the 2024 rule before President Trump announced that Georgia’s sterilization facilities would be exempted. Some of those updates have since been delayed because of the exemption, Boylan told Grist in an email.

If companies exceeded the Clean Air Act emission limits and faced state action or lawsuits by community groups, they could use the exemption to claim the rules don’t apply to them. Companies that are exempted will also be relieved of the cost of complying with regulation. The EPA estimated that it would cost $313 million for all of the roughly 90 sterilizers to meet the new standards. But even those already in compliance could benefit from an exemption, because monitoring and pollution-control equipment require regular maintenance and oversight.

“There is a monetary incentive to not operate equipment even if you already have it,” said Buckley.

Sterilizers aren’t the only industry benefiting from these exemptions. Last year, President Trump issued a series of proclamations exempting more than 150 facilities, including dozens of coal plants and chemical manufacturers. Environmental groups have sued over several of these exemptions, claiming that Trump had exceeded his statutory authority. Many of these cases are winding their way through the courts. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’ for polluters faces its latest test in court on Feb 2, 2026.

Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers — and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans — for her resignation or impeachment.

The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti, which occurred during ongoing protests in Minneapolis. Noem initially described Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as a “domestic terrorist,” a narrative repeated by others in the Trump administration. Her account was almost immediately contradicted by numerous videos that showed Pretti was unarmed and restrained when federal agents shot him repeatedly.

“She should be out of a job,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, said after the videos emerged. While President Donald Trump has publicly said Noem’s position is secure, a number of potential successors have reportedly emerged, including Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency.

Noem’s handling of the killing — which came two weeks after a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis fatally shot protestor Renee Good — follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have slowed emergency response and delayed recovery funding. Long before the crisis in Minnesota, concerns were building over her approach to FEMA preparedness and spending and its response to calamities like last year’s devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country.

“It’s a policy of chaotic austerity,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies disasters and adaptation. “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.”

FEMA helps coordinate the response to major disasters like last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, but the agency more often acts like a bank, reimbursing states and cities for their disaster preparedness and recovery spending. When Noem took office, she throttled that spending by, among other things, requiring her personal sign-off on all expenses over $100,000. The pace of disbursements has since slowed to a trickle.

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Those restrictions reportedly hindered the agency’s response to emergencies like July’s floods in Texas because officials could not pre-position search and rescue teams. The acting head of FEMA at the time, David Richardson, was reportedly unreachable for several hours, and the agency did not answer two-thirds of calls to its hotline. More than 130 people died in the floods. 

On Thursday, a coalition of disaster survivors released a “report card” that gave Noem’s leadership an “F.” Brandy Gerstner, a member of that coalition, lost her home and belongings in the Texas flood. She and her family live in the rural community of Sandy Creek and spent three days without power or water waiting for federal assistance.

“Official help was scarce,” she said. “Despite that, Kristi Noem and Texas Governor [Greg] Abbott have described the response as exceptional, a lie that insults the memory of those lost in the floods.”

Beyond floods in Texas and fires in Southern California, the United States experienced relatively few major disasters last year. Even so, Noem’s restrictions on FEMA spending has also slowed payments to local governments still recovering from past catastrophes. The reimbursement backlog has reached $17 billion, according to The New York Times — more than the agency spends on such things in a typical  year. 

Delays have also affected FEMA’s efforts to reduce the impact of future catastrophes. A Grist analysis found that the agency’s net spending on resilience grants declined over the past three quarters, even as climate-driven disasters intensified nationwide. The nonprofit news outlet NOTUS identified a $1.3 billion backlog of such allocations, the primary source of federal funding for states and cities seeking to harden infrastructure. FEMA terminated another climate resilience program last year, though a court has ordered it to reinstate that program.

Former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen Jr. said Noem’s departure could ease the logjam.

“I don’t see another secretary coming in that is going to want to review every single grant,” said Coen, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “I would think that most executive leaders … are gonna find that that is micromanagement.”

Beyond Noem’s leadership lie other questions about the agency’s direction. The Trump administration has yet to nominate a permanent administrator, leaving Karen Evans, a former cybersecurity official, in charge since Richardson departed in November. Agency leaders have suggested firing more than 11,000 employees, many of them contract workers involved in local response and recovery efforts. 

The Trump administration’s touted “review council” was set to produce a report on FEMA’s future, but Noem reportedly pared the council’s final report to a fraction of its original length. The panel abruptly cancelled its plans to present the findings in December, and its deadline has been pushed to March.

“I think whether she stays or goes, there are huge issues that have been created in the last year at FEMA that have to be resolved quickly ahead of hurricane season,” Labowitz, said, referring to the season to come.

Noem appeared to soften her approach last week. The agency paused its planned terminations, and Noem hosted her first in-person briefing with agency employees, whom she attempted to rally ahead of Winter Storm Fern. She also appeared to respond to mounting criticism on Thursday when she announced the release of $2.2 billion in disaster response funds. The money will reimburse states and local governments for repair costs associated with events like Hurricane Helene, the 2023 floods in Vermont, and coastal erosion in Louisiana. A press release frames the allocation as “additional” recovery money, but recipients told Grist that FEMA is merely following standard procedure in granting reimbursements.

“We were all quite surprised yesterday when we were informed that the payment was coming as quickly as it came,” said Joe Flynn, the secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. FEMA told his agency that it would provide $22 million to help rebuild a fleet garage destroyed in the 2023 floods. “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”  

The offer was less than the state had requested, but Flynn accepted it given uncertainty about future funding. “With everything going on in the federal government, an adequately granted award is a bird in the hand,” he said. 

The press release appeared to have been composed in haste. It contained multiple typos, including a misspelling of Louisiana as “Louisianna.” The director of the Greeneville Water Commission, after confirming that FEMA will reimburse the cost of rebuilding infrastructure lost to Helene, noted that her own town’s name was spelled wrong as well. 

“By the way,” said commission director Laura White, “they spelled Greeneville wrong!”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Turmoil at FEMA adds to the revolt against Kristi Noem on Feb 2, 2026.

When Oregon’s short legislative session convenes in early February, conservation advocates will once again try to convince lawmakers to pass a major funding bill that could provide nearly $30 million annually to protect the state’s biodiversity.

The 1% for Wildlife bill, sponsored by state representatives Ken Helm, a Democrat from Beaverton, and Mark Owens, a Republican from Crane, would increase the state’s current hotel and lodging taxes by 1.25 percent, creating a new revenue stream for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to support long-neglected habitat conservation programs. Last session, the bill passed the House, but two Republicans blocked it in the Senate.

Oregon’s federally required State Wildlife Action Plan identifies species at risk of extinction or decline due to habitat loss, climate change, and other threats. In 2025, as the plan was being updated, dozens of species were added, including the Crater Lake newt, the California condor, and the North American porcupine, bringing the total to more than 300.

“It’s a blueprint of the most imperiled species and habitats in the state,” said Sristi Kamal, deputy director of the Western Environmental Law Center, which supports the bill. “But a plan is only as good as the funding to implement it.”

Though Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife Department receives some state funding, most of its budget comes from state hunting and fishing licenses and federal taxes on guns and ammunition via the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937. The majority of Oregon’s federal funds, about $20 million annually, are earmarked for big game species and sport fish. Other federal grants primarily support species already protected by the Endangered Species Act. That means that Fish and Wildlife, like most state wildlife agencies, has little money to prevent species from becoming endangered in the first place. Between 2023 and 2025, it spent just 2 percent of its budget on wildlife conservation programs.

Dense mats of Ludwigia spp. choke out native vegetation at Horseshoe Lake, Palensky Wildlife Area, Oregon. Lauri Brewster/Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife

Increasing hotel and lodging taxes would leverage the state’s robust ecotourism industry, which annually attracts tens of thousands of out-of-state and international visitors.

If the bill passes, Oregon’s statewide hotel tax rate would be 2.5 percent — the third-lowest rate in the U.S. and less than half of what Washington, Montana, and Idaho charge. The 1% for Wildlife bill could provide a new model for state-level conservation funding, said Mark Humpert, director of conservation initiatives at the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which advocates for state agencies at the federal level.

“Ninety-five to 99 percent of species that states are responsible for have no dedicated funding from the federal government. We sometimes joke that state agencies have to offer bake sales to fund this work,” Humpert said. Some sell specialty license plates; others use a small percentage of sales taxes on outdoor equipment. The “gold standard,” Humpert said, is Missouri, where a state constitutional amendment dedicates one-eighth of 1 percent of its sales tax to its Department of Conservation.

According to a 2016 study by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and its partners, fully implementing every State Wildlife Action Plan in the country would cost around $1 billion annually. But for years, Congress has failed to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a bipartisan bill that would bolster states’ conservation funding. Now, as the Trump administration slashes federal conservation and climate funding, advocates say that the 1% for Wildlife bill could provide the stable funding needed to implement Oregon’s wildlife action plan. “The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states that are watching closely to see if it’s successful,” Humpert said.

