Grist

For nearly four decades, the federal government has funded a program that buys out homeowners who live in disaster-prone areas as a way of encouraging them to relocate to safer ground. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent over $6 billion on more than 53,000 properties nationwide through its Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. But the question has long been: To what extent does this approach work? 

A study published today in Science Advances is the latest to offer an answer. Author Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of Minnesota, found that the buyout program has largely succeeded in its objective of relocating people and has mostly paid for itself by avoiding future damages. But it isn’t helping everyone equally. 

“The program is extremely effective at helping people not only move but also move to lower-risk places,” said Young, whose paper makes clear that the “benefits are not evenly distributed.”

FEMA started doing buyouts in 1988 with the aim of encouraging people to move out of harm’s way. The idea was to avoid repeatedly paying federal disaster aid or insurance claims at the same location. ProPublica reported, for example, that in one extreme case, a single home in northeast Houston received 18 federal flood insurance payments totalling $1.8 million — roughly 15 times its market value.

Residents apply through their local or state government, which requests federal funding that typically covers 75 percent of the property’s cost. If approved, the government offers to buy the property at its pre-disaster market value, and the homeowner decides whether to accept.

Using a mix of private and public data, the paper found that program participants were about 20 percentage points more likely to relocate in the first five years than others who were similarly impacted. While that difference dropped a bit over time, it persisted for at least 15 years. The research also showed that participants tended to move to areas with higher incomes and higher rates of education and employment. Moreover, their debt levels fell, at least in the short term.

From the government’s perspective, it’s been a win, too. Young said that “as long as we’re targeting people and ensuring that they move to less risky properties,” the federal investment tends to pay for itself in fewer claims and lower disaster costs. 

That said, the study found significant demographic differences. Participants from higher-income neighborhoods were more likely to relocate and move to areas with greater economic opportunity, while households from majority-Black or low-­income neighborhoods moved less frequently and experienced smaller improvements.  

“This work is super important,” Jim Elliott, a sociologist at Rice University who focuses on inequities in disasters and recovery, said of the study. A.R. Siders, director of the University of Delaware’s Climate Change Science and Policy Hub, agreed. “This is something people have shown at smaller scales,” she said. “It’s good to see it on the national level.” 

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Neither Elliot nor Siders were involved in the study, which they said confirms and adds to previous research on buyouts — a body of work that points to a program that works but needs improving, they added. Reducing wait times and paying greater attention to equity are key, Elliott said, noting that some of the disconnect rests in how the government and homeowners view the role of the buyout effort. “The government looks at it as a property acquisition program” and “a way to look out for other taxpayers,” he said. “But if you’re from a damaged home, you’re looking at this as disaster recovery.”

The buyout process can take years, leaving disaster victims in a precarious position as they await a decision. Even if a buyout is approved, Elliott said, using pre-disaster market values can amplify existing inequality: Homes in marginalized communities tend to be worth less from the start, which means their owners then have less money to relocate. In some cases, the government’s offer falls short of what another home costs, making it impossible to move somewhere safer.

These disparities show up in Young’s paper. The average buyout payment was $40,583 in areas with majority Black populations, compared to $93,977 in high-proportion white census tracts. And the estimated increase in relocation was approximately 18 percentage points in tracts with smaller Black populations, compared to 6 percentage points in majority-Black tracts.

The buyout program “should do better and be more equitable,” said Elliott. But he said the larger problem is the program isn’t reaching millions of people living in disaster-prone homes.

“This is important, but it’s not insufficient,” he said of the fix. “It’s buying us some time”

Young hopes that research like this can help policymakers improve, and potentially expand, buyouts as a climate adaptation tool, though President Donald Trump has repeatedly curbed FEMA’s spending. Elliott pointed to programs in Europe, New Zealand, and elsewhere that could offer lessons for the United States. Siders said this work also highlights the need to consider long-proposed changes to the FEMA program, such as using a home’s replacement cost rather than the market value to help marginalized groups relocate.

All three researchers agreed that more needs to be done to understand why these inequities occur and how to address them — work they say the government should be doing.

“The federal government doesn’t do anything to assess where people go after the program,” said Young. Elliott noted that work often falls to academics, who have limited access to the data needed to do it.  

“It was sort of left to us to figure out what the implication of the policy is,” said Elliot. “That’s backwards.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA’s disaster buyout program is working — but there’s a catch on Nov 11, 2026.

Over the past 20 months, the Trump administration has rolled back regulations and issued executive orders aimed at unilaterally speeding up industrial development projects. In true bureaucratic fashion, even attempts to cut red tape come with a litany of acronyms you may have never heard of. Take, for instance, “FAST-41.”

Title 41 of FAST-41, or the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, was originally passed under former President Barack Obama in 2015. It was created as a mechanism to streamline federal review for approval of large-scale infrastructure projects, and improve the public’s access to any permits and documents produced as part of federal review. Infrastructure projects can only be added to the FAST-41 list if they fall under federal review with the National Environmental Policy Act and meet certain size requirements.

In a July 2025 executive order, Trump expanded the definition of critical infrastructure projects eligible to be covered under the FAST-41 process to include artificial intelligence data centers. “My Administration will utilize federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers,” the directive reads. “This usage will be done in a manner consistent with the land’s intended purpose — to be used in service of the prosperity and security of the American people.”

FAST-41 shares similarities with the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA, the permitting bill that passed the Senate this week. That legislation would overhaul environmental regulations like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, and change judicial review, with the goal of expediting the permitting process for projects to go from proposals to shovels in the ground more quickly. If the bill passes the House as written, its changes would be applied to all infrastructure permitting projects. FAST-41, unlike BAAJA, does not change existing environmental statutes and only applies to projects listed under the policy. 

Reforming the permitting process has increasingly evolved into a bipartisan issue. Lawmakers on both sides have said the lengthy process stalls economic development. New Mexico Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich, one of the BAAJA sponsors, has said the current permitting process particularly hurts transmission expansion and renewable energy projects at a time when those are most needed, and has attributed those setbacks to continued higher energy costs. But depending on the type of project, expanding development can also mean driving up planet-warming emissions. The Natural Resources Defense Council has warned that BAAJA, in its current draft, could “benefit fossil fuel, mining, data center, and other industrial projects more than clean energy.” The environmental nonprofit has also said the bill would limit regulatory oversight of the environmental harms associated with development. 

FAST-41 established a dashboard where anyone can view a project’s timelines, required actions by federal agencies, and the status of environmental review and permits. It is overseen by what’s often referred to as the Permitting Council, made up of representatives from 15 federal agencies. There are two categories for projects listed under FAST-41. The first is a “covered” listing, which means a project will receive expedited processes, including a set permitting timeline that federal agencies must comply with and being assigned a project coordinator to carry the project through the review process. The second is a “transparency” listing, which essentially creates a one-stop shop for a project on the FAST-41 dashboard. It’s a centralized location with information on permitting documents. 

In late October, Montana became the 11th state to enter into an agreement with the Permitting Council, which oversees FAST-41. This means the federal government will help the state to identify infrastructure projects eligible for a FAST-41 designation — now including those that aid the development of data centers, like the mining of rare earth elements — provide resources to state agencies through the permitting process, and include state-level permitting actions and timelines on the federal transparency dashboard. Montana has a long-standing history of mining and other extractive industries. Some industry groups, like the Montana Mining Association, see this new state-federal collaboration on FAST-41 as an industry win. 

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Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and Iowa had all previously signed agreements as well. This is the first time in FAST-41’s history that these kinds of federal-state agreements have occurred. Given the novelty of this kind of collaboration, it remains to be seen how much say any given state could have in selecting projects for FAST-41 listing, or how expedited the timeline may be when state and federal permitting are happening in tandem. 

When Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed the official memorandum of understanding with the Permitting Council, he said, “This MOU will ensure that critical infrastructure projects avoid unnecessary roadblocks after completion of federal and state environmental review processes. This is especially important for energy infrastructure.” 

According to Adrian Van Rythoven, an associate professor with Montana Tech’s Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, FAST-41 establishes clarity and certainty in the process, which is beneficial for businesses like publicly traded mineral-exploration companies. “Capital markets like having timelines,” he said, adding that timelines build investor confidence and ensure more money flows toward mineral development. 

The effort to make it easier to begin a mining project in Montana comes alongside sweeping changes to bedrock environmental policies and how mining projects are permitted on federal lands. There are currently three mining or mining exploration projects in the state with a “transparency” designation: the Sheep Creek Project, Blue Copper, and the Stillwater Mine.

But ultimately, Van Rythoven said, it remains to be seen if this new MOU between Montana and the Permitting Council would speed things up. He pointed to the extensive personnel and resources required to process applications. 

“The scientists, the legal experts that work initially at the federal government, now perhaps the state government with this MOU, if those resources of human time, money, etc., aren’t made available to process these applications, it’ll be transparently slow.”

But for others, the partnership leaves more questions than answers. “I think there’s room for a lot of political interference, ignoring state law, and cutting the public out of the process,” said Derf Johnson, Deputy Director of the Montana Environmental Information Center. “I wonder how this MOU will conflict with Montanans’ right to know.”

Johnson supports improved transparency and said the dashboard is a useful site where the public can access information about a project. But he fears the agreement could allow projects to be prioritized based on the wishes of elected officials and political appointees rather than true merit for critical infrastructure. Montana has explicit constitutional protections for a “clean and healthy environment” and a robust state-level review process; Johnson said he hopes an agreement like this would not skirt any of the state’s own policies. 

“I’m worried about projects receiving this designation in the age of corruption that we live in,” he said. 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump plans to fast-track mining in Montana on Nov 11, 2026.

After barely three years on the road, Tesla is planning to kick the Cybertruck to the curb after flagging sales. Elon Musk announced on Friday that the company would wind down production next year to make room for the production of Cybercabs, the robot taxis Tesla hopes will reshape transportation. 

In its short lifespan, the Cybertruck managed to become a top candidate for the most polarizing vehicle on the road — ever. Critics called it a “MAGA hat on wheels” and compared it to a dumpster — a resemblance that may have fooled some hungry raccoons that once chewed on the vehicle’s rear vault. It’s already being declared “one of the greatest flops in automotive history,” on par with Ford’s 1957 Edsel. But the polygonal, supposedly bulletproof truck did appeal to a certain demographic. 

“It’s the kind of vehicle, as a kid, you imagine for the future,” said Dan Krassner, executive director of the American EV Jobs Alliance, an advocacy organization working to end the partisan divide over electric vehicles. He’s a Republican and a wrestling fan, and noted that some of his favorite pro wrestlers drove Cybertrucks, including the married WWE superstars Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch, along with The Miz and Liv Morgan (though the latter has said it was the “worst investment” she ever made). 

Weeks before the Cybertruck rolled out in late 2023, Musk told investors that Tesla would sell 250,000 vehicles a year. But it never came close: Last year, it sold just over 20,000. It’s the latest sign that the attempt to make EVs macho is falling flat, after Ford announced last December that its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, the all-electric version of the country’s most popular vehicle, would be discontinued since it was a money-loser. Sales of Rivian’s electric pickup have been sliding downward each year since 2023; they have also dropped sharply for GMC’s Hummer EV, which was dubbed “the worst-selling pickup truck of 2026.”

Automakers have long tried to shed the saintly, environmentally friendly image of the Toyota Prius, and this shift to big, aggressive electric trucks was an effort to appeal to traditional American pickup buyers. But they not only had to contend with conservatives’ hesitations about EVs, they also had to persuade a public increasingly worried about the cost of living to overcome sticker shock, to fork over thousands, if not tens of thousands, more to buy an electric pickup instead of a gas-powered one. A comparable gas-powered Ford pickup starts at $52,000, about $11,000 less than the Lightning did before Ford discontinued it.  

“The first electric trucks weren’t priced for the people who buy trucks, and buyers still have fair questions about charging and towing,” Krassner said. “You know, macho advertising can’t fix the monthly payment.” 

The starting price for the 2026 Tesla Cybertruck was just raised to $92,500, and the cheapest Hummer EV is $97,200. Full-size electric pickup trucks need very large batteries to deliver the range and towing capabilities that truck buyers want, leading to higher prices, Krassner said.

But cheaper models are on the way. Ford’s upcoming electric pickup truck coming next year, the Fathom, will be priced starting at $28,400 — well below the price of the average gas-powered pickup. Meanwhile, now that the F-150 Lightning is out of production, with used models going for 50 percent off the sticker price, it’s “selling like hotcakes,” according to the transportation news site Electrek.

“As the electric trucks are more comparable in price to gas trucks, we expect them to be a superior product and be popular with Americans,” Krassner said.

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There’s still a large partisan divide on electric vehicles: Roughly half of all new EV registrations in the U.S. from 2012 to 2023 went to the 10 percent most Democratic counties, according to a study from the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Because electric trucks performed better in Republican-leaning areas — though not as well as Tesla and Ford had hoped — the researchers suggested they could still be a way to broaden EV adoption. And some of Republicans’ resistance to electric vehicles has begun to ease, Krassner said. The share of Republicans who agree that EVs are “for people who see the world differently than I do” fell from 59 percent in November 2023 to 49 percent in November 2025, according to polling from EVs for All America.

As the Cybertruck’s production comes to a close, Alexander Edwards, president of the research consultancy Strategic Vision, was cautious about declaring the electric pickup experiment a failure. He sees the F-150 Lightning as a lesson in making sure that trucks can perform the jobs their owners bought them to do — including towing a camper across several states without worrying about range and charging access. The Cybertruck, on the other hand, appealed to a sense of individuality, innovation, excitement, but only a relatively small group of people were willing to pay for that experience at a high price point, especially as Tesla became a political target thanks to Musk’s involvement with DOGE. 

“I think price, product frustrations, Musk’s politics, and the changing meaning of owning one all need to be part of the discussion,” Edwards said.

High gas prices sparked by the war in Iran, which have stuck around for months, are prompting people to purchase hybrids, though sales of electric vehicles have declined after the Trump administration’s elimination of federal tax credits last year. Krassner is also bullish on a new generation of range-extended electric trucks — EVs with a gas-powered generator — which could ease drivers’ range anxiety.

In other words, America’s experiment with electrified pickup trucks isn’t over yet. “I’d say round one went to the gas truck,” Krassner said. “Round two hasn’t started yet.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Cybertruck era is over, but America’s electric truck experiment isn’t on Nov 10, 2026.

It’s 3 a.m. and the beach in El Bosque, in southeast Mexico, is humming with small talk and laughter as Viviana Velázquez eases out of her hammock and dashes to the shoreline to greet a boat returning with the night’s catch. Velázquez, 38, and her 13-year-old daughter, Marlene, help the tired fishermen unload the ice boxes and heave a plastic crate full of bonito to the cooperative to be weighed.

The captain pays Velázquez for her help in fish. She saves a couple to fry for breakfast and cashes in the rest for 50 pesos, the equivalent of about $3, and heads back to her hammock, where some friends are eating pastries while catching up on the past week’s dramas. 

This work is known locally as garrulear. For decades it was an important source of income, food, and bonding for women in El Bosque, a small fishing community in the state of Tabasco located on a narrow peninsula sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and the Usumacinta River. It is one of the things that Velázquez misses most since sea level rise forced residents to leave. 

“In El Bosque I would garrulear every day, but then the sea took everything,” said Velázquez, as she settled back into a hammock. “Now I’m stuck inside most of the time; it’s too far to come here often.” 

El Bosque became the first community in Mexico to be recognized as displaced by climate change in 2023. By then, coastal erosion and flooding from storm surge had already damaged or swept away more than half of the hundred or so homes in the area. After a high-profile media campaign and several administrative claims by a coalition of environmental justice organizations working with residents of El Bosque, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pledged to relocate them.

In November 2024, a new neighborhood called Nuevo Bosque, or New Forest, was inaugurated 7.5 miles inland on the outskirts of the city of Frontera. Fifty-one families received identical purpose-built houses in Nuevo Bosque. 

The El Bosque relocation was seen as a huge win for the residents and a success story for the government. Yet two years on, the community is now also struggling to adapt to economic, social, and cultural losses caused by moving away from the sea. Meanwhile, the residents who were excluded from the relocation still don’t know why.

Velázquez was among the lucky ones to be rehoused, but she doesn’t feel settled. “I am trying to adapt to my new life, but I can’t sleep, I cry all the time, my heart beats a thousand times a minute,” she told Drilled. “We’re constantly worrying about money. I eat and eat and eat to calm my nerves. I’ve put on 29 pounds. 

“We are grateful, but I am still grieving,” she said. “I miss everything about El Bosque: the cool breeze, my friends, our whole life.”

Fishing wasn’t just a job for the people of El Bosque. It was a core part of who they were, both as individuals and as a community. They wanted to be relocated closer to the coast so they could still fish every day, but the authorities said that they’d likely be flooded out again within a few years. Here, they should be safe from flooding for 30 years or so. 

Fishers help to unload the boats in El Bosque, work locally known as garrulear.
Daniele Volpe

The grief is not over yet. A taxi ride from Nuevo Bosque to El Bosque and back costs 240 pesos (equivalent to around $14), which is why Velázquez and her friends only go back once a week or so even during the height of the fishing season. But even these precious few nights spent garruleando, helping the fishermen and bonding with friends, are numbered. 

“At the rate things are going, a few sandy islands are all that will soon be left of El Bosque,” said Lilia Gama, an ecologist and expert in coastal erosion from the Juarez Autonomous University of Tabasco. “The river and the sea will likely join up within a decade, and the entire community will be under water.”

According to Gama, the river and sea in El Bosque would have eventually joined anyway, due to the natural dynamics of the waters, but climate change has turbocharged the process. 

Rising sea level is primarily caused by global heating driven by the greenhouse gas emissions released from burning fossil fuels. Ice caps, ice sheets, and glaciers that flow into the oceans are melting, increasing the volume of oceans across the globe. The oceans are also expanding due to warmer waters, which are not only making seas rise further but also causing storms to grow stronger and more destructive. Powerful tidal waves, storm surges, and other events that create extremely high sea levels, which historically occurred once every century, could become annual phenomena by 2100.

Globally, the rate of sea level rise has more than doubled over the past three decades. It will rise a further 15 to 30 centimeters (4 to 12 inches) on average by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, endangering close to a billion people currently living in low-lying coastal areas. 

It could leave up to half the entire state of Tabasco, home to about 2.5 million people, uninhabitable or highly vulnerable by the end of the century, according to modeling by Climate Central. 

Under international law, states have a duty to protect their communities and guarantee human rights, which includes transitioning away from fossil fuels and implementing climate adaptation measures to minimize harm.

“If displacement cannot be prevented, communities have the right to be consulted, the right to information, and to provide input so they co-shape the decision on how and where they will be relocated,” said Veronika Fikfak,  a professor of international human rights law at University College London.

From El Bosque to Nuevo Bosque

El Bosque was founded in the early 1980s by landless people from the neighboring state of Veracruz who saw an opportunity to lift their families out of poverty. Back then the peninsula was covered in mangroves and thick vegetation — hence the name El Bosque, which means “the forest.” 

Velázquez was just six months old when her family moved to El Bosque. The family didn’t get rich, but they did alright. There was an abundance of fish that sold to restaurants and markets in the capital, Mexico City, and then locally as El Bosque became a popular spot for local tourists to eat crab tamales, ceviche, and fish empanadas. 

Velázquez married a local fisherman, Javier Rodriguez, and they had two children. 

In February 2022, the sea flooded their home during a storm, and the family moved into another house slightly farther inland. When that house flooded in November 2022, they were evacuated to Frontera. By then, an entire row of houses in El Bosque was fully submerged under water, and the kindergarten and primary school their children attended had been abandoned. 

Viviana Velázquez and her husband, Javier Rodriguez, at their new house in Nuevo Bosque. They stayed in El Bosque with their children as long as they could, through the collapse of two houses, before finally leaving in December 2024. Daniele Volpe

Before being evacuated, “the children were crying all the time, scared by the sound of the waves crashing into the house,” Velázquez said. “But we came back to El Bosque so my husband, Javier, could keep fishing.” They stayed in a makeshift house cobbled together from sticks and metal sheeting, even after the power was cut off due to storm damage. “I couldn’t bear to leave.”

The family finally left El Bosque for good on New Year’s Eve 2024, a month after getting the keys to their new house in Nuevo Bosque. 

Nuevo Bosque consists of four rows of identical single-story, two-bedroom houses, each with a back and front yard that are too small for the chickens and ducks many raised in El Bosque. There’s a playground, a basketball court, and some benches — the town’s only gathering place, where teenagers make out and community meetings are held. 

The town was inaugurated without running water or a primary school. A narrow laminate static trailer parked at the community entrance currently serves as a makeshift classroom. There’s no bathroom, so the kids run home if they need the toilet. 

One day in late May when Drilled visited the school in Nuevo Bosque, the morning began with children helping to sweep rainwater from an overnight storm out of the trailer.  With no AC and just four fans (one of them broken), soon it was baking hot inside. Tabasco has always been hot and humid, but climate change is driving temperatures higher, and the state education department had just instructed schools to close at 11:30 a.m. for the rest of the term because of the heat. 

“The kids get irritable and sleepy. It’s so hot, it’s hard even for me,” said teacher Isabel Mayo Cerino. “This was supposedly a planned relocation, and yet nobody thought about education. A community without a school isn’t a proper community.” 

The state education department has promised to build a proper classroom when the community finds some suitable land. But the children have been without a proper school for almost six years now, ever since a tidal wave flooded their old school in El Bosque in late 2020. 

Natali Segura, 28, moved her 11-year-old son to a school in Frontera because he could barely read or write. “The kids lost 5 or 6 years of school,” said Segura. “They are so behind.”

The community is relieved to be away from the threat of the rising sea, and close proximity to the city has brought benefits. A hospital is nearby, and there’s good internet and phone service, which the teenagers love. 

But multiple residents told Drilled that they feel isolated and less healthy. Drilled met many adults and children who, like Velázquez, said they had put on significant amounts of weight since relocating away from the coast. Their life in the city is far more sedentary. Fish is no longer a mainstay of their diet, and fast food is a lot easier to find. Residents have gotten into the habit of ordering snacks and big bottles of sugary, fizzy drinks for home delivery. 

At the same time, money is tighter, and for the first time mothers don’t always know where the next meal for their kids is coming from.

Nuevo Bosque, a new community of 51 row houses, was built on the outskirts of the city of Frontera in the state of Tabasco, for fisher families displaced by coastal erosion. It was inaugurated in November 2024. Daniele Volpe

“It might look like we’re better off in these new houses, but we’re not,” said Áurea Sánchez, 44, who spends hours each day at her evangelical church praying for the community to be blessed. “No one was rich in El Bosque, but no one ever went hungry. Now, life is more precarious. We’re fishers, we can’t change overnight.”

In 2024, Sánchez and her eldest daughter, Yesenia, were among hundreds of people from frontline communities in Latin America and the Caribbean who testified at a landmark hearing on climate displacement convened by the Inter American Court of Human Rights, or IACHR, in Manaus, Brazil. “I realized that we’re not alone, that we have rights, and that many communities are suffering because we haven’t looked after what God gave us,” Sanchez told Drilled. 

El Bosque has become an emblematic case of climate displacement, helping clarify international law and setting in motion a wave of policy reforms in Mexico. It was cited in a historic opinion published by the IACHR in May 2025.  

“States are obligated to adopt measures to prevent … migration and forced displacement resulting directly and indirectly from disasters and other impacts of climate change,” according to the IACHR advisory opinion on human rights and climate change. In other words, the highest court in the Americas says that under existing international law, states are duty bound to develop and finance public policies on climate adaptation and displacement.

Where oil production and displacement converge

International climate negotiations are often cast in terms of those who have contributed the most to climate change and those who will suffer the worst consequences. Mexico is one of the few countries that straddles both categories. 

Mexico is one of the top 20 largest historic contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Industrialized countries that benefited most from fossil fuels are legally and morally bound to help lead the way in transitioning away from fossil fuel under international law and U.N. climate treaties like the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Yet Mexico is the 11th largest oil producer in the world, according to the International Energy Agency’s most recent data. It is also highly vulnerable to climate breakdown. If current climate trends continue, Mexico could see at least 3 million people internally displaced by 2050 as a result of sea level rise, drought, desertification, extreme heat, and other sudden and slow onset climate disasters, according to one study by the World Bank.

This paradox is particularly stark in Tabasco, the state where El Bosque is located, which is also the home state of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose six-year term from 2018 to 2024 saw Mexico’s transition to renewable energy sources go backward.

Tabasco is one of the biggest oil-producing states in Mexico, and fossil fuel companies have built refineries, pipelines, and other polluting infrastructure along its eroding coastline, as well as roads, schools, hospitals, and entire neighborhoods for their workers. Sea level rise and air pollution from oil operations threaten them all, underlying the harm caused by fossil fuels at every stage of their life cycle — from toxic pollution and industrial accidents when they are extracted and refined, to the global heating driven by the release of greenhouse gases when they are burned.

Mexico’s national oil company, Pemex, was founded by President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938.  A symbol of the country’s nationalism and sovereignty, it’s now ranked as the biggest corporate polluter in Latin America and among the most indebted fossil companies globally. 

The shoreline is eroding rapidly along the coast of Tabasco, one of Mexico’s biggest oil-producing states and also one of the most vulnerable to climate change.
Daniele Volpe

Tabasco is tightly intertwined with Pemex, which has installations in 80 percent of the state’s municipalities — including the Dos Bocas oil refinery, which opened in 2022 about 60 miles west of El Bosque, and only meters away from a primary school in the neighborhood Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, more colloquially known as La Petrolera (the oil company), because so many residents work for Pemex. 

The refinery has suffered floods, fatal fires, and massive oil leaks, while acute respiratory problems, panic attacks, headaches, and vomiting have surged among residents. The neighborhood is dotted with empty houses, all that’s left of the families displaced by the pollution, or who moved away in fear of further industrial disasters.

A huge gas flare is visible from the local hospital near La Petrolera, which is owned and operated by Pemex for its workers and their families, where Cindy Barjau rushed her daughter two years ago after she passed out, overcome by the fumes from the refinery. 

“Children can’t play outside anymore; we keep our windows shut,” Barjau told Drilled. “It’s inhumane. Our quality of life has gone. We want to leave, too, but where would we go?” 

Pemex has acknowledged a rise in air pollution but has repeatedly claimed that there is no risk to nearby communities. The gravity of the air pollution is difficult to determine, however, because the government has classified its air monitoring data as secret until 2030. 

Documents obtained by local media suggest that Pemex began building the facility before completing an environmental impact assessment or a drainage system. 

In March, amid growing public pressure following a fire that left five workers dead, President Claudia Sheinbaum asked Pemex to help relocate the school, where enrollment has plummeted. 

A 2025 study by Amnesty International revealed that at least 2 billion people — a quarter of the world’s population — live within 3 miles of operational oil, gas, and coal projects, which have turned nearby communities and critical ecosystems into so-called sacrifice zones. 

“The fossil fuel industry impacts people’s bodies, their health, their land, and the environment, polluting the surroundings and compromising the ability to sustain life in the short and medium term — and the long term, due to its climate impacts,” said Juan Manuel Orozco, a project officer at the nonprofit group Conexiones Climáticas, which has worked with residents in Dos Bocas and El Bosque. “In the southeast of Mexico, the situation is particularly dramatic. It’s as if all the monsters of our times have converged here.”

International law advances

In July 2025, a historic advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, confirmed that all states, whether they are signatories to the Paris Agreement or not, have a duty to take action to achieve “deep, rapid and sustained” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, which includes regulating private corporations. The continued expansion of fossil fuels would amount to a legal wrong under customary international law, which could trigger an obligation to provide full reparations, the ICJ wrote. 

The opinions — along with the El Bosque case — have generated political momentum in Mexico, and there has been more ambition on climate since President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in 2024. 

As a signatory to the Paris Agreement, Mexico must submit an updated climate action plan (called a Nationally Determined Contribution) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change every five years. Mexico’s 2025 update set a greenhouse gas target for the first time, implying that it would begin to take steps to lower its emissions.

However, plans are afoot to expand fossil fuel exploration, production, and use, while Mexico’s target timeline for shifting to renewable energy sources is way too slow, according to Climate Action Tracker. 

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The IACHR and ICJ opinions also helped clarify that states have a duty to safeguard human rights in the context of climate change and put in place adaptation measures to reduce foreseeable harms (which could include things like infrastructure damage and forced displacement). When climate impacts are so advanced that harms have become unavoidable, the courts direct states to cooperate on “loss and damage” claims, including for financial compensation.

Mexico’s updated climate action plan acknowledged, also for the first time, that climate change is already causing loss and damage, which will require reparations to some communities. 

Mexico could also end up facing loss and damage claims from other states over its failures to regulate fossil fuel and other polluting corporations and reduce emissions fast enough. But first the government must face domestic lawsuits for failing to protect its own people from foreseeable harms caused by climate change.

Loss and damage

The specific duties states have under international law to tackle sea level rise — and deal with consequences like lost livelihoods and displacement — are still undergoing legal clarification, and El Bosque has been a test case in many ways. In Mexico, the experience, good and bad, is likely to inform future climate policy, while a new lawsuit by El Bosque residents who were excluded from the relocation could help clarify the government’s statutory duties to climate-displaced communities. 

Mexico, like dozens of other countries, still has no climate adaptation plan that sets out how it will both protect and prepare its own communities from climate breakdown. This is expected to include measures to prevent or minimize the risk of forced displacement, such as coastal restoration, reforestation, water-capture systems, and flood walls.  

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In El Bosque, the state failed to implement adaptation measures such as mangrove restoration that could have slowed down the erosion, according to Nora Cabrera, founder of the Mexico City-based law firm Nuestro Futuro, which is representing the residents. 

The relocation, while well intentioned, was poorly planned and led to a decline in living standards for many residents, Cabrera said. 

“The community has been made more vulnerable by the relocation — a level of regression that speaks to the process of climate injustice,” said Cabrera. “The El Bosque case is clearly one of loss and damage, because conditions for adaptation were never created. This amounts to an omission on the part of the Mexican state … regarding its citizens, its people.”

The first house in El Bosque to be completely destroyed by the waves belonged to fisherman Pablo Cardoza, who lived on the seafront with his wife and three children. In September 2019, a strong northerly wind caused a storm surge, flooding the house with sea water, dead trees, and trash. So Cardoza and his family moved to a rental in Frontera, and he took up open-water line fishing, which requires spending several nights on the water to catch sea bream, amberjack, and red snapper. 

The catch is more reliable out at sea, but Cardoza still worries about making rent each month. Fish stocks are down due to warmer ocean temperatures, acidification, coastal erosion, and pollution from Pemex’s offshore oil rigs. 

Once the government accepted responsibility for relocating residents, officials conducted a census, held meetings, and collected documents. In the end, 51 families were selected to receive new homes. However, the criteria for inclusion — or exclusion — have never been shared, and residents left out, like Cardoza, have never been told why. 

“I missed some meetings because I was out at sea, but it feels really unfair. We were the first to lose our home and livelihoods,” Cardoza said. “I haven’t given up. I hope one day they correct this injustice.”

In July, Nuestro Futuro filed a lawsuit on behalf of Cardoza and six other residents of El Bosque who were not relocated without any explanation. This case, Cabrera said, could end up in the Mexican Supreme Court and prompt a ruling on what obligations the state has to climate-displaced communities. 

The Mexican government is worried about the pending surge in climate displacement, which would inevitably add pressure on urban hubs like Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara, where extreme heat and water shortages are already getting worse. A new national policy is in the works for grappling with climate displacement, although it’s unclear when it will be finished, and the Mexican department of environment and natural resources is holding consultations with a wide range of experts on issues such as migration and gender for the separate climate adaptation plan.

If the displacement policy reflects recommendations submitted by residents of El Bosque and climate justice experts, it should make relocation a last resort, and something that is well planned, less traumatic, and more just for the next El Bosque, and the one after that. 

In September, the government acknowledged that the vast majority of states and municipalities currently depend on data that is “three to four years out of date” to assess the risk from earthquakes, hurricanes, sea level rise, and other disasters. Funds have been allocated to help all 31 states and Mexico City identify new risks and update prevention efforts, said Laura Velázquez, Mexico’s national coordinator for civil protection.

Urgency is rising to get plans, policies, and financing in place, as climate breakdown accelerates faster than models predicted. “It’s too late for us, but we need a law or a policy to help others,” said Sanchez, the Nuevo Bosque resident who testified at the IACHR hearing in Brazil. “We were the first but we won’t be the last.”

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 2 years after Mexico relocated their climate-ravaged community, residents struggle to adapt on Nov 10, 2026.

A monster is growing in the Pacific — not the kraken, but something far scarier and deadlier. El Niño is a natural phenomenon in which a band of warm water forms every three to five years off the coast of South America. It raises ocean water temperatures by just a few extra degrees for typically nine to 12 months and ends up injecting an extraordinary amount of energy into the sky. It’s already the strongest El Niño on record, and it might not even peak for about another month or two.

“Those are actually really big changes for the ocean,” Art Miller, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told Grist in September. “The ocean has a lot of heat content — 1,000 times more ability to hold heat than the atmosphere — so slight changes in the ocean surface temperatures can actually do a lot for the atmosphere.”

While scientists are still trying to figure out how climate change might be influencing El Niño, some research suggests that rising temperatures have led to stronger El Niño events. At the very least, we can use this event’s temporary warming to imagine what the climate will look like by default in two decades, as planetary temperatures continue to rise. 

The effects of the current El Niño will be global, and they will be severe. Scientists have estimated that the additional heat alone could kill around 450,000 people worldwide. Drought is gripping some places, like the Amazon rainforest, while extreme rainfall hits others, like the Greater Horn of Africa. And the polar vortex — another phenomenon that periodically blasts the eastern and central United States with frigid air — interacts with El Niño in ways that can scramble weather even further. El Niño, then, won’t just fire heat into the atmosphere — it will fundamentally shift weather patterns the world over.

Read Next 5 ways to prepare for El Niño’s extreme weather this winter  Lyndsey Gilpin

The atmospheric changes are so complex that different parts of the U.S. will endure vastly different impacts from El Niño. (There’s also a lot of uncertainty here: Models can predict general changes across regions, but no one can tell you what the weather will be in a given spot a month from now.) California, for example, typically sees increased rainfall and flooding. The Midwest might be relatively better off with a milder, drier winter, whereas the Southeast could get colder and wetter. 

Which is all to say: Things are going to get very weird, and often very dangerous, across the U.S. To break it all down by region, Grist spoke to state climatologists and meteorologists. Here’s what they expect in the months ahead.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s outlook for December through February predicts a warm North and a wet South. Darker shading means higher confidence in the forecast. Click a region to learn more.

TemperaturePrecipitationSlightly favors warmerFavors warmerNear normalEqual chancesSlightly favors wetterFavors wetterSlightly favors drierFavors drierEqual chances

• AlaskaThe Gulf of Alaska coast is likely in for a mild winter. The west could go either way.Western Alaska and the interior are likely to run dry. The southeast shows no clear signal. Read the section ↓
• Hawaiʻi and the Pacific IslandsNo clear tilt toward warm or cool for Hawaiʻi.The forecast favors a dry winter in Hawaiʻi and the western Pacific Islands. Read the section ↓
• MidwestMinnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan lean toward a warm winter.Northern Michigan and Wisconsin lean dry, while the region’s western edge leans wet. Read the section ↓
• NortheastFrom Pennsylvania to Maine and the mid-Atlantic, a warm winter is likely.The coast, from Maryland to Maine, leans wet. Read the section ↓
• Northern Great PlainsAcross the plains, temperatures are likely to be higher, especially in northwest Montana and eastern North Dakota.Montana leans slightly toward dry, particularly in the west. Eastern Nebraska leans wet. Read the section ↓
• NorthwestWashington, northern Oregon, and the Idaho panhandle are likely to run warm.A split forecast: Northern Idaho and parts of eastern Washington lean dry, while southern Oregon leans wet. Read the section ↓
• SouthwestColorado’s plains lean warm.The whole Southwest, including southern Arizona, leans wet. Read the section ↓
• Southeast + U.S. CaribbeanThe stretch from Arkansas to Virginia leans warm.The chance of a wet winter tops 50 percent along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Read the section ↓
• Southern Great PlainsKansas and eastern Oklahoma lean warm; Texas is a toss-up.Kansas, Oklahoma, and most of Texas lean wet. Read the section ↓
• CaliforniaThe coast and the north lean warm; the southeastern deserts could go either way.Southern California is likely to see a wet winter. The north leans wet. Read the section ↓

Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center seasonal outlook for December 2026 through February 2027. “Slightly favors” means a 33–50 percent chance, “favors” means 50 percent or more, and “equal chances” means no category is favored. Hawaiʻi is shaded from CPC’s Hawaiian Islands outlook. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are unshaded; NOAA’s outlook suggests warmer temperatures in this region but publishes no corresponding probability.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

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Alaska is America’s largest state and home to all of its Arctic territory. That makes it uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which is warming the region several times faster than the rest of the planet. El Niño years add a blast of heat on top of that warming, intensifying local effects in the short term. 

A strong El Niño, like the current one, tends to strengthen the Aleutian Low, a broad area of low pressure over the North Pacific that helps shape Alaska’s winter weather. But El Niño is only one of many factors influencing the Low’s strength and location. Depending on how these conditions line up in any given year, the state could experience vastly different outcomes. That makes the effects of El Niño especially difficult to predict in Alaska, said Martin Stuefer, the state climatologist and director of the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 

“We have to be on the lookout for more intense events, that’s for sure,” Stuefer said. “But we should be cautious about making conclusions based on what we know now.”

Evidence from previous El Niño events indicates that populated regions along the Gulf of Alaska and the state’s southeast might experience warmer winter temperatures, and precipitation may fall as rain instead of snow, Stuefer said. According to the National Weather Service, most strong El Niño years have resulted in below-average snowfall in Alaska.

Anything that intensifies warming in the state isn’t welcome news. Climate change is already melting away sea ice, leaving Alaska’s vast shorelines exposed to erosion during storms. It’s also thawing permafrost — the frozen ground found across much of Alaska — to collapse. Meanwhile, warmer waters are setting the stage for harmful algae blooms and changing the distribution of fish species that Native Alaskans have depended on for generations. A strong El Niño in the coming months could add to these pressures.

— Sachi Mulkey

Hawaiʻi and the Pacific Islands

Hawaiʻi and the Pacific have had a tough year already, and El Niño threatens to cause even more disruption. Low-pressure storms known as Kona lows and hurricanes have hit Hawaiʻi throughout the summer and fall, leading to severe flooding and power outages. Elsewhere in the region, super-typhoons like Sinlaku made landfall, causing 17 deaths in the western Pacific. 

In the coming months, Pacific islands are broadly expected to face drier conditions and stronger storms. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands are facing an above-normal typhoon season, which will build on an already destructive summer and fall period. The threat is in addition to the rising probability of storms, fueled by warming ocean waters due to climate change. 

“It only takes one storm to come over the island to cause crazy rainfall and devastation,” said Ryan Longman, who is the consortium program director at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center. 

The Pacific islands are also bracing for a drier winter and spring. In Hawaiʻi, a strong El Niño can lead to a drier wet season, which typically lasts from October to March. That could mean less water available for residential, agricultural, and commercial uses and elevated wildfire risk. 

The landscape is currently thick with grass and other vegetation from a historically wet summer. As the climate shifts toward drier conditions, those fuels on the landscape will dry up, increasing the chances of wildfires. Longman suggested that residents clear dry grasses and other fuels from their properties to reduce their risk. 

For some Pacific islands, historic patterns suggest that the worst drought effects come the year following El Niño’s onset, meaning the most severe impacts could arrive in early to mid-2027. 

— Joseph Lee

Read Next Whether it’s ‘super’ or ‘Godzilla,’ El Niño is already breaking records Frida Garza & Kate Yoder Midwest

The Midwest may catch a break when El Niño peaks this winter. 

The cyclical climate pattern is mostly associated with milder, drier winters in the Midwest. El Niño shifts the polar jet stream — the band of fast-moving Arctic air high in the atmosphere — farther north, making it less likely that cold winds will dip into the region, resulting in warmer temperatures.

That doesn’t rule out snow and winter storms, though. It only means that average temperatures between December and February tend to be somewhat warmer. During recent strong El Niño events, winter temperatures ranged from 3 degrees Fahrenheit to more than 8 degrees F warmer than the 20th-century average, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Midwest has already experienced a warmer fall this year, said Daria Kluver, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Central Michigan University. Average September temperatures across the region were the highest in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 132-year record. Illinois and Missouri had their warmest September on record; Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan also saw above-average temperatures. 

That warmth will continue into the winter. And reduced ice cover on the Great Lakes could contribute to the warmer temperatures, Kluver said. Without as much ice, warmth stored in the lakes over the summer is likely to slowly dissipate into the surrounding air. The changes in ice cover could impact Great Lakes economies, recreation, and the ecosystems that depend on it.

Fall has been dry so far, but winter might not be. Kluver said precipitation levels will depend on other dynamics like Arctic sea-ice levels and Atlantic Ocean currents. But the El Niño typically tilts the odds toward less snowfall and more rain or ice.

“Whether you find that good or bad maybe depends on what you do for winter recreation,” Kluver said.

El Niño could also mean a reprieve from the Midwest’s record-setting tornadoes next year, according to Chris Callahan, a climate scientist and assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington. 

“We are likely to have a relatively quiet tornado season in the spring, because those tornadoes are shifted south into [states] like Arkansas, Georgia, and so they might have a more active tornado season,” Callahan said. 

— Vivian La and Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco

Northeast

The Northeast has so far avoided El Niño’s impacts — but that’s about to change. 

Brad Pugh, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s extended prediction division, said the unusually strong El Niño this year gives the Northeast more than a 50 percent chance of a milder-than-normal winter. There could also be more precipitation, he added, though those odds will vary within the region.

While areas farther east are generally more likely to be wet, he said, “it’s hard to tell how much is going to be rain or snow.” 