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In northeast Oregon’s high-desert region, Jamie Dawson, the Greater Hells Canyon Council’s conservation director, hopes the bill can fund wildlife crossings on Highway 82. “This section of the Blue Mountains is an absolutely critical habitat connectivity corridor — of continental importance,” Dawson said. Deer, elk, and other species use it to migrate between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades Range in western Oregon and Washington. But the route is a wildlife collision hotspot, with hundreds of animals killed by vehicles over the past few years.

Elsewhere, the funding could support studies of migratory bird habitats like eel grass estuaries and wetlands, said Joe Liebezeit, conservation director for the Bird Alliance of Oregon. In spring 2025, local birdwatchers and radar data indicated that half as many birds as usual migrated through the state, though the reasons for this are unclear.

As the state’s general fund waxes and wanes, so does the wildlife department’s budget, which is rewritten every two years. The lack of stable conservation funding prevents it from focusing on long-term solutions for species conservation, said Davia Palmeri, the agency’s federal policy director. “We do monitoring for these species when we can — when there’s a grant or short-term funding — to get pulses on species like reptiles or amphibians.”

For over a decade, advocates have fought to secure state funding for conservation. “At one point, there was a proposal to put a tax on birdseed,” said Danielle Moser, wildlife program manager at Oregon Wild. “There was the idea of a gear tax — things you buy at REI.” But none of these ideas would have raised enough, and ultimately, they fizzled.

Last year, two Republican senators, Daniel Bonham and Cedric Hayden, killed the bill by refusing to allow the final committee vote that would bring it to the governor’s desk. Now, conservation advocates from across the political spectrum are determined to pass it.

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“You won’t always see all these logos on the same page,” says Amy Patrick, policy director at the Oregon Hunters Association, which is working with conservation groups like Oregon Wild to shape the bill. “The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s something sportsmen can get behind. There’s a real sense that this is an investment that will benefit all of our wildlife and habitats.”

The current 1.5 percent tourism tax funds the $45 million annual budget of Travel Oregon, which promotes the state’s tourism industry. Travel Portland, an independent nonprofit that works with Travel Oregon, opposes the bill, arguing that the additional tax would discourage large conferences and events. (Update: Travel Oregon did not respond to a request for comment before publication, but in a later statement, the agency said that it does not take positions on bills.)

The Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association called the bill a “Pandora’s box” of future tax increases. “We don’t see an end in sight, with all the other state agencies that would love a new revenue source,” said Jason Brandt, the association’s president. Brandt and others note that the bill’s original text only provided a 1 percent tax increase for the wildlife agency, but amendments tacked on 0.25 percent for conservation efforts by other departments, including the Department of Agriculture’s invasive species management and anti-poaching efforts at the Department of Justice.

The association’s political action committee donated over $17,000 to Bonham during his time in state office. Bonham, who resigned from the Senate in October when he was nominated to a federal position, did not respond to a request for comment.

Kamal and other advocates say the tourism industry’s opposition is ironic, given that revenue from the new tax would be reinvested in some of the state’s most popular attractions. Travel Oregon’s surveys show that scenic beauty is the top draw for 90 percent of out-of-state visitors.

“A lot of people come to Portland for business, but then they go to our beaches, or the mountains,” said Kamal. “The tourism industry is standing on the back of these natural resources. If you don’t invest in it, the pressures on these resources will make that legacy crumble.”

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Visiting Oregon? You may soon have to pay a tax to protect its wildlife. on Feb 1, 2026.

New Hampshire Republicans are attempting to do away with a 50-year-old property tax exemption for households and businesses with solar, contending that the policy forces residents without the clean energy systems to unwittingly subsidize those who have them. Supporters of the exemption, however, say this argument is misleading, insulting, and at odds with New Hampshire’s tradition of letting communities shape their own local governments.

The focus of the debate is a bill proposed in the New Hampshire House this month by Republican Representative Len Turcotte and several co-sponsors in his party. The measure would repeal a law, established in 1975, that authorizes cities and towns to exempt owners of solar-equipped buildings from paying taxes on whatever value their solar systems add to their property. As of 2024, 153 of the state’s municipalities — roughly two-thirds — had adopted the exemption, one of the only incentives offered in support of residential solar power in the state.

The exemption means that homeowners without solar must pay more property tax to make up for the money not being collected from the ​“extreme minority” who have solar panels, Turcotte said while presenting his legislation at a hearing of the House Science, Technology, and Energy Committee last week. This ​“redistribution” of the tax burden is unfair, he said.

The solar property tax exemption is a fairly common policy: Nationally, 36 states offer some version of it. While legislators in many states have targeted pro-solar policies like net metering, property tax exemptions have so far avoided similar attacks. New Hampshire, therefore, could end up as a proving ground for whether this approach can find traction.

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New Hampshire does not have a sales tax or an income tax and leans heavily on local property taxes for revenue; its rates are among the highest in the country. That makes changes to property tax policy a particularly sensitive subject. The solar exemption bill has Republicans, who are typically tax averse, walking a fine line between championing what they say is fairness for all and pushing a policy that will inevitably raise taxes for some.

The state authorizes 15 other property tax exemptions — including for elderly residents, veterans, and those with disabilities — but Turcotte’s bill targets only the one for solar.

The exemption is a ​“local option” policy, meaning cities and towns must opt in through a vote in each municipality. Turcotte, however, doubts the average resident realized that they were signing up to pay more on their own taxes.

“They see a feel-good measure,” he said. ​“Do they truly understand? I don’t believe they do.”

After Turcotte presented his bill, the remaining speakers — about a dozen clean energy advocates, lawmakers, business leaders, and local solar owners — uniformly opposed his proposal.

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Removing the exemption would be an unfair rule change after homeowners invested in solar systems with the understanding they’d be getting a tax break, many argued. Businesses using solar could face a ​“significant tax increase,” said Natch Greyes, vice president of public policy at New Hampshire’s Business and Industry Association. The change could cost homeowners with solar hundreds of dollars per year while barely reducing the property tax rate for everyone else, others said.

In the town of Hudson, for example, $2.2 million in property value isn’t taxed because of the exemption, out of a tax base of $5.1 billion, its chief assessor, James Michaud, testified. Removing the exemption would have virtually no effect on the tax rate, he said.

“It’s almost incalculable how small it is,” he said.

Whatever tiny tax shift the exemption creates is worth it, others argued, saying that it provides an incentive for the public good: More solar means lower greenhouse gas emissions and less burden on the grid. Turcotte countered that these broader benefits of solar — many of which have been well documented — are ​“subjective.”

The question of local control also loomed large in the testimony. In New Hampshire, whose motto is ​“Live Free or Die,” the right of individual towns to decide on their own rules and regulations has long been a point of pride. Repealing the exemption would mean overriding decisions made by voters. Turcotte’s claim that residents didn’t understand what they were getting into is not only condescending but also just plain wrong, several witnesses said.

“You are essentially, with this bill, substituting your judgment about what is proper at the level of local taxation for that of town meetings and city councils throughout the state,” said Representative Ned Raynolds, a Democrat, while questioning Turcotte.

The bill now awaits a vote in committee before it can face a floor vote from the full House. It would then advance to the Senate. Republicans control both chambers of the state Legislature and the governor’s office.

But the bill’s opponents hope that lawmakers will heed their arguments and give weight to the mass of voters who have approved the exemption across the state.

“This is the reason two-thirds of the towns have adopted it: They can see it’s a good thing,” testified David Trumble, a solar owner from the town of Weare. ​“Solar is a good thing.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New Hampshire Republicans want to raise taxes on homes with solar on Jan 31, 2026.

Emptying supermarket shelves. Driving from store to store, hunting for milk, bread, and water. Ignoring the signs instructing shoppers to “Take one.” 

It’s a song and dance consumers across the country typically engage in when confronted with an incoming extreme weather event, and a pattern we’re seeing repeated as images have circulated of grocery shelves from North Carolina to New York City stripped bare leading into Winter Storm Fern. Now, with a second major winter storm brewing, shoppers and retailers across the East Coast are bracing for another rush. 

Experts warn that these stockpiling frenzies have lasting consequences — both personal and planetary. In times of turmoil, the irrational desire to overbuy things a household doesn’t really want or need can be difficult to distinguish from just regular emergency preparedness. 

To some extent, according to Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University, the pre-storm frenzy can be “a real nuisance, because people show up at the store and the shelves are already clear, or at the very least, there’s a sense of tension in the room, as you see unusually big crowds in the grocery store.” 

On the other hand, Wilde continued, “the buying patterns are sometimes partly sensible.” Many people, in fact, are merely following federal and state emergency management recommendations to stock up on enough food to last your household anywhere between three days to two weeks. 

Still, there is a big difference between buying what you need to ensure you and your family have enough to eat as you hunker down in extreme weather, and filling your cart with far more than that — especially when it includes fresh foods that just end up in the trash. 

Read Next The winter storm exposed the grid’s real weakness: Lots of old poles Rebecca Egan McCarthy & Jake Bittle

Minerva Ringland, senior climate and insights manager at national food waste nonprofit ReFED, says that while she is unaware of any data that directly captures the effects of panic buying on food waste emissions, it “makes a lot of sense intuitively” that when emotion trumps rationale in periods of extreme weather, “it’s unlikely that what extra food you buy would be consumed in the appropriate amount of time.” 