Government outlooks don’t include snow totals because snow is difficult to predict far ahead. But the winter outlook from AccuWeather, a private forecasting company, projects fewer flakes for the Northeast. That, however, doesn’t mean the region won’t see snow, Pugh added.

“The forecast leaning on the wetter side does raise the prospects that there could be some high-impact winter storms,” he said, pointing to the I-95 corridor between New York and Boston as one area that could be hit. He suggested keeping an eye on the NWS’ eight- to 14-day forecasts to get a more accurate and timely sense of what weather may be on the way. 

Even water that falls as rain could be concerning, said Auroop Ganguly, a hydrologist and co-director of Northeastern University’s Global Resilience Institute. “If I were an urban planner, I’d plan more for the possibility of flooding in urban areas,” he said. A mix of rain, snow, and ice on the roads could also make driving dangerous. “I’d prepare for somewhat more hazardous conditions on the roads.”

Still, many in the region may welcome El Niño’s arrival, especially after last winter, which was the coldest in a decade. Milder temperatures this year could, for example, lower heating needs at a time when heating oil and electricity prices are spiking. 

As for the prospect of a warmer winter in the Northeast, said Ganguly, “Most people would say, ‘I’ll take it.'”

— Tik Root

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

There is less certainty about the total El Niño impacts for the Northern Great Plains compared to the rest of the country. Nebraska, Montana, and the Dakotas are expecting a warmer-than-average winter, but rain and snowfall forecasts across these states are less conclusive. 

In Nebraska, some of those effects may already be emerging. Earlier this fall, the eastern part of the state experienced milder temperatures and heavy rain, leading to flash flooding. Wetter-than-normal conditions are likely to continue in eastern Nebraska through winter, increasing the risk of additional floods, said Eric Hunt, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln agriculture meteorology and climate resilience extension educator. The state could still see intense winter storms, and western Nebraska could experience a wetter winter, though those forecasts are less certain.

Farther north in the Dakotas, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has forecasted a 40 percent to 60 percent chance of higher average temperatures from December to February. For North Dakota, that still means average temperatures below freezing. Winter also tends to be dry in both states, and forecasts for precipitation are variable, according to both states’ climatologists. 

In South Dakota, a snowy winter could alleviate drought, replenish surface water, and reduce fire risk in the Black Hills, said state climatologist Laura Edwards. A dry winter in the state could be a tipping point for drought conditions next spring.

In North Dakota, it’s not clear if any precipitation this winter would improve drought conditions, said Daryl Ritchison, North Dakota state climatologist and director of the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network. One winter storm could push seasonal totals above average for precipitation for the season, but if the winter remains dry and spring rains are slow to arrive, fire risk might increase.

Montana faces much of the same uncertainty. In the Northern Rockies, the odds favor a below-average snow year — but only slightly, said Kyle Bocinsky, the director of climate extension with the Montana Climate Office. Montana has experienced four strong El Niño events in the past 40 years; three saw below-normal precipitation and snowpack, but one saw above-normal snowpack. “It’s a small sample size,” Bocinsky said, which makes it hard to definitively say what the impacts will be. “It’s still a 50-50 chance,” he said.

Bocinsky said warmer temperatures could make for a rainy winter similar to last year, particularly at lower elevations. Like much of the Great Plains, eastern Montana is still in drought carried over from last year’s mild winter. Farmers and ranchers are hoping snow settles on the landscape this year, but it’s just too soon to tell, he said. 

— Ellis Juhlin and Anila Yoganathan

Northwest

The Pacific Northwest typically sits in the center lane of a storm highway. Every winter, ocean storms travel across this familiar route, delivering a steady supply of the cool, drizzly weather that gives the region its gloomy charm. But El Niño is likely to reroute this storm track to the south, dumping rain onto sunny California instead. This often leaves the Northwest warmer, and sometimes drier, than usual.

That combination could be a double whammy for mountain snow, which is the main source of water for much of the Northwest, since snow can’t form if it’s too warm or too dry. “If we were to get both of those this year — both the warmer temperatures and less precipitation — that could spell trouble for our snowpack,” said Jacob Genuise, an engagement climatologist at the Washington State Climate Office. 

Climate change is also slowly chipping away at snow levels. Since the mid-20th century, snow levels in Washington’s Cascades have been steadily decreasing in both El Niño and La Niña years alike. These factors could lead to less snow stored in the mountains for next spring and summer, driving up the risk of drought or wildfires, and leaving less water available for irrigation, drinking water, or hydropower. 

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On the coast, El Niño can also lead to more tidal flooding. As ocean and wind patterns shift across the Pacific, seawater can get pushed toward the West Coast, raising high tide levels by several inches. This extra tidal boost could also combine with sea level rise, storm surges, or winter king tides to drive up the flood risk in Washington’s and Oregon’s coastal communities. “It’s not a huge effect,” said Genuise. “But that can mean the difference between a property getting flooded or not during these El Niño years.”

— Jesse Nichols

Southwest

El Niño often delivers rain and snow to the Southwest and could bring a glimmer of hope to a region suffering historic drought. Jon Meyer, assistant state climatologist at the Utah Climate Center, expects the weather pattern to bring “favorable storm activity” to the desert Southwest, including Arizona and New Mexico, with effects bleeding into Nevada and parts of southern Utah and southern Colorado.

But northern Utah, which is home to most of the state’s population, “is right in the bull’s-eye of being very unpredictable,” he said. Colorado’s outlook is also mixed. El Niño tends to bring more precipitation in spring and fall, but it also typically creates drier conditions for the Northern Rockies, said Peter Goble, assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center. 

“The strong El Niño, as interesting a story as it’s been,” he said, “doesn’t guarantee us anything.”

The region is in dire need of snowpack in the winter months ahead. Utah’s Great Salt Lake hovers just a few inches above eclipsing the record-low elevation it set in 2022, and its vast exposed lake bed is drying into a dust source impacting the health of the roughly 2.5 million residents living in cities near its shores. Meanwhile, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, saw a fraction of their normal inflows from the Colorado River and set their own record lows over the fall. Around 40 million people in the West depend on water supplies delivered by the Colorado River system.

The early autumn run-up to the super El Niño has already brought downpours, sending torrents through city streets and arroyos across the region. Arizona is already facing flash flooding and could now see tornadoes and other extreme weather, according to meteorologists at AccuWeather.

More moisture would boost desiccated reservoirs and reduce sleepless nights for farmers, but experts are already repeating an all-too-familiar warning: One good year won’t solve the region’s water woes. Western states saw record-breaking snow in 2023. Today, that moisture is gone, and both the Rio Grande and Colorado River basins look more stressed than ever. Climatologists say those extreme oscillations will become more common as climate change heats up the region.

— Austin Corona and Leia Larsen

Read Next Why haven’t we had an Atlantic hurricane yet? Thank El Niño. Matt Simon Southeast and the U.S. Caribbean islands

For the notoriously hot and humid Southeastern U.S., El Niño typically has two main effects: It gets wetter and it can bring bouts of cold weather. In general, climate change is making the Southeast warmer and more susceptible to both drought and heavy rainfall events, and winter temperatures drop below freezing far less often. But that long-term warming trend doesn’t rule out frigid winter days and nights this year.

The wet weather comes down to the same forces that inundate the Southwest during an El Niño cycle, according to Chuck Watson, a Georgia-based disaster researcher who tracks weather impacts worldwide.

“That jet of air that’s coming across California continues on across the Gulf of Mexico and drags moisture from the Gulf and whatever was left over after it rained all over California,” he said. “It drags that across the Southeast.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting enough rainfall between mid-October and the end of January to improve or eliminate drought conditions in several parts of the region, which has grappled with an unusual level of drought over the last year. The period from September 2025 through April 2026 was the driest in Georgia history, fueling wildfires in the spring that destroyed homes and forced evacuations; other states in the region also saw precipitation levels at or near record lows over the same period. As a result, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared disasters due to drought in more than 200 counties in the spring. 

El Niño might also bring ice storms. The wet air moving east from California typically interacts with a flow of Arctic air high in the atmosphere, Watson said, creating the potential for colder weather. For a region that doesn’t deal with sustained temperatures too far below freezing most winters, the combination often means ice storms that people and infrastructure aren’t accustomed to.

“That’s really just a recipe that’s ripe for disaster,” Watson said. “That tends to be just bad news all around for tree limbs falling and slick roads and particularly extended power outages.”

One piece of good news for much of the Southeast is that El Niño typically suppresses hurricane formation in the Atlantic. So while Hurricane Isaias wreaked havoc when it hit the region in early October, it was also the first Atlantic hurricane this year — an incredibly rare occurrence. 

But the reprieve from tropical systems doesn’t apply equally, Watson said. El Niño’s effect on the complex upper air currents that steer hurricanes actually makes the band across South Florida and the Bahamas more likely to be hit by a hurricane, he said.

— Emily Jones

Southern Great Plains

When it rains, it pours. El Niño is expected to bring much-needed relief to the drought-stricken Southern Great Plains. The upcoming event is significant enough that the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency that oversees oil and gas production, recently issued a notice warning operators that “this event may be outside the historical envelope” and that “past El Niño events may not be a good guide to this event.”

But unless this winter is exceptionally wet, it is unlikely to eliminate drought conditions entirely.

That’s because a wet winter won’t ease every impact at once, and different sectors may see varying effects, said Andrew Hoell, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Depleted aquifers, for instance, may take years to return to normal levels, whereas agriculture might rebound quickly depending on when and where the rain falls. 

In Texas, El Niño tends to increase seasonal snowfall totals in the north and west, but not for the rest of the state, said state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon. 

“Over the longer term, the warming trend in place over the past several decades is expected to continue,” said Nielsen-Gammon, referring to climate change. A 2024 report that he authored concluded that “extreme rainfall is strongly affected by increased temperatures.”

Meanwhile, El Niño’s effects in Kansas are less certain because of the state’s central U.S. location. Hoell described Kansas as a “toss-up” in a “transition zone” and emphasized that regional impacts in northern Kansas may be more pronounced. 

If the past is any indication, though, Kansas, too, might be in for a wetter winter. The National Weather Service in Wichita examined 11 strong to very strong El Niños since 1950 and concluded the event produced above-average precipitation across Kansas from fall through early to mid-spring.  

— Celeste Guajardo

Read Next California has a plan for El Niño’s torrential rain: Save it for later Matt Simon California

Like a camel stumbling into a desert oasis, California could soon get more water than it can possibly use all at once. El Niño can bestow the Golden State with increased rainfall — so much extra water, in fact, that Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency to prepare the state to fight coastal flooding and erosion (partly due to an oceanic “Kelvin wave” slamming into California) and monster storms. 

The built environment wasn’t made for this. For centuries, the mantra has been to funnel rainwater into sewers and rivers as quickly as possible to keep it from flooding cities. Climate change is already making it rain harder, pushing wastewater systems to their limits. Now comes El Niño, supercharging rainfall even further. Worst case, this winter the state gets successions of the punishing storms known as atmospheric rivers, saturating soils and overwhelming sewers. That could overwhelm crops in the state’s bountiful Central Valley and dump dangerous amounts of snow in its Sierra Nevada mountains to the east. 

California has been preparing for this moment, though. Los Angeles, for example, is deploying “sponge” infrastructure like roadside gardens, which allow rainwater to soak into the ground instead of pooling on streets. (Over just a few rainy days in 2024, the city captured enough stormwater to supply 106,000 households for a year.) The state has also been working with farmers to divert rain into open spaces, where it can seep into the dirt and recharge underlying aquifers. “Essentially, the top line is: flood-safe and recharge-ready,” said Steven Springhorn, supervising engineering geologist in the California Department of Water Resources’ sustainable groundwater management office. “Flood safety and flood response is our Number 1 priority going into a year like this.”

Counterintuitively, extreme rainfall could also prime the California landscape to burn catastrophically. More water means more plant growth, which desiccates through the summer — and this one could be extra hot if El Niño remains strong — turning into tinder. The wildfire danger could be particularly acute next fall, when intense seasonal winds can turn a spark into an inescapable blaze. With the state already cycling between extra-dry and extra-wet periods thanks to climate change, El Niño could literally add more fuel to the fire.

— Matt Simon

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A monstrous El Niño has arrived. Here’s what it means for where you live. on Nov 9, 2026.

You may have heard about El Niño — the natural, recurring phenomenon that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, influencing temperature and precipitation around the world. Its effects will differ this fall and winter depending on where you live, but heavy rainfall, flooding, and snowfall are some of the most likely impacts.

There’s a lot of information available on navigating extreme weather, so we came up with five things you can do to prepare right now, from packing an emergency kit and bookmarking your local National Weather Service page to knowing how to stay safe around floodwaters.  

Read Next A monstrous El Niño has arrived. Here’s what it means for where you live. Grist staff 1. Sign up for local emergency alerts

Your city or county has an emergency management department, which is part of the local government. Emergency managers are responsible for communicating with the public about disasters, managing rescue and response efforts, and coordinating among various agencies. They usually have an SMS-based emergency alert system, so sign up for those texts now. Some also have an app you can download. 

If you’re having trouble finding your local department, you can search for your state or territory here — but it’s easier to type your city or county name followed by “emergency management” into Google to quickly find the closest agency in your area. In larger cities, emergency management is often a standalone agency; in smaller communities, fire chiefs or sheriffs may manage emergency response and alerts. 

If you’re not signed up for alerts from your utility company about power outages in your area, now is the time to do that, too. Your utility company likely has an app or dedicated website for reporting outages and tracking when power will return. For example, the Nebraska Public Power District, the power company that serves Nebraska, has an outage map here, as well as a mobile app. 

2. Know where you’ll get accurate information and updates 

Many people find out about disasters in their area via social media, so it’s important to make sure the information you’re receiving is correct. Below is a list of reliable sources to check and our guide to spotting misinformation about extreme weather.

National Weather Service

This agency, called NWS, is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and offers information and updates on everything from wildfires to hurricanes to air quality. You can enter your ZIP code on weather.gov and customize your homepage to get the most up-to-date information and receive alerts for a variety of weather conditions. The NWS also has regional and local branches where you can sign up for SMS alerts. Local alerts in multiple languages are available in some areas. 

If you’re in a rural area or somewhere that isn’t highlighted on the agency’s maps, keep an eye out for local alerts and evacuation orders. NWS may not have as much information ahead of time in these areas because there often aren’t as many weather monitoring stations.  

“Watch” versus “warning”: You’ll often see meteorologists refer to storm watches or warnings. If a “watch” is issued, that means the conditions are ripe for extreme weather. A warning, however, means the threat is more imminent, and you should be prepared to take shelter or evacuate if told to. 

You can track extreme weather via these websites: 

• ElNiñoLive is an independent data journalism project that compares NOAA methods and explains results in plain language. 
• NOAA has a real-time El Niño monitoring page.
• The National Hurricane Center tracks hurricanes in the Central Pacific, Eastern Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. 
• The National Weather Service active-alerts page monitors severe weather by state, region, and type.

Local news

The local television news and social media accounts from verified news sources will have live updates during and after a storm. Meteorologists on your local news station use NWS weather data. Follow your local newspaper, radio station, and television station on Facebook or other social media, or check their websites regularly. If you don’t have cable, these stations often livestream online for free during severe weather. Your local news may also have a live blog that is updated regularly. 

Weather stations and apps

The Weather Channel, AccuWeather, Apple Weather, and Google, which all rely on NWS weather data, will have information on major storms. That may not be the case for smaller-scale weather events, and you shouldn’t rely on these apps to tell you if you need to evacuate or move to higher ground. Instead, check your local news broadcast on television or radio, or check NWS. 

Trying to fact-check during a crisis is stressful, and extreme weather makes you feel like there’s a lot to figure out in a short period of time. That’s why it’s important to know ahead of time who you can trust, how to vet information, and how to talk to your friends and family about it. Here’s a guide from Grist about how to spot misinformation.

3. Pack your emergency kit 

It’s important to have an emergency kit ready in case you lose power or need to leave your home. Review this checklist from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for what to pack so you can stay safe, hydrated, and healthy. (FEMA has these resources available in multiple languages here.)

These can often be expensive to create, so contact your local disaster aid organizations, houses of worship, or charities to see if there are free or affordable kits available — or buy one or two items every time you’re at the grocery store. Ideally, this will be packed well in advance of hurricane or fire season, so gather as much as you can ahead of time in case shelves are empty when a storm is on the way. If you’re facing possible heavy snow, it’s a good idea to have an emergency kit in your vehicle as well.

FEMA has activities for kids to make this process more fun; the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals also has useful guidelines for people with pets. 

Here are some of the most important things to have in your kit:

• A list of phone numbers for your city or county emergency services, police departments, local hospitals, and health departments
• Water (1 gallon per person per day for several days)
• Food (at least a several-day supply of nonperishable food) and a can opener
• Medicines and documentation of your medical needs
• Identification and proof of residency documents (see a more detailed list below)
• A flashlight 
• A battery-powered or hand-crank radio
• Backup batteries
• Blanket(s) and sleeping bags
• Change of clothes and closed-toed shoes
• First-aid kit (the Red Cross has a list of what to include)
• N-95 masks, hand sanitizer, and trash bags 
• Wrench or pliers 
• Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
• If you have babies or children: diapers, wipes, and food or formula
• If you have pets: food, collar, leash, and any medicines needed

Wirecutter, Wired, Popular Mechanics, and some other news outlets have “best of” lists for many of these items, where you can find different price points and features. You can also find reviews on Consumer Reports. 

Don’t forget: Documents

One of the most important things to have in your emergency kit is documents you may need to prove your residence, demonstrate the extent of damage, and vote. FEMA often requires you to provide these documents in order to receive financial assistance after a disaster. Keep these items in a water- and fire-proof folder or container. You can find more details about why you may need these documents here.

• Government-issued ID, such as a driver’s license, for each member of your household
• Proof of citizenship or legal residency for each member of your household (passport, green card, etc.)
• Social Security card for each member of your household
• Documentation of your medical needs, including medications or special equipment (oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.)
• Health insurance card
• Car title and registration documents
• Pre-disaster photos of the inside and outside of your house and belongings
• For homeowners: copies of your deed, mortgage information, and home insurance policy, if applicable
• For renters: a copy of your lease and renters insurance policy
• Financial documents such as a checkbook or voided check

Planning for people with disabilities

Disabled people have a right to all disaster alerts in a format that is accessible. The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, a disability-led nonprofit focused on disasters, has a list of these rights. The organization also runs a hotline for any questions: (800) 626-4959 or hotline@disasterstrategies.org. FEMA has a list of specific planning steps for people with disabilities. Some of these recommendations include:

• Contact your local emergency management office to ask about voluntary registries for people with disabilities to self-identify so you can access targeted assistance during emergencies and disasters. 
• If you use medical equipment that requires electricity, ask your health care provider about what you may be able to do to keep it running during a power outage.
• Wear medical alert tags or bracelets. Also add pertinent medical information to your electronic devices.
• In your emergency kit, have your prescription information and medicines, as well as contact information for people who can help care for you or answer questions.

4. Prepare your home and property 

It’s impossible to know what might happen to your home during a disaster, but there are many best practices to keep your belongings and property as safe as possible. 

Here are some ways to protect your home and valuables from flooding, based on tips from the National Flood Insurance Program and local government sources:

• Move your most valued belongings to a high, safe place, such as an attic. 
• Clear your gutters and downspouts when you know a big rain is coming, and make sure they’re pointed downhill, away from your home.
• Clear storm drains and drainage ditches of debris.
• Elevate your utilities, including electrical panels, propane tanks, sockets, wiring, appliances, and heating systems, if possible, and anchor them in place.
• Get a sump pump if you are a homeowner. A working sump pump and a water alarm can minimize flood damage in your basement. Install a battery-operated backup pump in case the power goes out. 
• Seal any cracks in your foundation with mortar, caulk, or hydraulic cement. 
• Secure outdoor items so they don’t blow or wash away.
• If you’re in a hurricane-prone area, install storm shutters. There are many products for every budget; some are temporary and some are permanent. 
• Secure loose roof shingles, which can create a domino effect if wind starts to take them off. 
• Sandbags are an affordable way to block or redirect water from coming in doorways, garages, and low windows. However, they are not watertight and cannot stop rising floodwaters. Some cities, such as San Diego, offer free sandbag giveaways if they know floods are a risk. 

The list below contains tips from several sources, including FEMA and the U.S. Energy Department, on protecting your home from frigid temperatures:

• Clear debris and tree limbs, especially those hanging over your gutters or roof, in case ice, wind, or snow knocks them down.
• Protect your pipes from cracking by detaching garden hoses before freezing weather begins. Leave your faucet dripping and open the cabinet doors under your sinks, especially if temperatures are below freezing.
• Evaluate the insulation in your home. If you’re a renter and can’t do much to your space, there are affordable options like sealing gaps around windows with plastic or weather stripping, getting heavy curtains, and installing door sweeps or putting towels along the bottom of doors. If you’re a homeowner, you can do more permanent things like insulating floors, ducts, and attics, or caulking around windows and doors.