Researchers have discovered that this pattern of storm “stockpiling” applies to virtually all food groups. Bread and milk, however, tend to be first among what people regularly race to buy, particularly before a bout of extreme winter weather. And if electricity gets knocked out, like it did for more than 1 million U.S. households who lost power last weekend because of Fern, much of that perishable stockpiled food will surely end up in the garbage. 

Americans already waste a staggering amount of food in fair weather. An analysis by ReFED found that of the around 70.7 million tons of “surplus” food generated nationwide in 2024, more than 33 percent was created by U.S. households. And nearly half of that food that went uneaten at home ended up rotting in landfills, where it produces methane — a potent greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11 percent of global emissions.

To put that into context, the amount of surplus food that ends up in U.S. landfills every year produces the planet-polluting equivalent of nearly 5 industrial coal plants, according to Ringland. “I, of course, would not advocate that someone not prepare themselves in these situations because they’re worried about their climate impact,” said Ringland, “but my personal opinion is that every decision that we make in our daily lives should at least have an awareness or a consciousness or consideration of what environmental impact that has.” 

She also points to the affordability complex behind panic buying, as food prices continue to rise. According to a report from Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, a typical U.S. family spent about $310 more overall for groceries last year as compared to 2024. “Wasted food in households is essentially like money that you are throwing out with the food. And so if we can be a little bit more conscious and careful about the food that we’re bringing into the home, you’re actually saving yourself money,” said Ringland.

What’s more, when people engage in fear-fueled buying sprees, accessing food and storm supplies only gets harder for lower-income households. 

“Panic buying has a direct impact and an indirect impact for families that are in households that are experiencing food insecurity,” says LaMonika Jones, director of state initiatives at the Food Research & Action Center. “It makes it even more difficult for them, because when they do go to the grocery store, the store may not have had the opportunity quite yet to restock their shelves. Or when they do go to prepare, they may find out that their resources, their food items, are not available, so there’s nothing left for them to purchase.” And that struggle doesn’t instantly abate once the storm subsides, according to Jones. The remnants of the phenomenon means food-insecure people may then have to wait for stores to restock their shelves. 

As the planet heats up, making extreme weather events more frequent and severe, the likelihood of panic buying may increase in tandem. 

“Our food distribution system does not have a good braking mechanism to slow down and mitigate the panic buying,” said Seungki Lee, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University. 

But the answer, according to Cony Ho, an assistant professor of marketing at Florida Atlantic University who has studied the psychological motives driving panic buying in periods of extreme weather, is not what we tend to see now: retailers attempting to control their stock by setting limits on how much of a certain product can be purchased. Doing so, said Ho, can actually set off a cycle of more panic buying, because it signals scarcity to already-panicked shoppers. 

Whatever the solution may be, according to University of Central Florida disaster sociologist Fernando Rivera, it shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of individuals, but incorporated into how a whole community prepares for emergencies. “In the ideal world, people will have their disaster kits ready to go, instead of just reacting to the news two days or a couple of hours before the event,” said Rivera. “That would be an emergency manager’s dream.”

Ho agrees that clearer government-led communications could encourage people to buy more nonperishable goods in preparation for a disaster, which at least may help mitigate overstocking on food that quickly spoils. For their part, Ho says, retailers could better incorporate weather forecasting into their plans for inventory distribution. 

By now, though, the impulse to rush to the store and grab as much as you can is a rather entrenched consumer pattern. So a quick or easy fix is unlikely. 

“All of these different disasters are hitting these places back-to-back,” Rivera said. “We have been exposed in the last decade or so to crises that we never imagined were going to happen, right? And I think that might be testing our ability to respond to them in a very logical way.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips6','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 Panic buying ahead of the winter storm isn’t preparedness. Here’s who it hurts. on Jan 30, 2026.

The mayor of Urania steered his pickup down a dirt road snaking through the weedy lots and patches of trees that had once been the bustling heart of his central Louisiana town. 

Jay Ivy passed pines growing where the saws of the sprawling Urania mill turned similar specimens into lumber. He pointed out the log pond, now the domain of alligators, and stopped at the mill’s smokestack, still standing over an increasingly deserted townscape. Once a year, the smokestack belches celebratory black clouds over Urania. 

“For our fall festival, we get it smoking again with some old tires or whatever we can find to burn,” the big-shouldered mayor said with a sheepish grin. “I suppose it reminds us of what we had here.”

Jay Ivy, the mayor of Urania, Louisiana, looks out over his small town. He hopes a wood pellet mill operated by British energy giant Drax will revive its economy. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

Urania was devastated when the mill and a related fiberboard operation closed in 2002, putting more than 350 people out of work. There was little hope of a revival until the British energy giant Drax arrived in the Deep South a decade ago, hungry for cheap wood it could burn in England as a “renewable” alternative to coal. 

Drax began opening wood pellet mills in former timber towns in Louisiana and Mississippi that had fallen on hard times. The region offered plentiful low-grade timber, a labor force desperate for work, and lax environmental regulations. The company was already producing pellets, which it calls “sustainable biomass,” in Mississippi and north Louisiana when Drax opened its biggest pellet mill just outside Urania in late 2017.

From left: A “Welcome to Urania” sign stands at the entrance to the Louisiana town, home to a Drax wood pellet mill. At the mill, LaSalle BioEnergy, logs await the grinders. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

A year later, then-Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, thanked Drax for “believing in Louisiana.” Jobs and other economic growth were soon to follow, he and the company promised. “Louisiana aggressively pursued Drax Biomass and today those efforts have paid off,” Edwards said at the time.

But more than a decade after Drax took root in the region, prosperity has yet to arrive. Drax employs a fraction of the workers the old mills did, and many commute from other towns. The money that might have flowed from Drax into investments in local roads, parks, and schools has been eroded by massive tax breaks. 

Now home to around 700 residents, Urania has lost nearly half its population since 2010, a decline that continued after Drax built its mill in 2017. In 2023, it drew unwanted attention when a news site declared it “the poorest town in America.” According to the most recent census report, some 40 percent of Urania’s residents live in poverty, and the average income is $12,400 — roughly one-fifth the national average.

“It’s a town of old people — a poor town, really,” Ivy said.

A painted saw blade depicting Urania’s early days sits in the town’s recreation hall. The Louisiana town lost much of its population after its lumber mill closed. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

Gloster, Mississippi, a majority Black town of about 850 people near the Louisiana line, has also seen its population shrink since Drax opened a pellet mill near the shuttered elementary school in 2014. More than 10 percent of Gloster’s working-age residents are unemployed, and the typical household income of about $22,500 is less than half the Mississippi median.

Residents in both towns believe that noise, dust, and air pollution from the nearly identical mills are harming their health. While it remains unclear whether Drax’s operations can be tied to any one person’s illness, the mills release chemicals at concentrations that federal regulators and scientists say are toxic to humans. Louisiana and Mississippi state regulators have repeatedly fined the company for a host of pollution violations, but several residents and environmental groups say the penalties haven’t made a noticeable difference. 

“Drax is a false solution,” said Jimmy Brown, a former worker at Gloster’s plywood mill, which closed 17 years ago. “They want to make something they can’t make in their own country, so they come here. We got this mill, but we don’t have schools anymore. We don’t have doctors anymore, and we got all these people with respiratory issues and heart issues now.”

Sawdust piles up at Drax’s wood pellet mill near Urania, Louisiana. The mill presses sawdust into pellets that are burned in a former coal plant in Yorkshire, England. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

On the outskirts of Urania, a giant hydraulic arm tips a tractor-trailer backward until its cab points to the sky. Several tons of tree limbs and other logging debris spill from the trailer into one of the mouths feeding Drax’s mill, called LaSalle BioEnergy. 

The half-mile-long facility also consumes a steady diet of sawdust from a neighboring lumber mill and a huge volume of tree-length logs, hoisted by crane into the teeth of an industrial-size wood chipper. 

“We take everything — the little bitty trees that’re so thin that nobody wants them, and also the limbs and even the pine needles,” Tommy Barbo, the mill’s manager, said during a tour. “Nothing gets wasted.”

Tommy Barbo, manager of Drax’s wood pellet mill in Urania, Louisiana, surveys operations at the facility.  Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

Drax and other utility-scale pellet makers initially promoted their industry as consumers of sawdust and other mill wastes, but these sources couldn’t meet their growing production goals. Large pellet mills now get most of their wood directly from logging whole trees.

At the Urania mill, log stacks larger than football fields and higher than houses are stripped of bark, shredded, cooked in a 1,000-degree tumble dryer, pulverized in hammermills, pressed into pellets and loaded on trains bound for Baton Rouge. From there, the pellets are shipped nearly 8,000 miles — through the Gulf of Mexico and across the Atlantic Ocean to northeast England.

Drax is riding high on explosive global demand for pellets, record profits, and government subsidies. Pellet exports from the U.S. have quintupled, growing from 2 million tons in 2012 to about 11 million tons in 2024, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. An increasing share of those exports has come from the South, reaching about 85 percent in 2023.

Including Drax’s five facilities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, there are 30 large pellet mills across the region and at least four more are proposed. Enviva, one of the industry’s biggest players, was building the world’s largest-capacity pellet plant in Epes, Alabama, when it declared bankruptcy in early 2024. The Maryland-based company had no trouble finding buyers for its pellets. Enviva’s troubles arose when it failed to produce pellets in the quantities and prices it had promised. Enviva shuttered its mill in Amory, Mississippi, last year but still has a presence in the state, producing pellets in Lucedale and shipping from its terminal at the Port of Pascagoula.

Much of the pellet industry’s growth was driven by the European Union’s decision in 2009 to classify wood burning as a renewable energy source on par with solar and wind, making it eligible for subsidies, low-interest loans and other government incentives. By the end of 2027, when Drax’s current subsidy support is scheduled to run out, the company will have received more than $14 billion in subsidies from the U.K. government, according to the climate think tank Ember.

Louisiana has also been generous to the company. Drax’s two mills in the state, which employ about 140 workers, have been exempted from paying about $75 million in property taxes via the state’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program, known as ITEP, Verite News and Grist found in a review of estimates from Louisiana Economic Development, a state agency. Aimed at attracting jobs and economic activity, the tax-exemption program shields large companies from taxes that would otherwise help support school districts, police departments, and other local government operations.

Mississippi offered Drax $2.8 million in grants and more than $1.5 million in tax breaks to draw the company to Gloster. 

While benefiting from taxpayer largesse, Drax has also seen its earnings climb. The company’s profits rose from nearly $1.3 billion in 2023 to about $1.4 billion in 2024. 

Tommy Barbo inspects wood pellets produced at the mill in Urania. The pellets are shipped to England to be burned in a former coal power station. Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

 

Drax recently expanded a mill in Alabama and brokered an investment and supply partnership with a company planning to build a jet fuel plant at a yet-to-be-determined location on the Gulf Coast. Drax also established a North American headquarters in Monroe, Louisiana, and opened an office in Houston to lead its carbon-capture enterprises.

For Barbo, the global pellet boom means he feels compelled to check second-by-second production stats to make sure he’s meeting demand. “Even when I’m home, I’m checking all this on my phone,” he said. 

Over the past seven years, the mill in Urania has produced enough pellets to fill the New Orleans Superdome nearly two times. Barbo is proud that his mill is the company’s top producer in the U.S., and he aims to keep it that way. “We did 377 tons this morning,” he said. “We try to keep it on pace at 95.2 tons an hour. Pretty good so far.”

Tommy Barbo walks on the grounds of the Drax wood pellet mill in Urania, Louisiana.    Eric J. Shelton / Mississippi Today

Mayor Ivy radiates pride when talking about Urania’s founder and all his mill provided. Henry Hardtner, a lumber baron who named both his land and business Urania, created a closed-loop company town. Most houses and stores were provided by Hardtner’s company. In one big building called the commissary, residents could find groceries, medicine, clothes, tools, a post office, and a soda fountain. 

“You’d spend your whole paycheck there using the company’s own money,” Ivy said, referring to mill tokens that were worthless beyond the town’s limits. 

Hardtner had a monopoly on almost every facet of town life, but he offered stability, security, and enough jobs to support hundreds of families. The leaders of many small, remote mill towns like Urania and Gloster still believe their communities can’t thrive without a large industrial facility, whether it be a mill, factory, or chemical plant. 

“All of these small towns, we have nothing,” Gloster Mayor Jerry Norwood said. “If big business don’t commit the big dollars, we don’t have the tax base. We have to have that for community growth.”

The high school in Gloster, Mississippi, closed several years ago as the town’s lumber mill-based economy crumbled. Despite the opening of a large wood pellet mill, the school remains closed. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian

A larger tax base is the “lifeline” Drax offers to dying towns with dying industries, wrote Jessica Marcus, Drax’s North American head of public affairs and policy, in an opinion piece posted on the company’s website. “Particularly in hard-hit states across the U.S. South like Mississippi and Alabama, communities are looking for other reliable sources of income to provide a dependable path back to prosperity.”

Drax estimates that its annual “economic impact” from taxes and wages exceeds $150 million in Gloster and the surrounding area and close to $200 million around Urania. The company is a frequent donor to community groups, providing funds to replace the floor in a Urania school gym and to install a new air-conditioning system at a Gloster meeting hall. The company has also given away turkeys at Thanksgiving and helped stock local food banks. 

Drax reported $907,000 in charitable giving in the U.S. in 2024, mostly focused on five Southern states. The company is more generous in its home country, giving away three times as much — about $3.3 million — to U.K.-based nonprofits and schools. 

To Krystal Martin, the founder of the Greater Greener Gloster community group, these giveaways are a relatively cheap way for the company to build goodwill where it’s doing the most harm.

Krystal Martin runs the group Greater Greener Gloster out of a small office in Gloster, Mississippi. She has been raising concerns about air and noise pollution from the wood pellet mill. Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian

According to state regulators in Louisiana and Mississippi, Drax’s mills have repeatedly exceeded their pollution limits, releasing harmful levels of formaldehyde, methanol, and other chemicals that can cause cancer, damage brains, and harm lungs. Despite millions of dollars in fines and promises to improve, many residents — especially in Gloster — say their health is declining.  

“They sell you hopes and dreams, but they don’t tell you the stuff they’re producing will make you die,” Martin said. 

Bearing environmental dangers might be worthwhile if the company offered more jobs, residents in Urania and Gloster said. But Drax’s employment opportunities have fallen far below many people’s expectations. Each of the three Drax mills in Louisiana and Mississippi employs between 70 and 80 people. That’s a fraction of the hundreds working in mills in each town 20 years ago. In Gloster, most of Drax’s employees live outside town, beyond the reach of the mill’s noise and pollution. According to the company, only 15 percent of employees reside in Gloster.  

The Urania Lumber Co. had at least 350 workers when it shut down in 2002. The International Paper mill in Bastrop, Louisiana — near Drax’s Morehouse BioEnergy mill — employed more than 1,100 people during the early 2000s and about 550 workers just before it closed in 2008.

In Gloster, the Georgia Pacific mill provided about 400 “good-paying, union jobs” until it closed in 2008, said Brown, who worked at the plywood mill for 24 years. Once it closed, many basic services evaporated, including schools and grocery stores. Without a doctor in town, Gloster residents with heart and respiratory ailments now must drive nearly an hour to McComb or two hours to Jackson for treatment.

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After losing his job at Georgia Pacific, Sammy Jackson bounced around the Louisiana oil fields and worked as a security guard in Texas. He was quick to apply for a job with Drax’s Gloster mill. “They said they wanted to hire a lot of local people,” Jackson said. “Everybody was excited.” 

He was one of hundreds who took a test required for employment. While everybody seemed to do well, Jackson was one of the few to get an offer. But it wasn’t Drax that hired him — it was a temporary labor agency that paid him $11 per hour to do cleanup work, mostly shoveling ashes and wood dust. He didn’t mind the sweat or long hours, but the conditions didn’t seem safe, with ash and dust coating everything, he said. 

“Man, that shit would get in your eyes and on your skin, and it’d be burning and itching,” Jackson said. 

In the oil business, Jackson had been supplied respirator kits and protective clothing for dirty jobs, but the gear provided at the mill was far more basic. “Just safety glasses and a surgical mask,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling right. Had a real dry cough all the time when I was working there. People’d be asking me, ‘What’s wrong with you?’”

Krystal Martin, a community leader in Gloster, Mississippi, shows a photo of the Amite BioEnergy wood pellet mill. She said air pollution from the mill is hurting her predominantly Black, low-income town.  Kathleen Flynn / The Guardian

A Drax spokesperson couldn’t directly address Jackson’s experiences but said the company “maintains robust safety standards and contractor requirements.”

“We take all health and safety concerns seriously,” the spokesperson said. “We also have extensive and ongoing training requirements in place to ensure the safety of our employees.” 

Mabel Williams, a lifelong resident of Gloster, said she never wanted a job at Drax, but once had high hopes that the mill would employ enough people to breathe life back into downtown. During a walk along Main Street, the 87-year-old didn’t see another soul, though her memories crowded every empty lot and darkened window. 

“There were people everywhere,” said Williams, who spent decades cleaning the homes of the white residents who mostly moved away. “This was a clothing store and that was a jewelry store owned by a German man. And over there, my mama worked at the cafe.” Across the train tracks was the Black business district, with four barbershops, restaurants, and music venues. 

All the buildings Williams points out are vacant or partially collapsed, but she slaps her thigh and smiles. “I get excited when I think about what Gloster had,” she said. Williams still has faith that Gloster is capable of a revival. She just doubts that it will be thanks to Drax. Despite the billions in profits, little of the company’s wealth is trickling down to Gloster, she said. 

“Drax is making so much money. They’ve got to spend that money some kind of way, but they’re not spending it here.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The biomass industry promised these Southern towns prosperity. So why are they still dying? on Jan 30, 2026.