Know your evacuation route

• Choose several places you could go in an emergency — maybe a friend or family member’s house in another city, or a hotel. Choose destinations in different directions so you have options. If you have pets, make sure the place you choose allows them, as shelters usually only allow service animals.  
• Make sure you know several routes and other means of transportation out of your area in case roads are closed.
• Keep a full tank of gas in your car if you know a disaster may be coming, and keep your emergency kit in your car or in an easily accessible place.
• Come up with a plan to stay in touch with members of your household in case you are separated. Check in with your neighbors as well. 

5. Know how to stay safe in rain, snow, and other extreme weather

Here are some best practices if your power goes out, or you come into contact with downed power lines: 

• Keep your refrigerator closed as much as possible and eat perishable food first. Get some coolers with ice if possible, and if you’re in doubt about any food, throw it out. 
• Unplug appliances and electronics, and use flashlights instead of candles to reduce the risk of fire.
• Carbon monoxide poisoning is one of the leading causes of death after a storm that knocks out power. Do not use a gas stove to heat your home and do not use barbecues, grills, or other outdoor cooking equipment inside, because they can generate carbon monoxide. If you have a generator, keep it outside in a well-ventilated area away from windows. Find more information about types of generators here; the Red Cross has more generator safety tips.
• Stay away from downed power lines, stray wires, and debris in contact with them, as they can deliver fatal shocks. 
• Still curious? You can find more power outage safety practices here, from the Energy Education Council.  

Here are some best practices when coming into contact with heavy rains or floodwaters: 

• Do not attempt to drive or wade through floodwaters, which can sweep you away even if the water doesn’t seem deep and which can be contaminated or contain dangerous debris. Do not touch any debris or materials that may be contaminated by toxic chemicals (you may need special equipment or PPE to handle burned or flooded debris).
• Turn off your electricity and gas (here’s how).
• Have a first-aid kit handy.
• Make sure your tetanus shot is up to date (your state or county health department may offer free tetanus vaccines if you need one; it’s best to call them to find out).
• Look at the structural integrity of the building before entering, and do not go inside if it looks like there is any potential for something to collapse. Do not touch anything electrical if in doubt about the state it’s in. 
• Wear protective clothing: long sleeves and pants, goggles, leather, rubber or plastic gloves, closed-toed and/or sturdy boots or shoes, a respirator or N95 mask, and a Tyvek suit if you can find one. Check with your aid distribution sites for tools, personal protective equipment, and cleaning materials. 
• Be aware of mold: Here’s a fact sheet on mold risks and how to clean mold up, from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. The key is moisture control. You may not be able to see all of the mold developing in your home after flooding. According to FEMA, “Everything that has been contaminated must be cleaned and dried. Items that cannot be properly cleaned and dried within 24 to 48 hours must be discarded, including building materials and personal property.” People with breathing problems, such as asthma, or a weakened immune system should stay away. You will likely see a lot of bleach at distribution sites. According to the EPA, bleach is not recommended for cleaning up mold. You can use bleach on hard, nonporous surfaces like countertops, but do not use it on porous surfaces like wood to kill mold — make sure those dry completely before deciding whether to keep them. If using bleach, ventilate the area and never mix it with other cleaning solutions or detergents that contain ammonia, because it could produce toxic fumes.
• If your home or belongings are damaged by water: Take wet items outside to dry; open doors and windows to air out your home, and use fans if possible; discard anything that can’t be cleaned and dried within two days; throw away perishables, clothing, cushions, and pillows. It can be difficult to throw away items with sentimental value — but anything soaked in floodwater or sewage poses a health risk.

If you’re facing heavy snowfall, ice storms, or freezing temperatures, here are some important things to know:

• Learn how to stay safe while driving, including what to do if you get stranded in your car. The Red Cross has many tips here. 
• Understand how to identify and treat frostbite, in which a part of your body freezes, and hypothermia, a condition in which the body loses heat faster than it can produce it. The Red Cross has a guide here. 
• Make sure you have enough warm clothing, including hats, mittens, and blankets, for everyone in your household.
• Plan to check on loved ones and neighbors, especially those who are elderly or those who have babies.
• Know where you will go if your home becomes too cold. This could be a library, community center, or friend’s house; many cities open up warming centers in times of extreme cold or winter storms. 

For more information about our work around disaster resources, check out Disaster 101. Contact us if you’d like to collaborate on distributing this information in your community: community@grist.org. ​

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 5 ways to prepare for El Niño’s extreme weather this winter  on Nov 9, 2026.

World leaders convene in Antalya, Turkey, on Monday for the United Nations’ 31st Conference of the Parties, or COP31, after another year of deadly climate disasters. Forest fires in Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil impacted millions of people. Heat waves contributed to more than 50,000 deaths in Europe. Floods prompted by the collapse of a melting glacier killed more than 1,500 people in Nepal and caused nearly $5 billion in damages.

And things may only get worse. This will be the first COP since the U.N.’s sobering report on the inevitability of breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming. That temperature target was a focal point for climate ambition even before the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, with scientists warning that exceeding that benchmark could push the planet past dangerous tipping points, triggering climatic changes that may be impossible to reverse.

Despite the urgent need for action, few expect COP31, co-hosted by Turkey and Australia, to produce another breakthrough like the Paris Agreement or COP28’s call to transition away from fossil fuels.

“There’s a whole bunch of decisions that have to be taken, but none of them on their own is going to make headlines,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president of international strategies for the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

This is in part due to the nature of the negotiations. This year’s event is being referred to as an “implementation” COP, where countries will focus on fleshing out existing commitments under the Paris Agreement rather than making sweeping new ones. The bulk of the official agenda aims to chip away at workstreams that began last year or at previous meetings.

But it’s also related to the state of the world. Although the historic “blue wave” in the midterm election means Democrats could curb the Trump administration’s rollback of federal climate policy, the global outlook remains bleak. Wars and economic turmoil continue to strain multilateral negotiations, and many wealthy countries have limited international aid. “In the current geopolitics, just delivering on housekeeping is news in itself,” Guilanpour said.

Here’s what to watch for.

The ‘housekeeping’ COP

Much of the agenda involves the less visible work of assessing where things stand and putting previous agreements into practice. Countries are set to discuss, for example, the beginning of the next “global stocktake,” the assessment of climate progress that takes place every five years under the Paris Agreement. 

They’ll also talk about ways of measuring progress toward the “global goal on adaptation” that delegates agreed to last year in Brazil, and they’ll consider whether to extend a “mitigation work programme” that kicked off in 2022 to encourage faster and more extensive emissions reductions in line with international climate targets.

Countries are also expected to formally create the “just transition mechanism” discussed last year. Broadly, it will aim to boost international coordination and support for a transition away from fossil fuels — for example, by providing job retraining for those employed in the oil and gas industry, or transferring carbon-free technologies from rich countries to poor ones.

“This is a sort of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-work-done COP,” said David Waskow, International Climate Initiative director for the World Resources Institute.

Where’s the money? 

Climate finance has been a “perennial” discussion, said Jennifer Allan, a senior lecturer in international relations at Cardiff University, and this year wealthy countries will face renewed questions about funding they’ve pledged but failed to deliver.

August’s catastrophic flooding in Nepal illustrates the scale of the problem. Last month, the disaster triggered the first allocation from the U.N. Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. Yet the $21.6 million payout was not even 1 percent of the damages the country sustained.

The fund itself has little more to offer. About $826 million has been pledged to underwrite it, but only some $450 million has been delivered.

Developing countries successfully lobbied for a “work stream” on climate finance in the COP31 agenda. This could give delegates an opportunity to discuss aligning existing financial flows with climate action and to flesh out a vague promise they made last year to triple adaptation financing by 2035. 

But many of the world’s richest countries have curtailed international aid in response to growing energy insecurity, high inflation, global conflict, and other factors. The Trump administration has effectively cut all international climate finance, and Guilanpour said the remaining donor nations “unfortunately just wouldn’t support an increase in climate finance.” A memo circulated among European Union members made clear that there is “no appetite” for committing more money.

Fossil fuels in a post-1.5 future

It took nearly 30 years, until COP28 in 2023, for the conferences to even mention “fossil fuels,” let alone commit to transitioning away from them. But at last year’s meeting in Brazil, delegates failed to make any new commitments on how they’d do it.

Observers hope COP31 will address that unfinished business and the new post-1.5 degree climate reality. Waskow said countries should “reaffirm the need to reduce emissions dramatically, but also ramp up what we’re doing on carbon removal from the atmosphere.”

Still, these issues — especially anything about fossil fuels — are unlikely to appear in the formal negotiating agenda. Turkey and Australia remain heavily invested in coal, oil, and gas, and Axel Michaelowa, an economist at the University of Zurich, said they lack the credibility needed for strong leadership. Turkey has instead promoted, as part of an “action agenda” that is also not on the negotiating schedule, a goal of electrifying 35 percent of the world’s energy consumption by 2035, up from 23 percent today. That is more palatable, Miachaelowa said, because it doesn’t specify that the electricity come from renewable sources.

Any of those high-level goals and statements could appear on the COP’s “cover decision,” a statement reached by consensus at the end of each conference. These texts often don’t represent legally binding treaty commitments but have political value, Waskow said, because they can serve as signposts for later negotiations. Battles over the decision’s final wording have in previous COPs led to dramatic, late-night battles over a single word.

Fixing the COPs

An outsize focus on headline-making decisions, however, may be part of the COPs’ broader problem. “We seem to be trapped in this one-year cycle of expecting a historic outcome … every year,” Guilanpour said.

“What we should be thinking about is a so-called ‘big COP’ every five years,” he added, referring to the cycle of stocktakes when countries are supposed to ratchet up their emissions-reduction commitments. Seen this way, COP31 is a prelude to COP33, when the next stocktake is scheduled to conclude. 

Erika Lennon, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, said she often worries that the conferences are a sort of a “circus,” where countries emphasize flashy pledges over implementing their commitments. Still, she added, the U.N. process is the best we have, and there are several ways of making it more effective, including better decision-making protocols and stricter conflict-of-interest policies.

Rachel Cleetus, climate program director for the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, said it’s “unfair” to place the blame for stagnation solely on the U.N. climate regime. Ultimately, she said, countries must carry out the emissions reductions that science says are needed.

“These kinds of large multilateral negotiations are just one part of what it will take,” Cleetus said. “Then countries have to go home and act on what they’ve promised.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What to expect as world leaders gather for COP31 on Nov 9, 2026.

The 27-year-long drought in the Southwestern U.S. — the longest dry period in the last 1,200 years — is taking a serious toll on the flow of the Colorado River. Climate change is shrinking the snowpack in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the source of roughly 80 percent of the river’s annual flow, and higher temperatures are melting the snowpack earlier in the year, which saps runoff in late summer and fall. Warmer weather is also increasing evaporation from the river’s 40 reservoirs, including its two largest — lakes Powell and Mead. 

Last month, Lake Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border, reached a record low, at less than 150 feet above dead pool, the point at which water can no longer flow through the Glen Canyon Dam’s bypass tubes to reach Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, 300 miles downstream. The low water levels reduced the generation of hydropower from both reservoirs, complicated how riverine ecosystems are managed, and slashed deliveries of water to the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. 

Farmers are fallowing fields. Developers in some areas have paused housing construction for lack of guaranteed water supplies. And the Bureau of Reclamation has curtailed its “environmental flows” — releases of cold water from Powell — which is threatening protected fish and preventing the buildup of sandbars that provide habitat for wildlife in the Grand Canyon. No matter how the river is managed going forward, observers say, ecosystems both downstream and up will see significant changes. 

Faced with the prospect of even lower Colorado River levels, the federal and state governments have been scrambling to come up with ways to meet the competing demands of disparate interests that rely on its flow, from topping off Lake Powell with water diverted from upstream reservoirs, to slashing downstream water deliveries by 40 percent, to paying farmers to keep their allocations of water in the river. The crisis is even causing some to consider a fix once deemed unthinkable: draining Lake Powell entirely.

When the Glen Canyon Dam was built in the 1960s, proponents hyped its benefits: cheap hydropower, subsidized water for cotton and alfalfa growers, real estate on the new lakeshore, and a playground for boaters. But detractors bemoaned the drowning of Glen Canyon itself, a red rock labyrinth of gorges, spires, cliffs, and grottoes that conservationists described as even more beautiful than the Grand Canyon. 

Read Next The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird Jake Bittle

Over the decades, some environmental advocates have argued for removing the Glen Canyon Dam and restoring the canyon, but the idea was always dismissed as too expensive and, because it would wipe out power generation, wildly impractical.

Now, a more tempered approach is gaining support, with groups like the Glen Canyon Institute arguing not to remove the dam but to drain Lake Powell through new diversion tunnels that would be drilled below the existing bypass tubes, close to the riverbed. The upsides, say advocates, would be manifold. The water would boost hydropower production in Lake Mead. The stunning formations of Glen Canyon and sites sacred to Indigenous people would reemerge. Wildlife would return, and riparian habitat above and below the dam site would eventually be restored. The plan is called Fill Mead First.

For more than four decades, the Glen Canyon Dam was considered a huge asset to the river basin, said Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute. But it’s now “becoming a liability because it might actually prevent water from flowing downstream. All of the core assumptions around the dam have been turned on their head.”

That’s because of the dam’s structural limitations. If the lake drops below minimum power pool, its penstocks — the large pipes that send water to the dam’s eight turbines — will be left stranded, high and dry. Lake water will instead be released through bypass tubes, which sit below the penstocks but have less than half their capacity to discharge water.

These tubes were not built for sustained long-term use, and sending high volumes of water through them could cause vibrations, scouring, and other effects that could cause irreparable damage to the dam. While the Bureau of Reclamation has long warned about relying solely on the bypass tubes to release water, after inspecting and relining them in 2025 it said they might work if needed. But another challenge will remain: Relying on the narrow tubes will make it harder for Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) to meet their delivery obligations to Lower Basin states and, by international agreement, Mexico.

The Glen Canyon Dam. DEA / S. AMANTINI / Getty Images

Allowing more water to flow through the Glen Canyon Dam — by draining the lake through the existing bypass tubes and newly drilled diversion tunnels near the riverbed — is no longer dismissed out of hand. “That conversation has evolved,” said Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. 

Lower release structures, said Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, are “an utterly reasonable idea” and should be part of the discussion. As for Powell’s potential loss of hydropower, proponents of dam removal say those megawatts could be replaced with solar power. The new Gemini solar plant near Las Vegas has a capacity of 690 megawatts; the Glen Canyon Dam currently has a capacity of around 730 megawatts. 

Read Next Arizona’s water is drying up. That’s not stopping the data center rush. Jake Bittle

The Lower Basin states, which primarily take their water from Lake Mead and are seeing their allotments held back to prop up Lake Powell, have urged the federal government to consider modifying the dam with lower outlets rather than cutting back on deliveries, as the Biden administration ordered in 2024. 

“Addressing the infrastructure limitations may be the one long-term measure that would best achieve operation and management improvements to the Glen Canyon Dam,” representatives of the Lower Basin states wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last year.

Draining Lake Powell completely “could [annually] reduce evaporative losses by a couple hundred thousand acre-feet,” said Sorensen: Experts say 11 percent of the water in the reservoir is lost to evaporation each year. “On a river that is much smaller than anyone expected, that water really matters,” she said. But while the Glen Canyon Institute plan is gaining some traction, she added, “it faces a lot of obstacles.”

One of those obstacles is the federal government, which did not even consider the possibility of draining Lake Powell as an option in its recent environmental impact statement — finalized in August — which addressed ways to manage the Colorado over the next 10 years. 

Officials in Page, Arizona, which has a thriving water-based recreation industry, have also opposed draining the lake. The BlueRibbon Coalition, which represents off-road and motorized outdoor recreation, leads the opposition. It has put forward a model bill called the Colorado River Abundance Act, which would supply treated water to Lower Basin states, allowing more water to be retained in Lake Powell. The treated water would come from nuclear-powered desalination of seawater and briny water and through “advanced water reuse,” in which wastewater is cleaned with filter technologies, at an estimated cost of $40 billion. 

Another obstacle is time: New diversion tunnels would likely take a decade to study, design, and build. And the price tag could be in the billions.

Long-drowned cottonwood trees in Lake Powell have resurfaced as water levels have dropped. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The Colorado’s reduced flows are, meanwhile, taking a toll on riverine ecosystems, which scientists call “novel” because they have been radically altered by 70 years of human activity — most significantly by the elimination of seasonal flooding. For a number of reasons, including low lake levels, the Bureau of Reclamation has canceled many environmental flows from the Glen Canyon Dam in recent years, depriving the Colorado of a large pulse of sediment, which is a part of the river’s natural ecology. The flows rebuild sandbars and beaches used by boaters in the Grand Canyon, and they create shallow-water habitat for threatened and endangered native fish.  

The bureau also occasionally releases cold water from the dam to lower the river’s temperature and keep invasive, warm-water-loving bass from taking up residence in the Grand Canyon stretch and displacing native fish. But because of the drought, which is already reducing hydroelectric production, those releases have also been curtailed.

Draining the lake completely would allow Glen Canyon to recover as the river flushes out built-up sediment, experts say. Native cottonwoods and willows would take root and help push out invasives, like tamarisk. River otters, beavers, birds, and amphibians would return to the canyon. And the drowned red rock arches, natural bridges, amphitheaters, and waterfalls would gradually emerge from the muck, along with thousands of sites sacred to Native Americans. 

A shift in the hydrological regime would also have profound effects on hundreds of miles of river ecosystems below Glen Canyon Dam, including in the Grand Canyon. “It would change in ways that are only partially predictable,” said Schmidt. “Suddenly the river would have great fluctuations. The river would have much more sediment. The river would be much more turbid.” A refugium of native fish, the Grand Canyon would suddenly be swamped with non-native fish, many of which were introduced into Lake Powell for sport fishing. “It just keeps getting more complicated,” Schmidt acknowledges. “It’s all a trade-off in this screwy manmade world.”

For now, Fill Mead First remains a pipe dream, one that’s getting a lot more attention as river levels continue to drop and global temperatures rise. The federal government will ultimately decide the Glen Canyon Dam’s future, but Eric Balken, for one, thinks a new regime is long overdue. Propping up Lake Powell is “kicking the can down the road,” he said. “But they are running out of road.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As the Colorado River shrinks, calls to drain Lake Powell grow on Nov 8, 2026.

It’s cranberry season in southeastern Massachusetts. At bogs throughout the region, growers are collecting the ruby-red berries destined for holiday cakes, juice bottles, and cans of jellied sauce. At two farms, however, the harvesting process looks a little different: Pickers are navigating equipment around metal poles in the shade of solar panels. 

The two bogs are the first in the country — perhaps the world — to grow cranberries beneath an operating solar installation. This fall marks the second season cranberries have been harvested from beneath the panels.

“We are literally proving it can be done,” said Prateek Tare, co-founder and executive vice president of Distributed Energy Infrastructure. His company constructed the two projects — a 4.4-megawatt array paired with a 13.5-megawatt-hour battery in the town of Kingston, and a 1-MW solar array in neighboring Plymouth. 

Solar development is a major part of Massachusetts’ plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The state has offered solar incentives since 2001, evolving and expanding them over the decades to drive even more development. 

However, the question of where to site solar projects has become a major point of contention in the densely populated and heavily wooded state. Building on rooftops and parking lots in developed areas can increase costs and limit generation capacity. But proposals for arrays on previously undeveloped land often spark protests from locals worried about the character of their community and environmental groups opposed to disrupting ecosystems. Using pre-cleared farmland has potential, but raises concerns about taking agricultural acres out of production. Many of these same dynamics are at play in communities across the U.S.

One of the solutions Massachusetts has been encouraging is agrivoltaics, or dual-use solar, which involves building solar panels above active agricultural operations. This strategy, which is gaining traction nationwide, allows farmland to be used for energy generation even as livestock graze or crops flourish beneath the elevated arrays. 

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In 2018, Massachusetts became the first state to offer a financial boost to dual-use solar projects like these. The state’s solar incentive program pays participants a set rate for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they generate; an array with a capacity between 1 MW and 5 MW currently gets a base rate of 23.17 cents. Agrivoltaic projects get an extra 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. 

That can be enough money to attract developers interested in leasing land for solar arrays or, less commonly, buying property outright with an agreement to keep it in agricultural use. Farmers who agree to lease are also generally paid for their services maintaining the landscape around the panels and poles. 

In Kingston and Plymouth, clean energy developer Greenbacker Renewables bought the land, which had been home to cranberry-growing operations for decades, from farmers who were ready to get out of the business. Greenbacker then worked with Distributed Energy Infrastructure to build the arrays, and hired Iain Ward, a solar consultant and longtime cranberry farmer in the area, to manage the growing operations. Both projects use a community solar model, selling power to customers interested in the lower prices and environmental benefits offered by renewable energy.

Solar can be particularly advantageous for cranberry farmers in Massachusetts, which grows more of the fruit than any state other than Wisconsin. While sheep farms and cornfields can often be sold to housing or commercial developers, cranberry bogs are protected wetlands: Even if they go out of production, they cannot be built on. Not all bogs are well placed to connect to the grid, but for those that are, solar panels can be a financial lifeline. 

“This is a farm viability opportunity,” Ward said. 

How to put solar on a cranberry bog

Figuring out how to build a solar array over a cranberry bog was a unique puzzle, Tare said. The first challenge was the foundations. For most solar arrays, the foundation goes 8 to 10 feet into the ground, he said. But in a cranberry bog, you have to go well past that to find ground solid and stable enough to hold the pilings. It took some trial and error to find the right machine to sink piles that deep. Wiring couldn’t be buried in the boggy ground, so it had to be hung overhead. 

“You’re trying to figure it out from a farmer’s perspective,” said Tare, who worked closely with Ward on the design of the two projects. 

The resulting installations have photovoltaic panels mounted 10 feet off the ground on an axis that allows them to tilt throughout the day to follow the sun. Pilings are spread farther from each other than standard so that harvesting equipment can be moved freely through the bog. 

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These successes in Kingston and Plymouth have led to more agrivoltaic opportunities for Tare’s company, including arrays in apple orchards, a cattle pasture, and a Christmas tree farm. Preliminary work is also underway at another bog. 

Meanwhile, a stalled cranberry solar project in the nearby town of Carver could be resuscitated. Five years ago, a different pair of bogs there were set to become the nation’s first cranberry agrivoltaic operations. The arrays were built, and crops are growing beneath them, but the company behind the developments went bankrupt before they could get up and running. Today, the new bog owner has ​“every intention to finish them,” Ward said. 

“They’re not a failure,” Ward said. ​“There is an opportunity for them to be finished.”

Tare expects future cranberry projects to get easier each time, as the company carries forward the lessons it learns. Though momentum has been slow so far, Ward expects development to accelerate soon. 

“It is picking up steam, and the lessons learned have been significant, he said. ​“When you change a paradigm, it takes a little time.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These cranberry bogs come with a side of solar on Nov 7, 2026.

Beginning in January, three of the five officials on the Georgia Public Service Commission will be Democrats. It will be the first time the party has controlled the powerful energy regulation board in 30 years. The commission, which regulates utilities including the state’s largest electric provider, Georgia Power, has come under more scrutiny in recent years due to rising power bills and the high energy demands of data centers. 

Now, Democrats plan to focus on affordability, clean energy, and closer scrutiny of Georgia Power. 

“There’s a long laundry list of things that need to be looked into,” said Democratic Commissioner Peter Hubbard, who won his reelection bid this week. “And so we’ll have to triage, in fact, and decide how best to move forward.”

One of his first priorities will be launching an affordability docket, he said — a series of hearings that would delve into the reasons for high power bills and ways to save customers money. Hubbard said he and his fellow Democrats also plan to bring close scrutiny to upcoming Georgia Power requests around making more energy and adjusting customer rates. Shelia Edwards and Alicia Johnson are the other two Democrats on the Public Service Commission, or PSC.

But any changes, especially to power bills, will likely take time. 

“We may not be able to expect immediate effects on our wallets,” said Emory University associate professor Kristin Phillips, who studies energy burden and the PSC. “But I think we can expect immediate change in the types of decisions that are made.”

Affordability and high energy bills were driving issues in the campaigns both this year and last year; the two elections together resulted in the commission’s new Democratic majority.

“We knew that we had to connect the dots between energy and affordability,” said Brionté McCorkle of Georgia Conservation Voters, a group that campaigned for the Democratic candidates and worked to draw attention to the PSC elections. “It’s not just this obscure regulatory body like it used to be treated. Its decisions directly affect household budgets, communities, health, and our energy future.”

Chris Womack, the CEO of Southern Company, Georgia Power’s parent company, also acknowledged the central importance of affordability during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. But Womack said he’s confident the utility can address those concerns with the new commissioners.

“If you look at what we have been doing with rate freezes, with benefits, with how we are providing benefits from growth to customers — existing customers — as well as to the communities, we think that’s a strong platform to stand on,” he said.

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Since the beginning of the data center boom, Georgia Power has maintained that the increased revenue would more than pay for the new infrastructure needed to serve the centers, which the utility argues would keep rates lower for residential and small business customers. The utility calls this “downward pressure.” It doesn’t mean rates will go down, but rather that any increases would be offset by the influx of revenue from data centers. 

The utility recently doubled down on that promise as part of its deal to serve a massive new OpenAI data center. The deal, Georgia Power said, would bring $15 not of savings but of downward pressure per month for what Georgia Power calls the “typical” residential customer. 

Separately, Georgia Power also credited the increased revenue from data centers for the temporary rate freeze approved last year. But the rate freeze received criticism from some advocacy groups. Instead of first holding a PSC hearing to give advocates a chance to verify the utility’s financial claims, Georgia Power announced the temporary rate freeze. Advocates feel that the backward process left them unable to confirm whether the company was delivering on its promises and fully shielding ordinary customers from data center costs. 

It’s part of a broader criticism often leveled at the PSC and Georgia Power: lack of transparency. The OpenAI contract was entirely redacted, and only a summary was provided to the public after it was approved. Specific details involved in service contracts, deals to buy energy, and construction costs are often redacted from the utility’s public filings under the auspices of trade secrecy.

“I absolutely think transparency is potentially one of the biggest impacts here,” said Phillips of the election results. “It has been often on advocates to push on the way that the PSC communicates about the decisions that it’s making, and I’m hoping that there will be more clarity and transparency.”

The Democrats on the commission have promised to bring increased scrutiny to the next rate-setting process, due in 2028, along with Georgia Power’s long-term plans to make and deliver energy, its forecasts about rising demand, and other issues. Hubbard has also proposed conducting a rate case for the state’s natural gas utilities, which he said hasn’t been done in over a decade. And he said they’ll push for other changes going forward.

“We’ll continue with an agenda next year and the year after that to take advantage of this four-year period when we have the majority and can push for long-lasting reforms and shifting the direction of the state in terms of energy,” Hubbard said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Democrats take control of Georgia’s powerful utility regulator on Nov 6, 2026.

Part of my work as a geographer and glacier scientist involves traveling around the world. Literally. Several times a year, I join expeditions, traversing continents and oceans, sometimes half the planet, in mere days. I’ve visited glaciers in some startling places — like Uganda’s Stanley Glacier, where ice retreat influences human health and malaria outbreaks. Or Iceland’s Breiðamerkurjökull, where glacier change is exacerbating the ice-breaking pressures of global tourism. Or South Georgia’s Heaney Glacier, where ice retreat has provided expansive real estate for one of the largest King penguin colonies on Earth. 

My job is to translate the landscape: how oceans move nutrients pole to pole; why one mountain might support snow but another does not; how glaciers shape societies.

I’ll own it’s a peculiar way to experience the world.

From 30,000 feet, borders fall away. Trees become forests become systems become a living planet. I see connections everywhere. But that view from 30,000 feet, while striking, can miss much of what’s unfolding below at the individual level — the people, the lives, the histories. 

Glaciers, I think, suffer from this same problem of perspective. We tend to see them from a great distance, as a single global story.

They’re tallied together: Some 275,000 individual glaciers remain worldwide. They’re measured together: how quickly they are shrinking, how much they impact sea level change, how long before they are gone. How many of them already are.   

But glaciers have never lived identical lives. My work has shown over and over that every glacier has a distinct life history, shaped by and shaping the communities, landscapes, and systems around it. As glaciers change, we aren’t witnessing a single global glacier story from 30,000 feet. We are witnessing hundreds of thousands of individual stories of transformation. 

One of the most surprising is unfolding right in my own backyard.

In the Pacific Northwest, a young glacier is growing  An aerial view of Mount St. Helens in June 2024, with Mount Hood in the distance on the left. USGS

My most recent expedition took me to nine countries. But I started the trip in Portland, Oregon — just north of my home in Eugene — land of the exhilaratingly perfect medium roast coffee and the Cascade volcano chain I used to orient myself for most of my childhood. The first morning, I ran up to the hotel’s top floor to see if the weather was clear enough to peer 50 miles northeast toward Mount St. Helens, across the border in Washington state. From downtown, it is easy to distinguish her whaleback summit, notably slumped in comparison to the sharper profiles of Mount Hood and Mount Adams.

What isn’t visible from this distance is the secret Mount St. Helens is hiding within.

The volcano erupted in May of 1980, two years before I was born. I grew up hearing stories of how ash coated our family farm, how the afternoon sky turned murky, how one terrified horse kicked through her box stall door. What I didn’t learn until much, much later was that, prior to the eruption, Mount St. Helens supported 11 named glaciers and two small unnamed ones. The nine-hour Plinian eruption destroyed 70 percent of the mountain’s ice, including the Loowit and Leschi glaciers, while the summit and entire north flank collapsed, leaving behind a horseshoe-shaped crater roughly two miles wide.

If you’ve ever received a climbing permit from the U.S. Forest Service, hiked to the crater rim, and gazed into that windy bowl of pumice and dark basalts, I can almost guarantee the very last word on your mind is “nursery.” Trust me. I rocked my baby in a softly-lit Scandinavian-paletted room designed for every possible infant need. But Mount St. Helens, apparently a fan of free-range parenting, took another approach. And it worked. Inside that raw volcanic maw, a baby glacier is growing inside.  

The eruption that destroyed most of Mount St. Helens’ glaciers also created the perfect conditions to grow a new one.

Winter after winter, snow fell on the volcano’s steep headwall, and then it avalanched, repeatedly, into the crater floor below. By September 1996, scientists observed that the 16-year-old body of snow and ice had begun to move, flow. This fact is existential — glaciers are defined as moving bodies of land ice that persist year after year. When glaciers stop moving, they are “dead” — it’s not just loss of volume that threatens their identity as glaciers. The Okjökull glacier in Iceland was declared dead in 2014 when it stopped flowing; in 2019, the nation held a funeral for it.

But here, the opposite has happened. 

Welcome to the world, Crater Glacier.

A view of Crater Glacier in 2005. M Jackson

There is something equally wonderful and strange about being almost exactly the same age as a glacier. We’re both children of the 80s, who grew up under the same Cascade volcanoes. I became a glaciologist; she became a glacier.

And we’ve both had setbacks. Me: paying my bills, becoming a mother, and learning, repeatedly, that adulthood rarely follows the topography you planned.

Crater Glacier: Mount St. Helens, in 2004, erupted again. Magma began pushing up beneath her. A lava dome swelled through the crater floor and into the glacier itself — the first time scientists observed the emplacement of a lava dome through glacier ice.

It split her in two.

As the dome grew, the now separate arms of the glacier deformed, then thickened and sped up, flowing 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimeters) per day. Within four years, those arms stretched all the way around the lava dome and rejoined. And the glacier kept going. Between 2009 and 2019, she gained some 13.8 million cubic meters of ice and advanced more than a thousand feet. 

My colleagues have noted that her advance is slowing. Eventually, warming Pacific Northwest summers may overwhelm the unique climate zone inside Mount St. Helens’ crater. Or, the volcano might erupt again.

And that matters to the people living below.

Crater Glacier’s body wraps around an active vent and lava dome. A future eruption could melt ice, mix with ash, pumice, and rock and become a lahar, a fast-moving slurry of water, mud, trees, and whatever else it picks up as it races downslope. Lahars from the 1980 eruption destroyed homes, bridges, and roads. Growing up, I remember how we were taught drills for lahars alongside earthquakes and fires.  

It isn’t lost on me how radically the landscape I grew up with has changed, or how much more it will change in the years to come. But, as I follow Crater Glacier’s development, I’m reminded that it isn’t all bad. This one glacier, among hundreds of thousands, is writing a story I could never have imagined.  

In Azerbaijan, forgotten glaciers become much-needed water

I arrive in Baku, Azerbaijan, in July. It is sweltering.

This country has glaciers, but I won’t see them on this trip. The last time I saw ice in the Caucasus, I was on a Fulbright in Turkey, living on the Black Sea and exploring these mountains from the west. The ice I saw then would be unrecognizable today.

Between 2000 and 2020, Azerbaijan lost 77 percent of the country’s total glacier area.

To me, that’s baffling to think about: 77 percent. Over 20 years. Half my life.

And yet, almost no one I meet in Azerbaijan seems particularly interested in talking about glaciers. I risk distracting my driver, Kamran, a delightful 20-something local man who weaves through Baku’s insane, seven-lanes-of-madness traffic like it’s nothing. The Caspian Sea twinkles peacefully to our left, oil derricks lazily chugging. To our right, the city’s iconic blue-gleaming high-rises overlap with mosques and war memorials. 

A mud volcano at Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve in Azerbaijan. M Jackson

“We don’t bother with them,” Kamran tells me, speaking of the glaciers. He pivots quickly to Gobustan, a district south of Baku that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Had I seen the mud volcanoes? “Tourists come all the time now to see the methane volcanoes.”

I keep encountering this indifference. My colleague, Suleyman, also doesn’t want to talk about glaciers and spends the bulk of our coffee telling me about the pending F1 race in Baku. He doesn’t even bother glancing at the map I’ve brought. Azerbaijan’s glaciers are remote, tiny, and high in the Eastern Caucasus. By 2025, 14 fragmented glaciers remain, covering together about 124 acres — roughly one-tenth of the ice that covered these mountains in the 1890s. 

But glaciers here, like glaciers everywhere, are critical components of regional water cycles. Glaciers hold water — for years, decades, centuries. They are reservoirs that do not need to be constructed. And in Azerbaijan, water and water storage matter. Agriculture relies on a complex system of reservoirs, canals, and irrigation. Groundwater withdrawals have increased some fourfold since 2000, largely fueled by farms growing wheat, fruit, and vegetables. 

In 2025, researchers climbed Azerbaijan’s Tufandag Glacier and reported retreat, accelerated melting, and expanding crevasses. Below it, the Mahmuddara River had increased water levels and discharge rates.

This is how a glacier can disappear in plain sight: by transforming into liquid. As a glacier melts, it releases more water downstream. And for that reason, the current precipitous decline of Azerbaijan’s glaciers is almost a boon. Glacier becomes meltwater, river, irrigation, drinking water, wheat, lettuce, peaches. Farmers rejoice. 

But, eventually, too much ice dissolves and the runoff peaks, then decreases. In glaciology, we call this “peak water,” when a disappearing glacier gives us the most water it ever will. The cycle of savings and withdrawals that has defined this landscape for centuries will ultimately end like this, when the bank is forced to close. 

Has Tufandag Glacier, or any of Azerbaijan’s 13 other glaciers, crossed that threshold? I don’t know. The increased flow of the Mahmuddara is only one measurement, from one glacier, that cannot fully answer that question.

But I can think back to the ice I saw in these same mountains years ago, then look at the Caucasus today, and I understand that it has transformed. Water that was ice, storage, cold is now warm liquid moving downstream.

Azerbaijan’s remaining glaciers may not survive this century. People in the coming years are going to have to do what glaciers once did — come up with more ways to store more water. Catch it when it arrives and hold it until it’s needed.

I keep thinking about the apparent indifference many Azerbaijanis show towards glaciers. Maybe Kamran’s response is more revealing than I initially thought.

Perhaps the first step of a glacier disappearing from a landscape is it disappearing from conversation.

In Japan, newly discovered glaciers are already fading A view out the window of a plane of Kuranosuke Glacier in Japan.
M Jackson

If you ever get a chance, wander through the Tateyama Museum in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. The exquisite open-air museum explores the nearby Mount Tateyama as both landscape and sacred place: a perennially snow-covered mountain, a dwelling place of spirits and the dead, a realm containing hell and heaven.  

There is a poem there by the eighth-century poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi about Tateyama’s summer snow and its association with the divine. It stops me. Some 1,300 years ago, people were already writing — marveling — about the snow that refused to disappear.  

Japan’s Sea-of-Japan side is one of the snowiest places on Earth, a skier’s powder paradise. And yet, for years, my colleagues and I thought no glaciers existed east of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The landscape was too warm, the mountains too low, to support glaciers under today’s conditions.

For glaciers — moving bodies of land ice that persist year after year — the base variables are critical: snow, time, and temperature. But those variables do interact with intensely local conditions such as wind, topography, shade — even human activity. It matters where snow falls, where it blows, and where a landscape and people allow it to accumulate.

Japan is technically not cold enough long enough to support glaciers. But it is extraordinarily snowy.

When I flew over Tateyama in June, most of the three-peaked massif was gray — alpine bare, with significant snow melt. But I did see a few Dalmatian-like white pockets in shaded nooks and north-facing crannies. If I hadn’t known better, I would have just labeled them as snow patches. Remember: Definitionally, a glacier must flow under its own weight. More movement is a sign of a healthy glacier. 

Snow patches, regardless of how long they’ve existed or if they contain ice, do not move.

Everyone in the bustling world of cryospheric research knew Japan had snow patches. More than 100 had been identified in the northern Japanese Alps alone. 

In the 1970s, researchers began observing holes in Kuranosuke — one such snow patch, roughly 6 acres in area — that looked and behaved like glacial features called moulins. In 1979, a Japanese researcher investigated one of the moulins by using the time-honored glaciological technique of climbing directly into it. He discovered layers of ancient ice, an observation supported later by radiocarbon analysis of embedded wood and leaf debris that were dated to approximately 1,700 years old.

Old, yes. But old does not make a glacier. Movement does.

And so Kuranosuke remained, scientifically speaking, for decades and decades, a snow patch.

Sunrise at the Kuranosuke hiking hut in the Northern Japanese Alps in July 2025. Antoine Boureau / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

But then, starting in 2009, researchers Kotaro Fukui and Hajime Iida of the Tateyama Caldera Sabo Museum used state-of-the-art geodetic measurements and ground-penetrating radar to take a closer look at several well-known perennial snow patches in the Japanese Alps. They showed that the Gozenzawa, Sannomado, and Komado snow patches were, in fact, flowing. They were glaciers.   

Take that in. I have spent my entire life watching ice disappear faster than we can understand it. Yet here are glaciers we never knew existed. It makes me immediately wonder — what other ones might be out there, if only we had time, resources, and the will to look?

The researchers turned to Kuranosuke next. They found that the snow patch was flowing roughly 3 centimeters a year — the equivalent width of one of the LEGO bricks my son always leaves on our stairs. An almost absurdly small measurement, but 3 centimeters is still flow. Movement. This transformed Kuranosuke from a snow patch into a glacier.

Still, identities are never quite so fixed. Recently, Kukui, Iida, and Tomoyoshi Kosaka have argued that Kuranosuke is in the midst of another slow transformation. As Japan warms, its glaciers and snow patches are losing crucial ice mass. They say that Kuranosuke is declining. It exists now in a nebulous no-scientist’s-land between glacier and snow patch, blurring the very boundaries of glacierhood.

One could easily look at that as a poignant story of loss: This glacier is dying, and we’ve barely had a chance to really know her. But when I look at Kuranosuke, I see a story of persistence. For at least 1,700 years, some form of ice and snow has held here, through centuries of summers, through blurring with the divine, through recognition as perennial snow patch and then glacier. 

And now, glacier-in-transformation.

I don’t think the disappearance of Kuranosuke will diminish local people’s reverence for Tateyama. If anything, as the mountain’s once-perennial snow and ice disappear, Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s poem may take on even greater meaning. For 1,300 years, these words and this snow have persisted. We may be the last generation to witness them together. 

For all these glaciers, and countless others, their stories are neither simple nor predictable. These are not merely stories of inches lost. If anything, they prove that we are far from certain about what the future holds. Kuranosuke and her neighbors defied decades of settled science by asserting their existence as glaciers. Tufandag is bringing abundance to the river and farms below it — though for how much longer, we don’t know. And Crater Glacier is still growing, thriving as so many others dissolve. I find something profoundly moving in that.

And me? I’m still circling the planet, collecting glacier stories. Maybe, like Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s poem, we’ll need them someday.

To remember.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Glaciers around the world are endangered — but no two are alike on Nov 6, 2026.

Plastic pollution blights the streets, beaches, parks, and lawns of Baltimore. A significant amount of that litter bears the circular red-and-blue Pepsi logo or the flowing white script of Coca-Cola’s branding.

But, legally speaking, none of that rubbish is Pepsi’s fault. Or Coke’s.

That’s what a Baltimore city circuit court judge ruled this summer following a legal battle in which the city and county of Baltimore sought money from PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and others to clean up plastic pollution. Companies “conducting lawful activities,” wrote Judge Audrey J.S. Carrión, referring to the sale of single-use plastics, “should not be held liable under public nuisance claims because others are misusing the products in an unlawful manner.” 

In other words, plastic pollution is a problem of consumer behavior, not corporate irresponsibility. As far as the state’s public nuisance law is concerned, a company’s liability ends at the point of sale.

Similar reasoning scuttled a public nuisance lawsuit the state of New York filed against PepsiCo and Frito-Lay and has arisen in similar litigation from Missouri to California. As environmental advocates and governments continue to develop this legal theory, those setbacks raise a fundamental question: When does a company’s responsibility for its products end? And can public nuisance laws succeed in making polluters pay?

The notion of public nuisance dates to 13th-century English common law and traditionally applied to violations of rights shared by the public, such as access to clean air. Since the 1970s, plaintiffs have increasingly tried to apply that idea to manufacturers whose products allegedly jeopardize public health, safety, and access to a clean environment.