The logic behind electric vehicles benefiting public health has long been solid: More EVs means fewer internal combustion engines on the road, and a reduction in harmful tailpipe emissions. But now researchers have confirmed, to the greatest extent yet, that this is indeed what’s actually happening on the ground. What’s more, they found that even relatively small upticks in EV adoption can have a measurably positive impact on a community. 

Whereas previous work has largely been based on modeling, a study published this month in the journal Lancet Planetary Health used satellites to measure actual emissions. The study, conducted between 2019 and 2023, focused on California, which has among the highest rates of EV use in the country, and nitrogen dioxide, one of the gases released during combustion, including when fossil fuels are burned. Exposure to the pollutant can contribute to heart and lung issues, or even premature death. Across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes, the analysis showed that, for every increase of 200 electric vehicles, nitrogen dioxide emissions decreased by 1.1 percent. 

“A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level led to a decline in air pollution,” said Sandrah Eckel, a public health professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “It’s remarkable.” 

The group had tried to establish this link using Environmental Protection Agency air monitors before, but because there are only about 100 of them in California, the results weren’t statistically significant. The data also were from 2013 through 2019, when there were fewer electric vehicles on the road. Although the satellite instrument they ultimately used only detected nitrogen dioxide, it did allow researchers to gather data for virtually the entire state, and this time the findings were clear.

“It’s making a real difference in our neighborhoods,” said Eckel, who said a methodology like theirs could be used anywhere in the world. The advent of such powerful satellites allows scientists to look at other sources of emissions, such as factories or homes, too. “It’s a revolutionary approach.”

Mary Johnson, who researches environmental health at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and was not involved in the study, said she’s not aware of a similar study of this size, or one that uses satellite data so extensively. “Their analysis seems sound,” she said, noting that the authors controlled for variables such as the COVID-19 pandemic and shifts toward working from home.

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The results, Johnson added, “totally make sense” and align with other research in this area. When London implemented congestion pricing in 2003, for example, it reduced traffic and emissions and increased life expectancy. That is the direction this latest research could go too. “They didn’t take the next step and look at health data,” she said, “which I think would be interesting.”

Daniel Horton, who leads Northwestern University’s climate change research group, also sees value in this latest work. “The results help to confirm the sort of predictions that numerical air quality modelers have been making for the past decade,” he said, adding that it could also lay the foundation for similar research. “This proof of concept paper is a great start and augurs good things to come.”

Eckel hopes that, eventually, advances in satellite technology will allow for more widespread detection of other types of emissions too, such as fine particulate matter. That could even help account for some of the potential downsides of EVs, which are heavier and could therefore kick up more tire or brake dust than their gasoline counterparts. On the whole, though, she believes the picture overwhelmingly illustrates how driving an electric car is better not just for the planet but for people. 

Research like this, she says, underscores the importance of continued EV adoption, the sales of which have slumped recently, and the need to do so equitably. Although lower-income neighborhoods have historically borne the brunt of pollution from highways and traffic, they can’t always afford the relatively high cost of EVs. Eckel hopes that research like this can help guide policymakers.

“There are concerns that some of the communities that really stand to benefit the most from reductions in air pollution are also some of the communities that are really at risk of being left behind in the transition,” she said. Previous research has shown that EVs could alleviate harms such as asthma in children, and detailed data like this latest study can help highlight both where more work needs to be done and what’s working. 

“It’s really exciting that we were able to show that there were these measurable improvements in the air that we’re all breathing,” she said. Another arguably hopeful finding was that the median increase in electric vehicle usage during the study was 272 per ZIP code. 

That, Eckel says, means there is plenty of opportunity to make our air even cleaner.

Correction: This story originally misidentified the pollutant studied. It is nitrogen dioxide.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline EVs are already making your air cleaner on Jan 30, 2026.

Scientists in the Midwest are asking for help from the public this winter to measure ice thickness on the Great Lakes and other inland lakes in the region, which they plan to use to improve ice-forecasting models. 

Satellites do a good job at capturing how much ice coverage there is, but not how thick it is, according to researchers at the Great Lakes Observing System, or GLOS, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

More data could give researchers insight as to how climate change is altering ice cover in the region and provide important safety information for people out on the ice. Improved ice models are also useful for navigational safety, like when ice-breaking ships clear frozen waterways. 

“Usually it’s the scientists putting data out to the public, and this time, we’re asking the public to give feedback to the scientists so they can improve the models,” said Shelby Brunner, science and observations manager at GLOS.

She said buoys that collect data on lakes typically get pulled out in the winter because of harsh conditions.

The citizen science program is in its second year of data collection. Last year, the program recruited around a dozen people in the Great Lakes region and logged around 30 measurements. Data collected by the public can be submitted online as long as there’s ice to measure, and stipends are available to participants.

Recreation aside, the Great Lakes also make up the region’s largest source of fresh water — more than 30 million people rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Brunner said the data from last year showed researchers that ice is more variable than they initially predicted. That’s why more data from people who are already “in tune with the ice” is useful to tap into, she said.

“They’re posting pictures of when there’s water in between layers of ice, and that’s information that is so novel for the modelers to have,” Brunner said. “If we can continually improve, we’re going to get safer and safer predictions.”

A charter fish captain uses an auger on ice-covered Saginaw Bay in Michigan in 2025. Courtesy of Ayumi Fujisake-Manome

The data is also useful as ice formation on the Great Lakes shifts with climate change, Brunner said.

Research suggests that average ice cover on the Great Lakes has decreased overall since the 1990s, but year-to-year variability is high. That means there are years with very little ice or years with a lot of it — as of January 28, 38 percent of the Great Lakes had iced over this winter, higher than the historical average at this time of year.

“We don’t get to go back in time and measure the past. We have to measure it now and keep it safe. So we can use it for reference for how things are looking in the future,” Brunner said.

It’s not just ice fishers contributing data. Mandi Young, a science teacher in Traverse City, took her middle school students out last year to measure ice thickness on Cedar Lake, a long, narrow lake adjacent to Grand Traverse Bay popular for boating and fishing. 

Young has her students regularly collect information from the water, like its temperature or depth, to compare with previous years. Ice thickness was another data point they could add to the mix, she said.

“The students really love it. They get the chance to be outside. They know that their information is being saved and used by other community members,” Young said.

Young plans to have her students measure ice thickness again this winter. This time, they have an auger to drill holes into the icy lake.

She said one of her favorite parts is the questions students ask while they’re out taking measurements: “Could we throw a rock on it? Will it break? Oh, what about throwing ice on ice, what’s gonna happen? Oh, did you hear that sound?”

“Kids just get curious about ice,” she said.

The data they collect from inland lakes like this one will be kept for archives and used in future research, Brunner, the scientist, said. She hopes citizen scientists see the benefit in contributing data that could help the many people, from ice fishers and ship captains to researchers, who spend time on the ice.

“Our job is to collect information that’s relevant now, but also make sure we do our due diligence and make it useful in the future,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How thick is the ice on the Great Lakes? Scientists want your help. on Jan 30, 2026.

On paper, the public power district serving much of eastern Nebraska has been trying to quit coal at its North Omaha plant since 2014. That June, its board voted to retire three of the plant’s five coal units in 2016 and convert the final two to natural gas in 2023.

The almost 12 years since then, however, have been marked by delays that have kept coal units running at the aging plant, while power demand continues to rise. Then, in late 2025, as the public utility’s management recommended the board delay retiring the two remaining coal units, board members received some reassurance.

Omaha Public Power District CEO Javier Fernandez told the utility’s board members that a human health risk assessment, commissioned by management, showed that the plant poses no additional significant “negative impact on the health of people in the vicinity.”

But that’s not exactly what the report — which focused on a specific type of air pollution, not all the potential harms to human health — shows, according to six public health and environmental science experts who reviewed the study at the request of the Flatwater Free Press and Grist. 

Asked about the utility’s reason for commissioning the health assessment, OPPD said the utility wanted to provide “the best information possible” about a top-of-mind form of pollution to its board and stakeholders. 

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen responded to news coverage of the study, writing on social media: “The science confirms it: OPPD’s North Omaha coal-fired power units — which generate some of the cheapest and most reliable electricity in Nebraska — are safe.”

Rather than assuaging concerns, though, the report and the subsequent mischaracterizations of its findings have fueled criticism from community members, experts, and at least two of the utility’s board members.

“So the health assessment, I think, was a smack in the face,” said state Senator Terrell McKinney, a Democrat from North Omaha. “It didn’t speak of the historical impacts. It didn’t speak of the disproportionate amount of asthma, respiratory issues that the community has, or health impacts, and also the community in which the coal plant is situated is a community that’s been historically minority.” 

Rather than assuaging concerns, OPPD’s report has fueled criticism from North Omaha community members, who are no stranger to pollution. Naomi Delkamiller / Flatwater Free Press

In the wake of the study’s criticisms, OPPD board member Craig Moody said he is looking at opportunities to partner with the Douglas County Health Department to look at environmental health impacts to North Omaha residents.