These lawsuits, however, have “a mixed record of success,” said Timothy Lytton, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law. Cases against opioid manufacturers, e-cigarette companies, and even the landmark litigation against Big Tobacco have sometimes succeeded — but mostly by securing favorable settlements, not because judges ruled in favor of the public-nuisance arguments.

Cases that have been heard, meanwhile, have struggled to convince judges of “causation,” or the idea that corporate defendants are substantially responsible for violating a public right. Judges are wary of extending corporations’ liability past the lawful sale of their products, particularly when those products aren’t used as intended. If a doctor or patient diverts opioids to the black market, for example, are the manufacturers responsible for the resulting harm?

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This is essentially what Carrión said in the Baltimore case. It also echoes questioning from Justice Stephen Lindley last month as he heard arguments in the appeal of New York’s Pepsi lawsuit. “If [Pepsi] has to pay for the cleanup when somebody else is littering, … it’s not going to be sustainable,” he told the plaintiff’s lawyers. He appeared sympathetic to PepsiCo attorney Andrew Tulumello’s argument that the state had a “honking causation problem”: Pepsi, Tulumello said, “is not encouraging people to throw stuff in the litter.”

According to Albert Lin, co-director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at the University of California, Davis, there are three basic elements of a successful public-nuisance lawsuit. The first is demonstrating “substantial interference with a public right.” The second is causation — linking a defendant to that interference. The third, he said, is negligence, intent, or other “tortious conduct” in the defendant’s activities.

Environmental groups and governments are trying to get around the point-of-sale argument by linking causation and conduct: Plastics companies, they argue, are responsible for the pollution and knew their actions would harm public rights. Courts will therefore pay close attention to “foreseeability” — whether it was foreseeable that plastic would end up as litter, Lin said. As Lytton put it, manufacturers allegedly acted “in a way that foreseeably increases the risk of misuse.” The word “foreseeable” appears 22 times in Baltimore’s complaint.

Plaintiffs have evidence they can point to in arguing that plastic pollution was foreseeable. At least some manufacturers have known for decades that mass production of single-use plastics would contribute to environmental pollution, and that recycling would be unable to manage the problem. The lawsuits also cite microplastics contamination as part of the alleged nuisance, and an investigation published last week by the Los Angeles Times found that industry scientists have known since at least the 1970s that microplastics could lodge in humans’ bodies.

That history informs the framing offered by Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute. “Companies induced consumers to purchase these products while knowing the likelihood that they would end up as trash,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

Whether this framing succeeds may depend, in part, on the jurisdiction. In addition to the causation requirement for public-nuisance lawsuits, Lin said some states have a higher standard for demonstrating that defendants had “control” over their products at the time the nuisance occurred. New York and Maryland are two such states. California, on the other hand, is not, and courts there have so far proven more receptive to plastics public nuisance suits.

Judge Richard Seeborg of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who is overseeing two lawsuits against Exxon Mobil Corp., allowed one — from the Sierra Club — to proceed to trial. (He has not yet ruled on the other one, brought by the state’s attorney general.) 

But even in California, surviving an early challenge is no guarantee of success. A judge there allowed Earth Island Institute’s public-nuisance claim — which rested in part on allegedly misleading recycling labels — against 10 food and beverage companies, but it was ultimately rejected earlier this year in a summary judgment. Earth Island plans to appeal.

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Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.

Lin said it’s still “early days” for this legal theory, and the rejections do not necessarily signal a losing strategy. He noted, however, that the courts have shown significant skepticism for public nuisance in ongoing climate litigation, and a case the Supreme Court is hearing this term could make it more difficult for cities and states to bring such claims in the future. 

Lin added that in climate lawsuits, plaintiffs have leaned more heavily on fossil fuel companies’ allegedly deceptive conduct, invoking consumer protection and false advertising claims that can be easier to substantiate than those based on public nuisance. Plastics plaintiffs could pursue a similar strategy, he said, potentially winning damages — though likely not orders requiring companies to clean up the pollution their products create.

Public nuisance laws could face new constraints at the state level, too. Last year, Montana enacted a first-of-its-kind law preempting state and local public-nuisance lawsuits based on “lawful activities,” while Kansas and Utah have since enacted their own restrictions.  All three states’ laws are connected to model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative policy organization that brings together state lawmakers and private-sector members to develop model legislation.

Whatever their ultimate outcome in court, Lytton said plastics lawsuits can “win” in other ways — by unearthing new documents, for example, and putting the plastics issue higher on the public-policy agenda. They also provide an opportunity for plaintiffs to refute the plastics industry’s consumer-responsibility narrative. 

“When you file a lawsuit, what you’re doing is you’re telling a story” — often about some sort of structural or corporate wrongdoing, Lytton said. “When you talk about tobacco, it’s not just about smokers. Or opioids, it’s not just about users. It’s about the companies and their design and marketing decisions. And so the framing that goes on in these [lawsuits] is moving the discussion of plastics away from ‘litterbugs’ and toward corporate responsibility.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Plastic pollution is putting an old legal doctrine to a new test on Nov 6, 2026.

When Trump was elected both in 2016 and 2024, promising to make the federal government hostile to climate action, many climate advocates insisted that state and local governments would take up the mantle of pushing for clean energy. That’s the thesis of the “America Is All In” coalition, which brings together cities and states that have vowed to uphold America’s “climate commitments … [i]n the absence of federal leadership.” The unspoken caveat in these claims is that the states leading the way on climate policy are concentrated in a few liberal parts of the country, like New England and the West Coast.

The Democratic Party’s historic victory in this week’s midterm elections could change that. Democrats have secured control of both state legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion — also known as a “trifecta” — in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three states that have spent years or decades under Republican or divided control. The three states have also lagged on support for clean energy. Democrats also restored trifectas in Minnesota, Michigan, and Nevada this week, but those are states where they last had unified control earlier this decade.

“It is impossible to overstate how monumental these results are,” said David Weiskopf, the senior policy director at Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that works to elect climate-focused candidates and pass state climate policy. He said that the six states where Democrats have secured trifectas would be one of the world’s largest emitters if they made up their own country, rivaling Canada and Saudi Arabia.  “This is just a massive opportunity to make progress.”

Here’s how the election could open up the floodgates for new climate policy in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

Wisconsin Construction on a Meta data center in March in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. The state’s legislature failed this year to pass a law that would require data centers to source their power from clean sources.
Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch via Getty Images

Compared to its neighbors in the Upper Midwest, Wisconsin has been far less ambitious when it comes to ditching fossil fuels in its power sector. While Michigan and Minnesota have both passed laws that mandate that the states get all their power from clean sources by 2040, Wisconsin set a measly 10 percent renewable electricity standard more than two decades ago. It blew past that goal but never set a new target. Unlike most other states, it doesn’t even require utilities to plan for what kinds of power plants they want to build. The state gets a larger share of its electricity from coal than its immediate neighbors.  

Renewable energy advocates in the Badger State believe they can make some short-term gains with Democrats’ first trifecta since 2010. Erik Kanter, the policy director for the nonprofit Clean Wisconsin, said he believes that the new legislature can agree on the “low-hanging fruit” of making utilities plan for the future, which he said will nudge more of them to build renewables rather than extending the lifespans of gas and coal plants. The Wisconsin legislature failed this year to pass a law that would require data centers to source their power from clean sources, and Kanter expects such a measure to pass once Democrats take control. The legislature will also likely renew programs like Knowles-Nelson, a longstanding fund for parks and ecosystem preservation, which once enjoyed bipartisan approval but has lost support from Republicans in recent years. 

Weiskopf, of Climate Cabinet, believes that even more ambitious moves are in the offing. He expects Wisconsin’s new class of legislators to pursue a 100 percent clean electricity standard, filling what he calls a “Wisconsin-sized hole” in the Upper Midwest. Not only would that help to phase out coal in the state, it would also make it easier for neighboring states to meet their climate goals, since the whole region shares the same interconnected power grid.

Pennsylvania The NRG Station of SEPTA’s Broad Street Line in Philadelphia. Democrats in the Pennsylvania legislature intend to pass a rescue package for the state’s public transit systems. Emilee Chinn / Getty Images

The Pennsylvania Senate has long been known to Democrats as the place where climate policy goes to die. Even though the party managed to flip the lower house of the legislature a few years ago, Republican leaders in the upper chamber often refused to bring climate bills to a vote. The Keystone State’s status as a large producer of both natural gas and coal also made it difficult to secure agreements within the Democratic Party on clean energy proposals.

“You don’t want to let yourself fully imagine what it can be, because you’ve been let down in the past,” said Lindsey Williams, a state senator who represents a swath of the Pittsburgh metro area. “Now we’re in that moment of, wow, there’s so many things that we can accomplish.” 

Every year since 2019, Williams has introduced a bill that would establish mandatory energy and water efficiency standards for appliances like ovens and showerheads, a measure she said could save consumers millions of dollars a year. The legislation has never moved forward — but she thinks it will in next year’s session. 

She hopes Democrats will use their first trifecta since 1993 to advance a full-scope climate agenda. In addition to passing laws that would allow community solar and warehouse rooftop solar, Democratic lawmakers also want to pass a funding package for struggling mass transit systems like Philadelphia’s. The $1.5 billion infusion would help prevent the transit “death spiral” for those systems and would reduce reliance on gasoline-powered cars.

The state’s reelected centrist governor, Josh Shapiro, appears to be on board with at least some of these proposals. Although he withdrew the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a Northeast-wide carbon pricing system, he has promised to create a similar cap-and-trade system for Pennsylvania itself if he can get legislative support. He has also named funding for mass transit as a leading item on his agenda for the new legislative session next year. But Democrats will have to be careful: While they will now control both chambers, they’ll have slim majorities in each, and may have just a narrow two-year window to pass climate policy before one flips back.

“We need to be brave and lead,” said Williams. “Yes, what are the low-hanging fruits, but what are the big ambitious things that we can get done this session?”

Arizona Alfalfa fields at the Fondomonte farm in Butler Valley, Arizona. Democrats in the state legislature plan to pass a bill that would crack down on rural groundwater pumping. Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post via Getty Images

The last time Democrats had a trifecta in the Grand Canyon State was in 1966, decades before the general public was even aware of global warming. The state has ample sunshine and wind, so its renewable energy industry has grown quickly over recent years, and its grid is cleaner than in regions like the Midwest. Furthermore, the many new-built suburbs of the Phoenix metroplex tend to be heated with electricity rather than natural gas. Yet Republicans in the state legislature have all but banned climate and environmental policy, prohibiting the state government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions or energy usage, and numerous climate and water bills have failed in recent years.

Lauren Kuby, a longtime Democratic legislator who represents the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, says she and her colleagues have a long wish list that spans several issues. Their first order of business is to reform the Arizona Corporation Commission, the state’s utility regulator, which Kuby says has been slow to embrace new technologies like solar and wind even as developers seek to build more of them. Legislators want to pass a law that would direct the commission to make utilities invest in solar, batteries, and “virtual power plants,” or networks of homes and businesses that coordinate their energy usage. As part of the reform, they might even change the commission’s name, taking out the “corporation” and replacing it with “public utilities.” The two Democrats who appear set to win seats on the commission will make these reforms easier to push through.

The legislature could also break long-standing logjams on the crucial issue of water — a scarce resource in a desert state where climate change is worsening droughts. Kuby and other senators have been trying for years to pass a bill that would regulate groundwater pumping in the state’s rural areas. These areas are home to massive dairies and alfalfa farms like Riverview and the Saudi-backed Fondomonte, which have been blamed for sinking land and dried-up residential wells. The bill has failed in several legislative sessions, but Kuby believes that some form of regulation can pass in the coming year, bringing an end to the water free-for-all in the desert areas outside Phoenix.

“That has been languishing and has not been heard in the legislature, even though we have agreement from a lot of Republicans on water and environmental protection,” said Kuby. Of the trifecta, she said, “It’s a game-changer.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the midterms could unleash a new era for clean energy in these 3 states on Nov 5, 2026.

The Southwest just got way too much of a good thing. Last weekend, a ferocious storm inundated communities and killed at least four people. Though precipitation is an essential component of Arizona’s desert climate, the state got two or three months’ worth of it in just a few days — far more than human infrastructure could handle all at once. Since September 20, an astonishing 28.84 inches of rain has fallen on Clovis, New Mexico, compared to its historical average of just 3.3 inches.

“This weekend was just adding more on the rough times that those communities in Southwest Colorado and Arizona and Utah and New Mexico have been having recently,” said Russ Schumacher, director of the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University, who’s also the state climatologist. “I think the El Niño connection is pretty clear.”

Indeed, that band of warm water in the Pacific could be priming much of the southern United States for a winter of increased precipitation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s seasonal outlook. “Could an event like this have happened in a non-El Niño year?” asked Michael A. Crimmins, a climatologist at the University of Arizona. “It could have, but it would have been a lot harder to pull all of the ingredients together at the same time, and would have been a lot less likely.”

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.fxlabel{font-size:26px}.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:18px}} @media (max-width:480px){.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook svg.map .fxlabel{font-size:38px}.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:24px}} @media (prefers-reduced-motion:reduce){.el-nino-precip-outlook#el-nino-precip-outlook *{transition:none !important}} A wetter winter looks likely across the southern US

Precipitation outlook through February 2027

Slightly favors wetterFavors wetterSlightly favors drierFavors drierEqual chancesWetterDrierEqual chancesPuerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands

“Slightly favors” means a 33–50 percent chance of the favored category, and “favors” means 50 percent or more. Hawaiʻi is shaded from CPC’s Hawaiian Islands outlook. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are unshaded; NOAA’s outlook suggests warmer temperatures in this region but publishes no corresponding probability.

Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center

Clayton Aldern / Grist

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The looming problem this winter is heat, oddly enough. The unfolding El Niño is already the strongest on record, and it could get stronger still in the next few months. Although that amounts to just a handful of extra degrees in the Pacific, it injects a tremendous amount of energy into the atmosphere, scrambling weather the world over. The phenomenon is so influential, in fact, that it has helped cancel hurricanes over in the Atlantic, by messing with winds high up in the atmosphere. Accordingly, this year shattered the record for the latest first hurricane in a season by nearly a month. Normally by this time of year we’d have seen six of these cyclones, but 2026 has still only produced one.

The Southwest, though, gets no such relief from inclement weather. In addition to adding heat to the sky, the warmer waters of El Niño also increase atmospheric moisture. Even beyond the El Niño, temperatures in the Pacific have been running extra hot, which explains why the western part of the ocean has produced 10 hurricanes this season even as the Atlantic has remained quiet. (Overall, more than 90 percent of the excess heat that humans have pumped into the atmosphere has been absorbed by the oceans.)

All this warm water means more moisture for the weather patterns that have been moving into the Southwest over the last month. A separate system in late October, for instance, became one of the most extreme storms in Colorado’s history, pelting higher elevations with up to 8 inches of rain in four days, causing widespread destruction. “It’s just really extreme amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere that have been aimed into the Southwest in each of those storms,” Schumacher said.

This autumn precipitation primed Arizona, Colorado, and other Southwestern states for yet more destruction this past week. For one, rivers were already running high, then ran all the higher. And two, if soils are soaked, a follow-up bout of rain will run off and cause flooding. “We get the second storm, just a little bit after the first one, then everything was primed for even worse flooding this time around,” Schumacher said. 

Read Next California has a plan for El Niño’s torrential rain: Save it for later Matt Simon

In mountainous terrain, this gets especially dangerous, as the topography funnels rainwater into raging torrents. “If you hike around the Southwest, you’re going to see out-of-place boulders all over the place,” Crimmins said. “Water put it there. Maybe it was 5,000 years ago or something like that, but water moves. We can have really epic flash flooding.”

The one silver lining here is that any increased precipitation from this El Niño could bring drought relief to much of the southern U.S., according to NOAA’s projections. Climate change is not only exacerbating these ongoing dry spells — hotter temperatures also increase evaporation from reservoirs. At the same time, populations are growing in the Southwest, meaning more people demanding more water. 

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.insetlabel{font-weight:500;font-size:12px;fill:#6B665E} @media (max-width:800px){.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .fxlabel{font-size:26px}.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:18px}} @media (max-width:480px){.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .fxlabel{font-size:38px}.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook svg.map .insetlabel{font-size:24px}} @media (prefers-reduced-motion:reduce){.el-nino-drought-outlook#el-nino-drought-outlook *{transition:none !important}} Drought could ease across the South this winter

Seasonal drought outlook through January 31, 2027

WorseningPersistingDevelopingImprovingEndingPuerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands

Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook

Clayton Aldern / Grist

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With these factors conspiring, the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are approaching the point of collapse. The potential for more rainfall this winter might help fill them, Schumacher said, but it can’t reverse the system’s precipitous decline. “It’s a long way to go to get even back to where we were a year ago,” he said. “Let alone when it was in good condition decades ago.”

The wildcard this year is snowpack: It’s still too early to tell, Schumacher said, how much snow will fall in Colorado. Whereas rainwater flows quickly into rivers, making it harder to store without overwhelming infrastructure — hence all the destructive flooding of late — snowpack slowly releases water as things thaw in the spring. With a record low snowpack earlier this year, Colorado is in desperate need of bountiful flakes in the months ahead.

Water agencies can’t change the weather, but they can at least change how they manage precipitation. Down in Arizona, cities like Tucson have been installing green infrastructure — basically dirt spaces that hydrate native plants — which slow down the flow of water, thus preventing flooding. “There’s really cool and clever ways of thinking about stormwater as a resource,” Crimmins said, “rather than a nuisance.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Extreme flooding in the Southwest foreshadows a wild El Niño winter on Nov 5, 2026.

In 2021, across much of the country, Winter Storm Uri caused utilities to scramble for power as the use of electricity and natural gas increased. In addition to facing transmission constraints, utilities couldn’t generate enough power due to issues with fuel supply and equipment malfunctions. In Nebraska, in an effort to preserve the grid and prevent a system-wide failure, the Omaha Public Power District, or OPPD, conducted rolling blackouts. Afterward, the Southwest Power Pool, which manages the region’s grid reliability, required its members to keep more power capacity in reserve in case of future emergency situations. 

In the following years, the data center boom, electrification, and growth from other industries have brought utilities around the country the promise of new customers and the challenge of a huge spike in demand. As a result, OPPD, which serves about 419,000 customers across eastern Nebraska, is running low on the amount of energy capacity it can promise to new and expanding economic development projects. The shortage is threatening the region’s ability to develop economically, attract companies, add jobs, and grow. 

What’s more, OPPD is facing the same challenges that are plaguing utilities and electric grids across the country: Power plants and other electric grid infrastructure are aging. Demand for energy is still growing. Climate change is straining the grid in real time. All the while, communities in Nebraska oppose the renewable energy developments that could solve some of these issues.

OPPD currently projects it has less than 100 megawatts of available power capacity for new or expanding large customers for the next few years. (For reference, a large data center could require as much as 1,000 megawatts of capacity, and manufacturing facilities can range from a few megawatts to over 100 megawatts.) That figure could vary depending on customer commitments and new energy generation coming online, and OPPD asserted that the utility has enough power capacity to support typical residential and commercial growth. But essentially, OPPD president and CEO Javier Fernandez said, any new or expanding development requiring 2 megawatts or more might have to wait to receive service. Fernandez will be leaving the utility at the end of the year, according to a recent internal announcement.

Economic development leaders are concerned that if power capacity in Nebraska’s largest metropolitan area remains limited, the Omaha area and the state as a whole will be put at a competitive disadvantage for growth opportunities like new businesses, jobs, and increased tax revenue. This comes as the state is projected to face a $208 million deficit next year. Compared to 2022, state income tax revenues this past year were $703 million lower.

“We are bending over backwards. We’re trying to figure out creative solutions,” Fernandez told Grist. “How do we bridge this? Can we buy capacity from other utilities? Literally, no one has excess capacity. Everyone is in the same boat as we are, so now the pinch, so to speak, it’s, well, growth has to slow down, maybe?” 

At the same time, OPPD is doing long-term planning to determine what its energy and system needs will be over the next 10 years. To meet the demand, the utility and its board face a decision about how much to expand OPPD’s energy portfolio. On the low end, the utility could add about 1,000 megawatts, but, according to OPPD’s initial planning results, the utility might more than double its portfolio. For context, OPPD’s portfolio currently contains 4,583 megawatts of energy capacity.

And while more generation capacity is coming online over the next few years, the projections for energy demand remain high. Companies with nearly 2,000 megawatts of economic development projects are planning to come to the area and are actively in OPPD’s queue through 2031, according to a September presentation. There are about 5,000 megawatts worth of other potential projects on the radar that are considering the area.

Fernandez said the utility knows that not all of the projects will actually come to fruition.  Nevertheless, if the utility builds too small, the Omaha metro could end up back in the same shortage for economic development. If the utility builds too big and the usage from big customers doesn’t materialize, OPPD’s ratepayers will likely have to eat the costs. 

Read Next Exclusive: Most voters believe climate change threatens the American Dream Kate Yoder

Nailing the projections and actually building new generation — such as renewable energy and natural gas sources — will be a big challenge. Two OPPD board members said it would be helpful if state and local leaders were on the same page with clear economic development plans to guide priorities for how much energy the region will need.

OPPD declined to comment on what portion of its queue is made up of data centers, manufacturers, or other types of customers. According to a presentation in March, a chart of the utility’s current peak demand shows industrial customers represent 32 percent, residential customers make up 41 percent, and commercial customers are 27 percent. By 2035, industrial customers are expected to make up 52 percent.

“Clearly, data centers have been a very, very big force on that increase,” Fernandez said.

“The biggest question my board is likely going to have to answer is going to be how big of a plan we approve,” Fernandez said. “And that is going to be informed by … state, counties, cities, chambers: How much do you want us to grow?” 

In September, Heath Mello, the Greater Omaha Chamber’s president and CEO, sent a letter to OPPD’s board calling for the utility to plan further out than 2036 and strongly consider building for more growth. Paul West, chair of the chamber’s board, said that the chamber hopes to recruit and expand industries like manufacturing.

Economic development could help solve big problems — the state’s budget shortfall, high property taxes, and brain drain. But energy is one of the top two reasons that the chamber loses deals to other locations. And any new manufacturing will have to compete for power with potential data center customers considering the region. This matches a trend being seen across the U.S., said Larry Gigerich, chair of the Site Selectors Guild. 

Utilities like OPPD have an obligation to serve all customers, but state and local governments can incentivize and disincentivize for the kind of growth they want to see, Fernandez said. The competition for electricity with data centers is “causing manufacturing companies now to be more proactive and to use their voice more directly with utilities versus the way they have done it for decades,” Gigerich said. “Now it’s a true competition, and we can’t generate enough new power fast enough to meet everybody’s needs.”

Projecting demand is one thing. Getting electricity-generating projects built is quite another. To meet the growing demand and to keep costs low, OPPD is looking at building more natural gas and renewables. Both of these options come with their own challenges. 

The current popularity of natural gas has constrained the equipment supply chain, which means it could take the utility much longer to build. And while renewables face some upfront cost increases, they remain the lowest cost energy source to operate. However, OPPD has struggled to bring these projects online, because some communities in the state have turned them away. The tension has been building for years as misinformation has spread and projects were kept secret by developers. Residents across the state have rejected clean energy proposals over concerns about fire risks and potential damages to prime agricultural land and local infrastructure. 

Fernandez said that some community leaders have rejected renewable generation only to ask for more power capacity to attract new economic development. “Everyone is saying no, and then we end up in a really bad place,” he said.

With the demand for power growing, something has to give, otherwise OPPD might not be able to generate the power it needs to help Nebraska grow.

“If Omaha doesn’t grow, if Omaha doesn’t prosper, the rest of the state very likely won’t,” Fernandez said. “What the state wants versus what the city wants versus what the chambers want — well, they all want different things. But the one common denominator that I keep hearing is jobs and income.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Nebraska seeks to grow, Omaha’s energy capacity is a major hurdle on Nov 4, 2026.

The Democratic Party won a commanding victory in Tuesday’s midterm elections. As of Wednesday morning, the party had secured control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as several state governments. The party’s strong performance, driven in part by voters’ anger over inflation and the war in Iran, reached into traditional Republican strongholds like Ohio and South Carolina. The sweep will have profound consequences for climate action in the United States, even with President Donald Trump still in the White House.

Flipping control of Congress will allow the Democrats to hinder Trump’s numerous attempts to roll back federal climate policy. In the first two years of Trump’s term, party leaders could do little more than write strongly worded statements to administration officials. They were powerless to stop the suspension of clean energy funding, the elimination of climate rules for power plants and motor vehicles, and the hollowing out of agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now, the party will have a lot more leverage. Democratic senators and members of Congress can issue subpoenas to force administration officials to testify before Congress, and could even impeach Trump administration figures over funding clawbacks and staff reductions that Democrats have called unlawful. Democrats will also have control over must-pass funding bills, and Trump will have to negotiate with them in order to avoid a government shutdown. This could lead to the restoration of some funding for energy and climate resilience programs that Republicans have been trying to whittle down. With majorities in the Senate and the House, the party could even seek to reimpose some of the clean energy tax credits that Republicans rescinded last year.

Turnover at the state level, where officials are still counting votes, may be even more significant. Democrats gained full control of the state government in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, according to election analysts, ending in some cases decades of Republican or divided government. This could allow the passage of meaningful climate policy in much of the country for the first time. In Pennsylvania, for instance, state House Democrats have said they intend to pass bills making it easier to build community solar, warehouse solar, and battery energy storage, as well as preventing local governments from banning renewables. In Georgia, Democrats flipped both the governor’s mansion and control of the Public Service Commission, which regulates electric utilities.

While Trump’s approval ratings are underwater on almost every major issue, energy prices were among the most salient issues in many races. The gasoline price hike caused by Trump’s invasion of Iran was perhaps the most consequential, but voters in many places were also concerned about their heating bills (Maine) and homeowner’s insurance premiums (Florida). In state races in Texas and Ohio, and in bellwether House districts like one in central Pennsylvania, skepticism over the AI boom may also have driven voters to oust incumbents who supported data centers. 

Here are some of the most consequential outcomes for climate change and the environment. We’ll continue to update this post as more results and analysis come in.

Supporters of Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico at the Long Center on November 3 in Austin.
Brandon Bell / Getty Images House Democrats could make the Trump administration spend money on the climate

Upon taking office, the Trump administration attempted to withhold billions of dollars in climate money, much of it from the landmark Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by Joe Biden in 2022. These freezes threw a number of major climate projects into limbo — the Department of Energy halted experimental projects for hydrogen production in Pennsylvania and decarbonized cement in California, while the Environmental Protection Agency froze a $7 billion community solar program. 

Those days may soon be over. Chellie Pingree, the lead Democrat who oversees funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, says that she has prepared a long list of investigations and subpoenas for Trump administration officials, including EPA chief Lee Zeldin. She also intends to use the power of the purse to force the administration to spend climate money. Funding bills could include provisions that would deny agencies core operational funds or restrict travel money for leading officials unless they doled out solar and energy funding as Congress previously instructed them to.

“We can put a lot more teeth into the next appropriations bill,” she said. “We can say, ‘OK, fine, if you’re not going to spend the money, we have the power to withhold other funding.’”

— Jake Bittle

Texas elects a Democratic senator for the first time in nearly 40 years

Texas joined other Southern states in flipping blue for the first time in decades. Senator-elect James Talarico, a Democrat, supports an all-of-the-above energy strategy, which includes protecting oil and gas jobs while also growing renewable energy. This moderate approach proved important in a state that provides over 40 percent of the nation’s oil and gas. 

As a state representative, Talarico authored and introduced the Texas Climate Action Act in 2021. While the bill did not advance, it aimed to establish targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and set energy efficiency standards, with an emphasis on local resiliency. 

Talarico beat out Republican Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, who is widely considered friendly to the oil and gas industry. He’s been embroiled in scandal for years and was impeached in 2023 by the Texas House. Paxton’s track record likely helped Democrats obtain this victory. 

— Celeste Guajardo

A wildland firefighter endorsed by AOC wins a House seat in Montana

Montana is on track to send a Democrat to the House of Representatives for the first time in over 30 years. Sam Forstag, a former wildland firefighter and union leader, claimed victory in the state’s competitive western district seat over Republican Aaron Flint, who conceded the race early Wednesday morning. The Associated Press estimates that 13 percent of ballots remain uncounted as of midday Wednesday.

Forstag ran his campaign on the affordability issues facing many Montanans and emphasized rising power bills, the need for data center regulation, and protecting public lands from attacks. The 31-year-old decided to run for office after experiencing Trump’s massive cuts to federal land management agencies, including wildland firefighting. Forstag received early endorsements from Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. 

In an interview with Montana Free Press in October, Forstag said he wanted to “invest in transmission” and ensure “next-generation energy projects, wind and solar, have the actual resources that they need to get off the ground.” 

— Ellis Juhlin

Democratic Representative Kathy Castor of Florida holds a committee hearing in the House of Representatives. Castor, a leading climate hawk, survived a tough reelection challenge in a district drawn to eliminate her.
Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Two climate hawks survive Republican redistricting

Their districts were redrawn to eliminate them, but voters in Florida’s 14th and Ohio’s 9th districts respectively reelected Kathy Castor and Marcy Kaptur anyway.

Castor — referred to as a “climate hawk” by Politico — has spent much of her long career in Congress raising the alarm about climate change. Between 2019 and 2022 she chaired the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and has otherwise made reducing carbon pollution and preparing communities for climate impacts central to her legislative agenda. In March, she backed the Energy Bills Relief Act, which proposed restoring energy upgrade tax credits and connecting more clean energy to the grid. She has also strongly opposed data centers in the Tampa area that she serves, warning that the facilities could drive up her constituents’ utility costs while straining local water supplies.

Kaptur is the longest-serving woman in the House. She has been a leading opponent of the Department of Energy’s efforts to redirect Inflation Reduction Act money away from clean energy and toward fossil fuels. She has alleged that these redirections violate federal law, and would likely lead investigations into the Energy Department’s actions in a Democratic-controlled Congress. The Ohio state Legislature redrew her district to encompass more conservative areas along Lake Erie, but she held on to her seat comfortably.

— Jake Bittle and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

A Democrat will become a Texas oil and gas regulator

Stunning results are still coming in from the Lone Star State. For the first time in over 30 years, a Democrat has won a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, the regulatory agency that oversees the state’s oil and gas industry. Jon Rosenthal defeated Republican candidate Bo French, who made a racist social media post about South Asian students celebrating at a University of Texas football game that drew national bipartisan backlash.

“To the dude that posted the online poll last summer, asking who’s a bigger threat to America and the only two choices were Muslims and Jews — tonight this Jewish engineer sent that motherf*cker home,” said Rosenthal in his victory speech, referring to another racist post by French.

Rosenthal asserts that good jobs and clean air can — and must — coexist. He supports an all-of-the-above energy strategy and capturing natural gas. He also wants to “turbocharge” the plugging of inactive oil and gas wells, which leak methane. The Railroad Commission is currently considering rules on that, spurred by state legislation passed last year. 

Rosenthal will join two Republican commissioners, meaning it’s likely he will be outvoted on many issues.

— Celeste Guajardo

Democrats flip control of Georgia utility commission for the first time in decades

Democrats secured both Public Service Commission seats on the Georgia ballot, giving the party majority control of the powerful utility regulation board for the first time in 30 years.

Democrat Peter Hubbard successfully defended his District 3 seat against a challenge from former commissioner Fitz Johnson, while Democrat Shelia Edwards defeated Republican Josh Tolbert to take the District 5 seat.

The commission regulates utilities, including the behemoth Georgia Power, meaning commissioners have final say over how the state’s largest utility makes energy and how much customers pay for it. The board has drawn increased scrutiny in recent years because of a series of rate hikes and the scramble to produce enough energy for the massive spike in demand that Georgia Power predicts will result from the data center boom. The utility’s plans to meet that demand rely heavily on fossil fuels.

Georgia is one of 10 states where utility regulators are elected rather than appointed.

— Emily Jones

Read Next In Savannah, Georgia’s utility regulators faced public wrath over data centers Emily Jones Public transit wins in multiple states

After years of financial woes and operating deficits, some residents of the California Bay Area were concerned that this year’s midterms might signal the downfall of public rail options in the region, leaving them stuck in its infamous traffic. But the Regional Transit Measure, which sought to enact a sales tax to fund local transit agencies for another 14 years, easily won a majority vote. It is expected to raise $1 billion each year to keep trains up and running.

Colorado rail supporters have also claimed victory for Measure 7A, which will establish a permanent sales tax to extend Colorado Connector passenger trains between Pueblo and Fort Collins. The coalition that campaigned for the measure argued that the expanded railway would reduce emissions equivalent to 29,000 cars in the area.

Other states had transit wins, too: More than 70 percent of voters said yes to Seattle’s Proposition 1, which would double the dedicated transit tax and support more frequent bus service. And Lawrence, Kansas, increased its transit sale tax to fund service for another 10 years. 

— Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

Voters reject adding a ‘right to natural gas’ to the Colorado Constitution

Colorado voters roundly rejected an effort to enshrine a right to natural gas in the state Constitution, which would have been a first in the country. Amendment 82 proposed giving homes and businesses a right to use gas stoves for cooking and heating, as well as giving distributors and utilities a right to sell the fossil fuel. Since the Constitution trumps all else, the ballot measure’s approval could have jeopardized local and state efforts to shift away from fossil fuels and electrify buildings, prompting court challenges to climate policies. The measure also raised concerns that it could protect access to natural gas for power-hungry data centers. 

Only 46 percent of voters supported Amendment 82 as of late Wednesday morning, far beneath the 55 percent a constitutional amendment needs to pass. That protects the Colorado Public Utilities Commission’s Clean Heat Plan, which requires utilities to cut natural gas emissions by 41 percent by 2035.

— Kate Yoder

A flip in an area devastated by Helene

In western North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene caused billions of dollars of damage two years ago, Democrat Jamie Ager defeated Republican Jennifer Balkcom for an open seat in the House of Representatives. Ager, a longtime farmer, made the area’s slow hurricane recovery a centerpiece of his campaign. He criticized Representative Chuck Edwards, who dropped out of the race after a sexual harassment scandal, for doing too little to deliver aid for Asheville and its surrounding counties. Grist reported last month that at least some voters blamed Republicans for the slow recovery. In a rally held on the eve of the election, President Trump promised to deliver more hurricane aid money, but only if North Carolina elected Republicans. The district around Asheville did not take the bait — not only did Ager win the state’s 11th House District, but Democrat Roy Cooper, the state’s former governor, easily won a Senate race, flipping a seat that had been held by Republicans. 

— Jake Bittle

North Carolina Democratic congressional candidate Jamie Ager greets a supporter at a “Trunk or Treat” Halloween campaign event. Ager prevailed in a race for a seat in an area devastated by Hurricane Helene. Allison Joyce / Getty Images An ex-Sunrise activist wins in Michigan

William Lawrence, a co-founder of the climate activism group Sunrise Movement, has prevailed in a razor’s-edge House of Representatives race in central Michigan. Lawrence, a 36-year-old progressive, ousted freshman Republican Tom Barrett in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, a bellwether area encompassing Lansing and its suburbs. He made opposition to data centers a focal point of his campaign, calling for a national moratorium on data center development. He also aligned himself with activists and residents who have opposed large-scale renewable energy projects in the Lansing area. In an interview with Grist last month, Lawrence said that many utility-scale solar projects don’t benefit the communities around them.

— Jake Bittle

Read Next The Michigan climate candidate courting opponents of Big Solar Jake Bittle Democrats win after attacking Republicans on data centers

In one of the night’s biggest upsets, Texas state Representative Gina Hinojosa ousted incumbent Governor Greg Abbott after campaigning on a data center moratorium and accusing Abbott of selling out to the tech industry. 

And at least three legislative seats flipped blue after Democrats aggressively criticized Republican incumbents for being too friendly to data centers. Democrat Sherrod Brown defeated Republican Jon Husted in Ohio’s special Senate election after state Democrats put up billboards stating: “See that data center? Jon Husted did that.” Likewise, Democrat Paige Cognetti beat Republican Rob Bresnahan in Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District after she ran television ads associating Bresnahan with data centers and comparing tech companies to polluting mining corporations. (Bresnahan has owned stock in data center companies.) And in South Carolina’s Senate race, voters pushed Annie Andrews to a surprise win over incumbent Darline Graham after Andrews highlighted that a new pro-data center super PAC spent $1.5 million dollars on ads for her opponent, whom she nicknamed “Data Center Darline.”

Both Husted and Bresnahan had previously welcomed data centers to their regions, but later attempted unsuccessfully to pass regulations constraining them once the facilities became a hot-button issue. Data centers are massively unpopular with voters across the political spectrum, polls have shown. The facilities have become a growing source of demand for electricity from fossil fuels.

— Austin Corona, Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, and Jake Bittle

Data centers upend municipal politics

Further down the ballot, it’s hard to find a place where data centers didn’t lose. In addition to the marquee congressional and governor’s races where voter sentiment about the AI boom may have helped oust Republican incumbents, dozens of towns and cities passed pauses or bans on data center development, according to The Washington Post. In many cases, these restrictions passed by enormous margins — in Sunbury, Ohio, where Amazon proposed a $2 billion project, voters rejected the facilities by an almost 60-point margin. 

The AI issue also upended local elections, and perhaps the best example is in Pine Island, Minnesota. Google has proposed building a large new data center there, one that would be powered exclusively by clean energy and would include big subsidies for electric ratepayers. But voter outrage over the project caused a previous mayor to resign and led a first-time politician to mount a campaign against the interim replacement. That challenger, Mark Lang, won with well over 60 percent of the vote.

— Jake Bittle

A FEMA defender sails to victory in Florida

Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat, easily hung onto his seat in Congress, surviving a challenge from Scott Singer, a Trump-backed Republican, in Florida’s redrawn 25th Congressional District. His third-term victory defies the right-wing effort to make his district significantly redder with new boundaries and keeps one of America’s most vocal FEMA reformers in Congress. 

Moskowitz, once appointed Florida’s emergency management director by Governor Ron DeSantis, championed bipartisan legislation to pull FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security and make it an independent, Cabinet-level agency — just as the Trump administration seeks to cut its funding and shift more responsibility onto states. He has also introduced bills that would let states voluntarily administer federal disaster housing and public assistance, and proposed a reinsurance backstop that would help cover catastrophic losses after disasters like hurricanes. 

— Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

Protesters in Detroit demonstrate against DTE Energy’s request to hike electricity rates to pay for more fossil fuel plants. Voters in Michigan passed an amendment that would restrict political campaign contributions by utilities.
Jim West/ UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images Michigan gets utility money out of politics 

Voters in Michigan passed a measure to limit corporate spending in elections, and in a nationwide first, successfully went after the state’s electric and gas utilities. Supporters of Proposal 2 leveraged ratepayers’ growing dissatisfaction with utilities around power bills, unreliable service, and data centers. The measure is one of the most ambitious attempts in the country to limit corporate influence in politics, which it aims to do by preventing utility-funded political action groups and utility executives from contributing to state political campaigns. Groups that oppose the measure have contended that Prop 2 will stifle corporations’ speech protections under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, a conservative policy group sued the state in federal court, saying that everyone from journalists to nonprofit organizations could lose speech and privacy rights under the new measure. And while experts said the measure likely won’t get all utility money out of politics, Prop 2 advocates maintain it’s a step toward accountability.

— Vivian La

Read Next High power bills, blackouts land Michigan utilities on the ballot Austin Corona & Vivian La A governor who at least acknowledges climate change in Florida

Republican Byron Donalds has defeated Democrat David Jolly for occupancy of Florida’s governor’s mansion. Donalds, who currently represents Florida’s 19th Congressional District, will be the state’s first Black governor. He doesn’t believe humans play any role in global warming, but he’s more willing to discuss the issue than the current governor, Ron DeSantis, who signed the state’s infamous “don’t say climate change” law.

That matters in a state especially battered by sea level rise, coastal erosion, and storms. The skyrocketing costs of home insurance were a central issue in this race, and Donalds promised to bring them down by increasing competition in the state’s private market. In 2025, Donalds notably co-introduced bipartisan legislation with Democrat Jared Moskowitz to reform federal disaster aid by making FEMA an independent Cabinet-level agency. In the weeks before voters went to the polls, he also pledged investment in restoring coastal habitats. Donalds seems likely to carry on DeSantis’ other environmental policies, such as supporting data center development and attacking wind and solar projects.

— Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

A campaign sign for Florida Republican Senate candidate Ashley Moody seen outside a polling station on November 3 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Saul Martinez / Getty Images A MAGA loyalist who says no to drilling in Florida

Republican Senator Ashley Moody defeated the progressive Democrat Angie Nixon to retain her seat, which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed her to last year. Moody’s brief stint in Washington hints at what’s to come: She introduced a resolution to overturn Biden-era efficiency standards and supported the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which ended federal tax credits for clean energy installations like rooftop solar and batteries. Previously, as Florida’s attorney general, she joined a lawsuit challenging emissions reduction targets on highways.

But in Florida, a state grappling with coastal erosion and rising sea levels, some environmental protections are popular across party lines: Last year, even as Trump pushed to open offshore drilling in other states, Moody introduced the American Shores Protection Act to ban the practice off Florida’s coast through 2032.

— Sachi Kitajima Mulkey

This story has been updated with analysis of additional races and trends.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What a historic ‘blue wave’ midterm means for climate action on Nov 4, 2026.

The call came from a home in Hyde County, a rural expanse of coastal farmland and marsh in North Carolina. Paramedic Quinn Reece jumped into an electric aircraft with one seat, two wings, and eight propellers. It is called a BlackFly, and at about 14 feet long it looks like an oversized drone. Moments later it rose like a helicopter, then flew like an airplane.

As she raced toward the emergency at about 60 mph, a dispatcher described the location. Reece quickly realized that the app the county uses for emergency response had given the wrong location. Because she had flown over the area before, Reece had an idea of the correct location. She zipped over in the aircraft, confirmed where the call had come from, and relayed the information to paramedics headed that way. She was on the scene and administering care 20 minutes before they arrived.