Still, the report — and news coverage of its supposed findings — added fuel to an already simmering debate. In October, the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office sued OPPD, arguing its plan to phase out coal in North Omaha threatened the utility’s mandate to provide affordable and reliable electricity. Nationally, the Trump administration has moved to block other utilities from retiring coal plants for similar reasons.

Ultimately, OPPD delayed retiring and refueling the coal units, with management citing a variety of reasons supporting this decision. In December, the board outlined steps and a timeline for management to work toward a future retirement, which could take at least another two years — though that timeline is not binding. And even as they did so, at least two board members were not impressed by the health study.

“I generally understand why staff wanted to do the study, but to put it bluntly, it was a big miss,” Moody said at the December board meeting. “And I’m not going to go into the details. I will simply say the science is clear: Burning coal is not good for human health, and it’s really that simple.”

North Omaha residents, 68 percent of whom are people of color, are no strangers to pollution. The historically redlined community is situated near a major highway and the city’s airport, and part of the community is also included in the city’s lead Superfund site. The North Omaha Station plant has operated since the 1950s.

North Omaha residents suffer from higher rates of asthma, pulmonary disease, heart disease, and stroke, said Lindsay Huse, the Douglas County Health Department director.

“What’s special to Omaha is the fact that we have a population who’s already experiencing many, many more negative health outcomes due to a number of variables, and if this is something that we can remove from that risk profile for them, I think that that is only a good thing,” said Huse, who sent a letter to OPPD that opposed the continued burning of coal in North Omaha after the health assessment’s release.

Despite its stated desire to do so, OPPD has struggled to wind down coal in North Omaha. After meeting its 2016 goal to convert three of the coal units to natural gas — also a source of powerful greenhouse gas emissions — OPPD signaled it wouldn’t meet the 2023 deadline for the remaining two coal units.

Challenges with supply chain, construction, and the federally regulated generation interconnection process hindered OPPD’s ability to build and connect part of the replacement power generation. Further complicating those efforts, OPPD needed to ensure the new power sources met requirements established by the Southwest Power Pool, a regional transmission organization.

OPPD set a new target of 2026 to stop burning coal at North Omaha. But some of the new power generation didn’t come online until 2025, and the utility was waiting on final agreements with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that management said were submitted years ago.

In August, OPPD management hired the Electric Power Research Institute, an energy research and development nonprofit, to conduct a human health and environmental risk assessment associated with the operations of the two coal units at the North Omaha Station.

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Some critics have questioned the use of EPRI, whose board of directors includes utility industry executives from across the country, including the CEO of the Nebraska Public Power District. EPRI is funded by hundreds of energy and government sector organizations across the globe, according to its website. OPPD paid more than $431,000 in membership dues in 2024. It’s unclear how much the utility paid for the health assessment — OPPD denied a public records request seeking a copy of the contract with EPRI, though it acknowledged a contract exists.

Jonathan Kim, a research associate at the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog organization, said that EPRI does “a lot of research that is good and useful.”

“But when EPRI is asked to conduct some specific research inquiry, like in this case,” Kim continued, “it has every incentive to tell the utility that is requesting that, what the utility wants to hear. That is in our minds how you end up with this EPRI health assessment for North Omaha Station.”

EPRI spokesperson Rachel Gantz said in an email that the organization is “rigorously objective” when conducting research and does “not advocate for any specific company, sector, or technology.”

“EPRI receives funding from a range of collaborators, including national labs and government grants, so that we can help provide the critical research and development necessary to help society power toward a reliable, affordable, and resilient energy future. Because that’s who we are — a research organization, not an advocacy organization,” Gantz said.

OPPD said it chose EPRI because of its proven track record in research and conducting such assessments.

“EPRI was the right choice for this work,” OPPD said in an emailed response. “EPRI is an independent research organization that does not advocate for any specific company, sector, or technology.”

Fernandez, OPPD’s CEO, noted to board members at one of the December meetings that he viewed the report as a way to address residents’ ongoing concerns about potential health impacts from the North Omaha plant.

“It was important for me … morally, personally to know whether or not we were missing something,” Fernandez said.

The report, released in November, almost immediately received scrutiny. Academics at Creighton University organized a public meeting where a panel of public health and utility experts largely panned the study. 

Public comments posted on OPPD’s website and made at meetings largely criticized the report and the looming decision to keep the coal units running.

“The North Omaha community can no longer accept the mediocre things that y’all do for us at the risk of the health in our community,” said Precious McKesson, president of the North Omaha Neighborhood Alliance and executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party, at the December OPPD board meeting. 

“Every time we get close to getting this coal plant closed, y’all put another goalpost, y’all move it, and y’all do it strategically.”

While public health experts did not invalidate the report’s findings about air toxics — the specific form of air pollution evaluated in the study — they disagreed with the interpretation that it shows the plant does not significantly contribute to negative public health impacts. The focus of the study, they said, was simply too narrow to determine this. 

OPPD said the study used the Environmental Protection Agency’s methodology to examine air toxics and found that the risks from the coal units are below EPA thresholds. 

However, there are a number of pollutants that can come from coal plants and enter the environment in various ways besides air toxics, including wastewater that coal plants discharge into rivers and coal ash that is generated by plants. The EPRI study did not explicitly look into whether these forms of pollution are at play. 

When asked why the report did not investigate these other forms and types of pollution, OPPD stated, “Air emissions are a focus of our community and other stakeholders.”

Experts also noted the EPRI assessment took a narrow approach to which air emissions to study. Experts said the study did not look deeply at all the criteria air pollutants, which are dangerous emissions that could come from the plant.

OPPD said that because the region meets federal standards that govern the criteria air pollutants, their study focused on providing “further clarity around air toxics and the community.” 

However, just because the city meets EPA’s air quality standards for these pollutants does not mean there are no health impacts, said Corwin Zigler, a professor of biostatistics at Brown University School of Public Health.

Zigler and Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at George Mason University, stressed that a full health assessment would need to take into account existing scientific research showing coal plants can make people sick and are linked to asthma, early death, and low birthweight. Zigler also said that one of the known drivers of negative health impacts from coal plants is fine particulate matter, which the EPRI report did not assess beyond attesting that the region is within EPA’s thresholds. Moreover, Omaha’s ozone levels have been on the edge of EPA compliance, according to EPRI’s own data, said Jun Wang, a professor of chemical and biochemical engineering at the University of Iowa. If the national standards were to tighten, as they have before, Omaha could fall out of compliance.

OPPD noted that criteria air pollutants can come from a number of sources, including cars, airport activities, wildfires, and industrial activity, and that North Omaha Station’s emissions have generally fallen by 40 percent since 2013. 

In discussing the health assessment and delayed retirement of the North Omaha coal units last month, Fernandez said the utility remains committed to its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. 

But in the meantime, the North Omaha plant will continue to depend on coal — much to the frustration of residents and even a couple OPPD board members. 

“The frustration and anger that’s in this room, I feel very viscerally, and I share it,” Moody said during OPPD’s December board meeting. “I am disappointed, I am frustrated, and I agree that it’s unfair and unjust for North Omaha to shoulder this burden.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A Nebraska utility says that its coal plant poses no ‘significant’ health threat on Jan 29, 2026.

The ostensibly barren Mojave Desert is in fact teeming with plants and animals, including a rare species known as the threecorner milkvetch. It’s a member of the pea family, splaying across the ground instead of climbing up a garden trellis. Given the harsh desert conditions, it waits until the arrival of rains to burst from the earth — flowering, fruiting, and reproducing. 

Though hardy, the threecorner milkvetch — which is under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act — and its fellow species in the Mojave are still sensitive to disturbance, like when solar farms literally break ground. Traditionally, energy companies “blade and grade” habitats, meaning they cut out vegetation and even out the soil, which disrupts the seed banks stored within the ground. 

In the desert outside of Las Vegas, the Gemini Solar Project took a gentler approach, instead trying to preserve the ecosystem. According to a new study, it paid off for the threecorner milkvetch: Before the development, scientists found 12 plants on the site, and afterward in 2024 found 93, signifying that the seeds survived construction. Compared to a nearby plot of land, the plants at Gemini grew wider and taller, and produced more flowers and fruits. That might be because the solar panels shade the soil, slowing evaporation, which makes more water available to the plants to grow big and strong. “So you just have the potential for a lot more plants,” said Tiffany Pereira, an ecologist at the Desert Research Institute and lead author of the paper, which was published late last year. “There’s seedlings of so many other species coming up as well. And so the fact that seed bank survived is phenomenal.”

Plants grow among panels in the Gemini Solar Project, outside Las Vegas. Courtesy of Tiffany Pereira

It’s yet more evidence that solar farms can be built in ways that minimize disturbances to ecosystems. (The company behind the Gemini project, Primergy, did not respond to requests for comment.) This technique is called ecovoltaics: Instead of blade-and-grade, facilities are built with native species in mind. To give the ecosystem a boost, for instance, a crew can seed the soils with native grasses and flowers. “Some of those seed mixes do quite well at solar facilities, and they attract pollinators, birds, and other wildlife as a result,” said Lee Walston, an ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Sort of asking that umbrella, Field of Dreams, question, right: If you build it, will they come?”

In Minnesota, at least, the answer is yes. Walston led a study of two solar sites on converted cropland there, observing the growth of biodiversity over the course of five years. The researchers found that the number of unique flowering plant species increased sevenfold, and the abundance of insect pollinators tripled. Native bees alone increased by 20 times. In a follow-on study across a dozen solar sites, grassland birds flocked to the areas, likely attracted by the abundance of insects — same goes for bats. Birds could also nest among the panels, hiding from predators. “We’ve seen positive outcomes, sort of across the board,” Walston said. “Anytime that you’re seeing increases in insect prey, you’ve got at least a really strong potential for also seeing greater bird activity and bat activity, as they are attracted to those sites.”

Such a significant boost to biodiversity is not a given, though. Certain plant species will need more or less shade from the panels: In the Mojave, Pereira only found one threecorner milkvetch, for example, growing directly under a panel. The rest were popping up in the sunnier spaces between them. Young plants of other species, by contrast, might prefer shadier spots, because too much sunlight can stress them. 

An ecovoltaic project teems with flowers, which attract native pollinating species. Courtesy of Lee Walston

Panel height is a major factor, too: Taller ones let bigger plant species grow to their full potential — but the higher the supports, the more a solar company must spend on materials. A facility might also set a specific height to accommodate livestock like sheep and goats, used for “conservation grazing” to clear out invasive weeds, which in turn reduces the fire risk of dead plants. “We’re trying to work with developers,” Walston said, “to say, ‘OK, well, if all you can do is 2 feet, what might be the best mix of seed mixes and management styles that could really optimize the habitat?’”

That mowing might sound destructive, but it mimics the natural order of things, as grazers like deer and buffalo, in addition to wildfires, have historically served the same purpose. Ecovoltaics can also return former agricultural fields to more of their natural state. “I think there is real potential for solar farms to be especially good for biodiversity in prairie ecosystems, since prairies evolved over time to require repeated disturbance,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at the nonprofit Environment America, who wasn’t involved in the new research. 

The blade-and-grade alternative, on the other hand, doesn’t just disrupt a habitat. With native plant species cleared out, the earth loses the root structures that keep soils from blowing away. Then, opportunistic and fast-growing invasive species can take over, muscling out the natives. And their flowers might not be as enticing for indigenous pollinators like bumblebees.

Just as endemic plants can grow among solar panels, so too can crops, a technique known as agrivoltaics. Researchers are finding, for example, that things like cucumbers grow like crazy on rooftops. The panels create a unique microclimate that keeps crops from getting too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and uses about one-third of the water compared to growing in full sun. Now scientists are trying to figure out which crops — especially high-value ones that can make up the cost of installing solar — will do the best growing under panels, both on rooftops and on the ground. “If you’re going to grow something, you want to grow something that a potential farmer could sell for decent profit,” said horticulturist Jennifer Bousselot, who studies rooftop agrivoltaics at Colorado State University but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “You name the crop, and there’s interest.”

All told, ecovoltaics and agrivoltaics have the potential to bolster biodiversity and the food supply while generating clean electricity. “Rather than a moonscape of invasive species and dust blowing into cities, why not strive for something better?” Pereira said. “It’s a wild and beautiful place that we live in, and it’s our job to look out for these species as well.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Solar farms can be havens for rare plants. Just ask the threecorner milkvetch. on Jan 29, 2026.

In the summer of 2023, more than 19,000 people were forced to evacuate as wildfires swept through Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Emergency alerts were issued in French and English, but not in the nine Indigenous languages that are recognized as official languages in the territory, forcing some Indigenous families to rely on friends, radio broadcasts, and social media for critical information.

A new white paper argues that the lack of translated disaster warnings is emblematic of a much broader problem: Climate change information, from emergency alerts to scientific research, is overwhelmingly produced only in English. The research, published by Climate Cardinals, a youth-led climate advocacy organization focused on language access, found that 80 percent of scientific papers are published in English, which is spoken by just 18 percent of the world’s population. The researchers argue that most of the world is excluded from the information needed to understand how climate change is reshaping the planet, including people in positions of power. 

“Language is not just about inclusion, but I think really determines what would count as climate reality,” said Jackie Vandermel, research co-director at Climate Cardinals. “Language is not just about who receives the information, but also what is allowed to even exist in climate governance.”

The report puts particular emphasis on the need for Indigenous language translations, including in emergencies like those in Yellowknife. Indigenous languages, researchers note, are increasingly threatened not only by colonialism but also by climate change itself. Forced migration can sever ties to ancestral lands, making it more difficult to teach languages to new generations. At the same time, Indigenous languages embed detailed understandings of local ecosystems and weather not captured elsewhere. Indigenous peoples are also disproportionately exposed to climate impacts, like melting Arctic ice and Pacific typhoons. The result can mean that Indigenous peoples face heightened climate risks and get less access to relevant information while struggling to preserve languages that could be critical to fighting climate change. 

“Indigenous observations are the earliest climate signals, but science tends to flow where Indigenous knowledge gets extracted, and then scientific findings aren’t returned to them in accessible form,” said Jackie Vandermel, research co-director at Climate Cardinals.

That has implications beyond the affected communities because it shapes what policy decisions are made. News organizations, Vandermel added, can play an important role. “By choosing whose voices are heard, in what languages, and in what formats, journalism can reproduce existing gaps, or help make Indigenous and multilingual climate realities legible to the systems that govern response and funding.” 

The report calls for an urgent expansion of climate information in languages other than English and recommends the creation of a global climate language access fund that would support multilingual dissemination of climate information. Such a fund could support translations of scientific research, government reports, international negotiations, and extreme weather alerts. Researchers at Climate Cardinals said that, to their knowledge, the United Nations has never considered establishing such a fund, though some U.N. agencies have begun exploring translation options through machine learning. 

But funding may be difficult in the current geopolitical climate. Governments have consistently fallen short on finance commitments, like climate reparations. At last fall’s global climate conference in Brazil, known as COP30, negotiators agreed to increase funding for climate adaptation measures, like building sea walls to guard against rising seas, but left final figures vague. Even the most ambitious estimates fell well below the estimated $400 billion annual need to fight climate change. In the United States, the Trump administration has cut funding for domestic and international climate initiatives and slashed funding for non-English weather warnings, despite research showing that such cuts can be deadly.

But a climate language access fund remains a worthy goal, said Laura Martin, an associate professor of environmental studies at Williams College.

“The hiring of translators, multilingual educators, and local reporters should be embedded in policy and financial structures,” she said. “Language is a matter of climate justice.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate news is written in a language most people can’t understand on Jan 29, 2026.

Can a lump of coal ever be … cute?

It’s a question no one was thinking about until last Thursday, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a cartoon of himself on X kneeling next to “Coalie” — a combustible lump with giant eyes, an open-mouthed grin, and yellow boots, almost like a carbon-heavy Japanese video game character.

Department of the Interior

It might seem like a strange mascot to promote what Burgum calls the “American Energy Dominance Agenda.”

“Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” said Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo, and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World. 

In Japan, Dale said, seemingly everything gets a cute character attached to it — not just in TV shows and games, but also as part of government public relations efforts. This ultra-adorable aesthetic, associated with rounded shapes and huge eyes, is so common it has a name: kawaii. Even the Tokyo police department has an orange, mouselike mascot, with a disarming cuddliness that serves to make law enforcement feel softer and less threatening.  

Coalie appears to do something similar, countering Burgum’s “mine, baby, mine” message with a kawaii-style innocence. “You know, it makes us feel more familiar,” Dale said. “It makes us want to get closer.” Those warm, fuzzy feelings come from how our brains are wired to respond to babylike characteristics. Give a character a round body, big eyes, and chubby arms and legs, and you can even make a lump of coal look huggable. 

Coalie is just the latest in a long line of characters used by controversial industries, from tobacco to nuclear energy, that seem designed to make their risks feel less threatening — though they typically looked less cute, at least in the United States. David Ropeik, a risk expert, sees Coalie as part of a tradition of advertising strategies that widely disliked companies use to push back against criticism. 

“It’s a common response from cultures that feel themselves under attack, looking for ways to make their case in a less than adversarial way to sell their point of view,” Ropeik said. President Donald Trump has been working on rehabilitating coal’s image as the administration tries to stall the fuel’s decline. Trump has even said he has a standing order in the White House for staff to use the phrase “clean, beautiful coal.” He explained why in November, saying, “It’s ‘clean and beautiful’ because it needs public relations help.”

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Even cuteness can backfire, though, if people notice that an extra-adorable character is trying to coax them into liking something dangerous. Consider Pluto-kun, a cherubic mascot from the 1990s who promoted the Japanese nuclear company Tepco — at one point by cheerfully drinking a glass of plutonium as if it were harmless. The character attracted little attention until the nuclear accident at Tepco’s Fukushima plant in 2011, when people began resurfacing Pluto-kun online to point out the irony of its upbeat reassurances as the threat of nuclear disaster felt real and immediate. 

Some felt a similar dissonance when Interior Secretary Burgum posted the image of Coalie. Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy at Appalachian Voices, an environmental nonprofit, said the character was mocked by some of her friends and colleagues who work to support coal communities because of the serious damage they see firsthand from coal. “There’s nothing funny about climate change,” she said. “There’s nothing funny about black lung disease. There’s nothing funny about the water pollution that many people in Appalachia experience because of coal mining.” 

Part of the problem was that the timing was bad, Barnes said. The day after Coalie showed up on Burgum’s social media feed, Trump signed a law that redirects $500 million in funding originally set aside for cleaning up abandoned coal mines to the Forest Service and federal wildfire management programs. On top of that, the administration has been trying to roll back safety programs for miners. To people who care about the health of people working in mines and living near mines, Barnes said, Coalie “comes across as a middle finger, in a way.”

For Coalie’s creators, the backlash was a bit surprising, according to Simone Randolph, the communications director at the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, or OSMRE. The thing is, Coalie wasn’t initially intended as a mascot for “American Energy Dominance.” Its story actually started way back in 2018, when a social media manager at OSMRE put googly eyes on a picture of coal. 

“Coalie” became a running joke in the office and an icon on their Teams channel, evolving into different versions over the years, Randolph said. “If you walk down our hallway in the D.C. office, people have pictures of Coalie on their doors.”

Grist / OSMRE

Despite the uproar over Coalie, Randolph hopes the mascot can help people learn about her obscure federal office. OSMRE oversees the permitting and regulation of the country’s coal mines and is responsible for cleaning up old, polluted mining land. The agency has transferred and authorized billions of dollars to restore mining lands for better uses — like what’s now the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden.

“So often, communication boils down to something that’s kind of bland,” Randolph said. “It doesn’t really catch the public’s attention. And so we were hoping to do something that would be a little bit more attention-grabbing.” Last week, OSMRE posted an explainer of its work using Coalie as a guide to walk readers through the agency’s responsibilities. 

But the office’s character has notable differences to the version of Coalie that Burgum posted on X, which has tiny pink circles next to its eyes. Its features show a clear link to kawaii, an unusual move for an American institution, Dale said. It’s possible that it’s the result of somebody in Burgum’s department using AI to generate the image. In his own experimentation, Dale has found that AI will often add kawaii features to cute characters. Randolph said that OSMRE’s team uses AI tools, encouraged by Burgum, and that the version of Coalie he posted was designed to align with the secretary’s existing “Cartoon Doug” character.

Randolph said that it was an intentional decision to have the interior secretary introduce Coalie online, to bring more attention to OSMRE’s work. “The response has been extreme on both sides,” she said. “And my hope is that we can capitalize upon this moment to at least show the good work that is happening.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the government is trying to make coal cute on Jan 29, 2026.

In 1843, Congress gave Samuel Morse $30,000 to try to send a telegram from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Rather than bury the transmission wires underground, where technical issues would be hard to identify, the inventor of Morse code strung them along wooden poles and trees. When the system was completed about a year later, the first transmitted message read: “What hath God wrought?” 

This was the beginning of the modern electrical grid, and although demand for electricity has increased exponentially since then, the system for distributing electricity remains remarkably similar to its initial, 19th century version, especially the utility poles. Trees have to meet stringent standards to become a utility pole, remaining free of knots, scars, swelling, or contact with the ground, but poles are still vulnerable to extreme weather — prone to electrical fires, wildfires, and frigid temperatures. 

As the country grapples with skyrocketing power demand, extreme weather events now spur contentious debates about what kinds of energy work best. Conservatives blamed the California heat wave blackouts in 2020 on renewable energy, and climate advocates blamed the freeze in Texas in 2021 on the state’s reliance on natural gas, with each side claiming that its resources are more reliable. Winter Storm Fern barreled across the country this week, resurrecting concerns over the grid in Texas, where the state has added ample solar batteries, and in New England, which lost access to hydropower from Canada.

So far, power plants across the country have held up just fine, whether running on renewables or fossil fuels. But the storm revealed another vulnerability in the country’s aging power grid — the wires and poles that carry electricity from house to house. 

“That last mile of the grid is extremely vulnerable,” said Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “The equipment’s old, or the poles themselves are old, and they can break under extreme events. Those types of boring infrastructure investments are really critical to ensuring that we have reliability and resilience under extreme events.”

In most of the country, this infrastructure “is becoming one of the main drivers of electricity cost increases,” said Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation, a clean energy think tank. The bill has come due on much of the grid, Solomon explained. There’s currently a transformer shortage in the United States, and the Trump administration’s tariffs has made replacing infrastructure significantly more expensive. 

“When we think about how to reduce electricity costs for consumers, certainly making sure that we’re finding ways to reduce the cost of those components is really important,” Solomon said. 

As of Wednesday afternoon, at least 300,000 customers in in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana still lacked power, according to the website PowerOutage.us.

The biggest damage done by Winter Storm Fern was to a series of power lines owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, a federal power provider established under the New Deal in the 1930s. The storm toppled more than two dozen transmission lines that feed power to smaller utilities across Mississippi and Tennessee, and iced over some of the TVA’s other infrastructure. That left some of those smaller utilities without the energy they needed to keep the lights on.

Meanwhile, the TVA’s power plants made it through without disruption. The authority weatherized its main coal and gas plants after the catastrophic Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused the first rolling blackouts in the TVA’s history and cost the authority $170 million. This time around, the generation plants all stayed online despite record levels of power demand.

The worst-affected utility during this week’s winter storm has been Entergy, which serves most of Louisiana along with parts of Texas and Mississippi. Winter Storm Fern knocked out power for more than 171,000 customers at its peak and took out hundreds of pieces of infrastructure — the utility estimates that at least 30 transmission lines, 860 poles, and 60 substations went out of service. 

Entergy is used to getting knocked around by extreme weather. After Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana in 2021, Entergy lost more than 30,000 poles. Its main transmission tower carrying power into New Orleans collapsed in 150-mile-per-hour winds, cutting off power deliveries to the Crescent City. Not all this damage was inevitable: Entergy’s critics pointed out that nearby Florida had spent billions to harden its grid against storms with stronger poles and underground power lines. This allowed the Sunshine State to restore power much more quickly after similar hurricanes.

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The smaller utilities that cut power during Winter Storm Fern often don’t have the resources to pursue such repairs. Power poles only get replaced every 50 years or so, and replacing a pole network can cost millions of dollars. It’s this repair work, rather than the need to serve new data centers, that explains why power prices have risen over recent years. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the “primary driver of increased electricity-sector costs in recent years has been distribution and transmission expenditures — often devoted to refurbishment or replacement of existing infrastructure.” By far the greatest cost increase was in California, where utilities have had to spend billions of dollars to harden their grids against wildfires.

Even when utilities do invest in grid resilience, some storms can still break through. More than 30,000 customers of the North East Mississippi Electric Power Association lost power during the peak of the outage brought on by Winter Storm Fern, and the utility had only restored power to 5,000 customers as of Tuesday morning. The electric co-op spends about $2 million a year to remove trees and other vegetation around its power lines, according to a spokesperson, but the storm outpaced those efforts. 

“When large trees — some more than 30 feet tall — fall due to extreme ice loading, there is limited ability to prevent damage entirely,” said spokesperson Sarah Brooke Bishop. “We continually evaluate opportunities to strengthen and improve system resilience, but events of this magnitude will still result in significant impacts.”

Changing the material of the poles could help mitigate damage. A standard wood pole is pressure-treated to protect against fungi, humidity, and insects — but in extreme conditions, there’s only so much you can do to prevent wood from rotting. The first fiberglass composite poles were installed in Hawaii in the 1960s to withstand high humidity and wind speeds. Composite poles installed in Mexico and Grand Bahama have survived hurricane-force winds and are an increasingly appealing choice for utility companies looking to protect customers from the vagaries of extreme weather.  

The upfront costs of installing these fiberglass poles are substantial though. Composite poles cost roughly $5,000 before installation costs — compared to roughly $1,000 for a wooden pole — but they require less upkeep and are cheaper in the long run. Repurposing old wind turbine blades could lower the cost, although the wind industry’s expansion under the Trump administration looks uncertain. 

The fastest and easiest way to improve reliability, Solomon said, would be by incentivizing local battery storage. “By strategically placing batteries at certain spots on the grid where you might otherwise need to do an upgrade,” she explained, utilities could avoid some of the long-standing outages brought on by downed power lines. Homeowners could be compensated for purchasing their own batteries and allowing some of that energy to flow back to the grid in times of crisis. 

Ultimately, there’s no way around the fact that “our distribution system requires generation reinvestment,” Samaras said. Burying lines underground, building smarter controls to identify problems underground, and creating a strong network of distributed energy resources will all be required to deal with the growing threat of extreme weather. 

Correction: This story has been corrected in order to clarify which states are served by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The spelling of Michelle Solomon’s last name has also been corrected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The winter storm exposed the grid’s real weakness: Lots of old poles on Jan 28, 2026.