That is exactly what Brook Cox, the county’s emergency medical services chief, hoped to see. She launched the six-month trial with a company called Pivotal in March to see if its BlackFly could help medics more quickly reach patients in a county that covers 1,459 square miles of land and water. The county conducted more than 300 training flights prior to using the aircraft for two 911 calls.

Air taxis and flying cars have long defined the promise of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs. This is the vision the Federal Aviation Administration has highlighted through the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which works with manufacturers to test the emerging aircraft in real-world settings. Last week, Archer Aviation announced plans for aerial taxi services in three Texas cities and Joby Aviation began demonstrations in Florida.

Hyde County is among those exploring more immediate uses for these machines. The FAA program considers emergency medical response an important application, particularly in rural areas. Similar aircraft powered by the sun that can stay aloft for weeks are being developed to monitor climate threats like wildfires, methane emissions and ice melt.

The great promise of electric aviation is to help decarbonize flight. These developments point to a fast-approaching future for electric aviation. It just might not arrive in the form we expected.

Pivotal’s BlackFly can take off like a helicopter and fly like an airplane, making it a promising tool for emergency response in rural areas, where it can launch quickly, fly directly to an emergency, and land close to the scene. Courtesy of Pivotal

Kristina Menton, Pivotal’s vice president of flight, points to a December 2024 flight as proof the technology could be a boon to EMS. A BlackFly took off from a Los Angeles County fire station and landed in a backyard in Malibu, demonstrating it could fly directly to a private address.

Menton acknowledged that single-seater aircraft are a new approach for a field that has typically employed separate crews for flight and EMS operations. BlackFly’s simplified controls allow one person to serve as both pilot and medic. “The aircraft is a breeze,” Cox said. “It really takes the guesswork out of it because you have a screen and you have all these prompts that you have to go through.”

Carl Dietrich, who founded Jump Aero in 2019 to build electric aircraft for EMS, sees Pivotal’s work as proof of concept rather than competition, something that can only help the sector grow. “It shows that other organizations believe that this is a real opportunity,” he said.

Jump Aero is building a different kind of aircraft, the JA1 Pulse, which has been in development for seven years. Dietrich expects it to reach 288 mph, compared with 63 mph for the BlackFly. He said eVTOLs aren’t necessarily replacing helicopters or ambulances, but adding something new to emergency response: an aircraft that is easy to fly and can launch almost immediately without warming up.

“It’s ideal for rapid response missions because you don’t pay any maintenance penalty for going to full power instantly,” he said. This is particularly important in a field that aims to arrive within eight minutes of a call, while rural response times average nearly 15 minutes.

There are, of course, limitations, including battery range and weight capacity. The BlackFly can travel 20 miles on a charge and carry 200 pounds, while the JA1 Pulse is good for 70 miles and 350 pounds. The aircraft clearly aren’t meant to transport patients; their utility lies in being able to quickly reach an emergency and stabilize a patient until an ambulance arrives. Reece carried a cardiac monitor, airway supplies, and a “primary response bag” of essential gear that would allow her to assess a patient and begin treatment immediately.

Rural areas may present an easier path to introducing the technology, said April Zhang, director of advanced air mobility at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research. “In the urban area, it’s probably more challenging to find the right landing and takeoff sites,” she said. Menton said other counties are already looking at Hyde County’s experience and considering similar programs. 

Zhang points to the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program as a way for manufacturers and public agencies to collaborate on applications. Beyond EMS, she sees traffic surveillance and cargo deliveries as other potential uses.

FAA policy may also give public agencies an easier path to using eVTOLs than commercial operators. Andrew Mearns, a commercialization consultant at Multicopter Aerospace Consulting, said EMS organizations can often operate under the FAA’s public aircraft rules, which could allow them to fly without the credentials required of a commercial pilot.

Cost is another appeal. Pivotal’s model sells for $190,000, while Mearns said helicopters can cost from $500,000 to $10 million. Operating costs will vary with the specific model, but generally speaking an electric aircraft might be about 80 percent cheaper than a similarly sized machine that burns fossil fuels, Mearns said.

Emergency response is one avenue where electric aviation is beginning to find a practical use. Another is taking shape much higher in the atmosphere.

Unmanned stratospheric aircraft can reach altitudes of 65,000 feet, about twice as high as commercial aircraft. Solar-powered versions can remain aloft for weeks or months, making them well suited to long-term environmental monitoring.

“If you imagine these solar-powered aircraft just circling the L.A. County area, collecting soil moisture, vegetation moisture data, with complex math models and deep learning mapped to that, you can have improved risk profiles better than the models that are currently there,” said Craig Mascarenhas, an aerospace researcher at Harvard University. The aircraft could also spot fires more quickly and help map them for first responders.

Mascarenhas leads engineering research for Harvard’s branch of the Stratospheric Airborne Climate Observing System, where he is helping develop and deploy solar-powered electric aircraft with Electra.Aero, MIT and others. He said their applications go beyond wildfires.

“It’s hurricane monitoring and tracking, methane emiss monitoring, understanding ice dynamics across the world,” he said. “The instruments will be swapped, but the topology of the aircraft will remain the same.”

The aircraft themselves could offer environmental benefits too. Mascarenhas said eVTOLs could reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they replace fuel-burning helicopters, but the climate case is less clear when they replace efficient ground transportation.

“Vertical flight is inherently energy-intensive, and an electric aircraft is not necessarily more energy-efficient or lower-carbon per passenger-mile than an electric car, bus, or train,” he said.

For Pivotal, EMS in Hyde County is just the beginning. Menton said the company’s broader vision is to “revolutionize transportation” by making short electric flights accessible to more people.

But for now, some of the technology’s most immediate uses may be the specialized applications already being tested in places like Hyde County and high above it.

Correction: This story originally underestimated how much cheaper an eVTOL aircraft might be to operate.

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

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Electric aviation is taking off in unexpected ways on Nov 3, 2026.

Arthur Matherne is used to speeding his airboat across a southeastern stretch of the Louisiana coast where lakes and bayous have widened as the Gulf of Mexico’s salty water has moved in, dissolving marshes and swamps.   

But in one tucked-away patch of the Barataria Basin’s 1.6 million acres, the semi-retired tour guide eases off the throttle as he tries to remember his way through channels that have grown tighter by the year. Grasses are overtaking the shallows, and oak branches are spreading overhead, dangling Spanish moss over waterways he once barreled through.

“All this, it’s filling in,” Matherne said after shutting off his airboat’s roaring propeller. “Right here, it used to be three feet of water. Now it’s three inches.” 

What Matherne is seeing is a striking reversal of a pattern that has defined southern Louisiana for the past century. While much of the coastal zone has receded at about 11 square miles per year from erosion and other forces compounded by climate change, the wetlands here are gaining ground.

The reason is just a few miles away. Near Luling in St. Charles Parish, the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion has funneled Mississippi River water into the basin since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built it in 2002 to combat saltwater intrusion. But something unexpected happened. The diversion also carried the muddy river’s sediment into the wetlands, raising the bottom and helping create new land. 

“It’s had this unintended consequence of building land,” said Jacob Berkowitz, an Army Corps of Engineers wetland scientist. “This became one of the strategies that’s considered a key to addressing coastal land loss in Louisiana.”

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scientist Jacob Berkowitz discusses the growth of wetlands south of the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion. Tristan Baurick / Verite News

Yet even as Davis Pond demonstrates the land-building potential of river diversions, Louisiana has abandoned its most ambitious attempt to put that approach to work. Last year, the state canceled the massive Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, a $3 billion project inspired by Davis Pond and once heralded by the state as “the largest and boldest environmental restoration project in U.S. history.” Though it broke ground in 2023, work stopped shortly after Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican and one of the diversion’s most prominent critics, took office in 2024. He officially terminated the project, which would have been located 20 miles south of New Orleans, in July 2025. 

Landry called the diversion a costly and ineffective “experiment” that would harm the commercial fishing industry by flooding parts of Barataria Bay with too much fresh water and sediment, pushing out shrimp and burying oysters. 

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry told state lawmakers in 2024. “It will destroy the shrimping industry — which is already struggling — and destroy the oyster beds.” 

Landry’s administration also canceled a companion project — the $1.8 billion Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, aimed at reviving dying wetlands southeast of New Orleans. 

Despite Landry’s opposition to these projects, his administration is quietly planning more diversions along the Mississippi, albeit on a smaller scale.

Officials with the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, or CPRA, declined to discuss the state’s diversion plans, but a Verite News review of the authority’s budget documents indicates the state plans to spend at least $340 million on five projects over the next several years that would divert Mississippi River water to restore coastal wetlands. That represents a big increase over past spending on diversions. Since 2007, CPRA has completed just three diversion projects totaling $47 million, according to the agency’s 2027 annual plan.

While some state leaders may disparage diversions, CPRA scientists still believe using river water to rebuild land and restore wetlands is a sound approach. At its core, a diversion mimics how the Mississippi functioned before levees walled off its floodplain, preventing the river from overflowing its banks or breaking through them at points called crevasses, according to Brian Gossman, a CPRA coastal scientist, who spoke at a public lecture in March. 

“The natural process that we’re attempting to harness is the Delta cycle,” Gossman said. “It’s the same process that built all of coastal Louisiana over millennia. We’re just using it in a targeted way.”

An airboat travels through a canal south of the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion in Louisiana. Water and sediment from the diversion have helped build land and increased the growth of wetland trees and grasses.
Tristan Baurick / Verite News

Nearly all of the CPRA’s diversion spending would go to one project — the restoration of Maurepas Swamp, a Chicago-sized wetland along the west edge of Lake Pontchartrain, about 25 miles from New Orleans. 

The $334 million project, which broke ground in 2024, will install gates in the Mississippi River levee near Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish and channel up to 2,000 cubic feet per second of water into Maurepas, which remains one of the country’s largest swamps despite losing thousands of acres of cypress and tupelo forest. Levees built in the early 1900s cut the swamp off from fresh water and sediment, leaving its trees vulnerable to saltwater intrusion.

According to CPRA, the diversion will rebuild lost land and flush out stagnant, salty water, rejuvenating about 45,000 acres. It’s set for completion late next year. 

The authority hasn’t totally given up on diverting sediment into the Barataria Basin. After canceling the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the agency dusted off an earlier, much smaller version of the project: the Medium Diversion at Myrtle Grove. Proposed more than 25 years ago, the project would divert up to 15,000 cubic feet of river water per second into the basin — about one-third of Mid-Barataria’s typical operating rate. To speed up the creation of marsh, the authority would also dredge sediment from the Mississippi and pump it directly into the basin. 

The Myrtle Grove project’s timeline and budget are unclear. CPRA’s budget documents indicate about $1.7 million could be spent on it between 2027 and 2029, but the full cost will likely be much more. In 2012, the project was estimated at $278 million, or about $480 million in today’s dollars. 

CPRA’s spending plans would also boost the Davis Pond diversion. The agency has proposed spending $3 million, shared with the Army Corps, to study how the diversion could be operated to build more land. 

Research led by Tulane University in 2019 suggested that boosting the diversion’s average flow from 1,000 cubic feet per second to between 4,000 and 7,000 cubic feet per second could deliver more sediment to nearby wetlands. But if the flow is too high, researchers warned, the sediment will be flushed away.  

In St. Charles Parish, home to Davis Pond, finding ways to increase the diversion’s flows has strong support. In its 2025 habitat restoration plan, the parish endorsed the proposed CPRA study, citing criticism that the diversion’s operations were “not being aggressive enough” to maximize its benefits. 

Watching Davis Pond’s silty flows creep past his airboat, Matherne agreed the diversion should release more water and sediment. “Right now, it’s like pissing in an Olympic-size swimming pool,” he said. “We need more flow.”

The Army Corps built the diversion to improve oyster beds that had become too salty as coastal marshes receded. Oyster abundance in the area has fluctuated since the diversion was built, but recent monitoring data suggest populations on public beds were above their 10-year averages in 2024, according to Danielle Richardi, a CPRA coastal scientist. Shrimp catches south of the diversion hit a nearly four-decade high that same year, she said. 

Matherne said he’s seen a marked increase in wildlife. Alligators are more plentiful, he said, pointing out more than a dozen of the reptiles as his boat traveled the maze of waterways near the diversion. “All the alligators you see — that’s a fraction of what’s out there,” he said. “Come back at night, and you’ll see their eyes shining all over.”

Matherne stands on a platform used by scientists to track the growth of new land created by the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion. The semi-retired tour guide says the wetlands south of the diversion are expanding, and wildlife is thriving.
Tristan Baurick / Verite News

Several studies have documented how accumulated sediment has built land near the diversion, although researchers in recent years have reached conflicting conclusions about the overall impact on wetland acreage. 

In 2019, Louisiana State University coastal sciences professor Eugene Turner challenged conventional thinking about river diversions with a study linking Davis Pond to increased wetland loss. Turner found that the annual rate of wetland loss near Davis Pond nearly tripled after the diversion began operating, increasing from 0.36 percent to more than 1 percent. The increase was greater than in nearby wetlands unaffected by the diversion. 

One explanation might have to do with what’s in the water. While the diversion was intended to restore the Mississippi’s pre-levee connections to surrounding wetlands, the river’s water has changed dramatically over the past century. It now carries high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus, much of it from fertilizer and manure runoff from farms and wastewater discharged by cities upstream. Turner argues that the excess nutrients produce wetland plants that are, essentially, flabby and weak. 

“If your garden is fertilized too much, it puts all its growth aboveground,” he said. “It falls over because its roots never had to work hard.”

Turner believes that lower nutrient levels encourage plants to develop stronger root systems, making marshes more resistant to erosion. He likens some of the apparent land gains from diversions to a “green toupee.” The wetlands may look as though they’re filling in, but strong winds or currents can easily strip away the vegetation.

Read Next Nearly 1.5M people in Louisiana depend on this strip of marsh. But it needs saving. Tristan Baurick

Two of Turner’s colleagues disputed his findings in a 2023 study. John White and John Day, also LSU coastal sciences professors, found that the first 20 years of Davis Pond’s operations had actually led to a net gain of 1.3 square miles of land. Their study said Turner came to an “erroneous conclusion” by incorrectly using data “that was clearly labeled as inappropriate for the task.”

The researchers asserted that Turner’s satellite data were too imprecise to distinguish small patches of wetlands from open water, potentially making land appear to have disappeared when it hadn’t. 

Turner stands by his findings, arguing they more accurately portray how diversions affect coastal wetlands and warn of the damage they can cause if poorly managed. 

Opponents of the Mid-Barataria diversion regularly cited Turner’s research and added several more concerns, including CPRA’s projections that the huge diversion could bury oyster beds under sediment and that added fresh water would likely push shrimp farther offshore, making them harder to catch. Combined with the project’s $3 billion price tag, those concerns cratered political support.

“Considering the uncertainties and questionable environmental outcomes recognized by various agencies … it was necessary to abandon the current project,” CPRA Chairman Gordon Dove wrote in a column in The Times Picayune. 

Although CPRA has yet to fully explain its new approach to diversions, smaller and cheaper projects appear to be a priority. Turner welcomes that shift, but argues diversions should also operate at lower flows to avoid washing away vegetation that he believes excessive nutrients have weakened. He also recommends building diversions in areas with sandy soils rather than the soft, unstable soil in many marshes.

“It’s not that they won’t work,” Turner said. “These diversions give you lessons. We should learn from them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Louisiana’s accidental blueprint for restoring its coast on Nov 3, 2026.

Blackstone, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, officially changed the name of its dedicated energy investment fund to include the phrase “energy transition” in 2022, having already ceased investing in oil and gas production five years earlier. The pivot toward a new energy future has not diminished interest in the fund. In mid-October, Blackstone announced that the fund pulled in $8.7 billion in investor money this year, reportedly turning away an additional $3 billion to stay under its maximum investment cap. 

Blackstone’s is one of several energy transition funds at private equity firms that have consistently grown over the past decade. That growth has continued even as general climate-oriented investment has fallen over the last few years. Colloquially, “energy transition” refers to the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy that is necessary to limit the worst impacts of climate change. But on Wall Street, the term can mean something a bit different. Some transition funds — including Blackstone’s — see opportunities for profit in natural gas, data centers, and rising electricity costs.

“I know a lot of the investors out there do consider gas a transition fuel,” said Ryan Loughead, a senior associate and former climate solutions analyst for BloombergNEF, an energy research firm.

Private equity funds take new investor money every few years and then use it to buy existing companies, maximize their profits, and then sell them, returning the money from the sale to investors. Unlike publicly traded companies, whose stocks are available for anyone to buy, private equity firms typically take investments only from large organizations, like pension funds, or very wealthy individuals, and they have faced criticism for prioritizing returns at the expense of workers and the environment.

The transition to renewable energy has been a booming business for private equity firms. “Transition funds” in private equity have raked in $178 billion between 2021 and the beginning of 2026, triple the amount raised by comparable funds dedicated to fossil fuels and general energy, according to Loughead’s research. They’ve maintained their popularity even as other forms of climate-related investments have flagged in the United States, with climate-related venture capital on track to suffer its worst year this decade. (While private equity funds buy out established companies, venture capital funds make smaller investments in startups.) 

These shifts have coincided with changes in federal policy, as well as the overall economy. The Biden administration’s signature climate law once spurred innovation in new technologies, but Republicans in Congress repealed most of that legislation last year. Meanwhile, the tech industry’s data center buildout is creating surging demand for electricity and drawing trillions of dollars from investors.

In the financial industry, the energy transition has grown into a sophisticated economic trend with established players and markets, said Dan Cohn, an energy finance analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank focused on the energy transition. Private equity funds don’t typically demonstrate investor interest in a budding industry so much as a view that the industry is becoming economically important. 

“Investors are sensing oncoming scarcity [of electricity] and are positioning themselves accordingly,” Cohn said. “That speaks to both the moment of rising electricity demand, but also the maturity of clean energy technologies.”

But while these funds seek to capitalize on high demand for electricity, they don’t all show a clear commitment to reducing emissions. Blackstone’s fund is explicit in its view that methane gas, a fossil fuel and the primary component of natural gas, is essential to the energy transition. The fund no longer invests in oil and gas fields, but it does invest in natural gas plants. When Blackstone rebranded it in 2022, the fund’s director, David Foley, explained why natural gas plants were still on the table. “A lot of the capital invested in the energy transition is going into simple renewable power generation assets like solar and wind,” he told an industry publication. “While this is important, just adding renewables to the grid doesn’t necessarily mean you can shut down and remove existing sources of power, such as coal and gas.”

Blackstone, headquartered in New York City, is one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Don Bitzer / Getty Images

This year, the fund announced investments in six companies, including a natural gas plant operator and a data center cooling technology company, alongside a company focused on renewable energy development and some transmission and grid technology companies. Blackstone did not reply to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the private equity firm Brookfield governs its transition funds partly through an explicit commitment to decarbonization and emissions reductions. The company has said it can invest in natural gas in cases where it replaces dirtier fossil fuels, but Brookfield has also drawn criticism for describing gas expansion as part of the energy transition.

Similar funds in Europe, like Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Energy Transition Fund, are far more focused on clean energy sources like green hydrogen, with little emphasis on natural gas.

“‘Energy transition’ is a flexible term,” Cohn said. “And I’m unsurprised to see either the gas or electrical equipment and data center-related companies in some of these funds. That is perfectly consistent with how I know some investors think about the energy transition.”

BlackRock, another private markets giant unrelated to Blackstone, explicitly defines “transition” investing as something different from “sustainable” investing: “not all sustainable strategies are transition, and not all transition strategies are sustainable,” its website reads. 

That partial overlap could complicate investors’ claims about how sustainable their portfolios are.

At least three major government-managed investors in Blackstone’s energy transition fund have explicit climate investing goals. The Oregon Treasury, Minnesota State Board of Investment, and San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System all have some form of climate-related goal or plan for their investments. These entities have committed a combined $525 million to the fund, according to Private Equity International, an analytics firm.

These investors did not reply to requests for comment before publication of this article, but the wide range of standards for climate- and energy-related investments has already created confusion. In Oregon, a state representative formally asked the state’s treasury this year to more clearly define what it reports as “climate-positive” investments, which it uses as a category in its public reports.

Investors may have a financial incentive to include gas in their view of the energy transition. Transition funds that include gas tend to have slightly higher returns than those that don’t, Loughead said. And Loughead and Cohn both said the massive rush to invest in the data center boom has permeated funds nominally concerned with the clean energy transition.

Off Wall Street, the question of whether natural gas and data centers have a role to play in the energy transition is hotly debated. Natural gas has cut emissions from the power sector when it has replaced coal, while data centers have spurred investment in grid improvements and clean energy sources. But using natural gas still produces significant emissions — both when it’s burned and when it leaks out of infrastructure — and data centers are spurring more fossil fuel use, potentially slowing progress on global power sector emissions. Plus, some grids are already finding ways to provide reliability with cleaner alternatives to gas, like batteries, which can store renewable energy to use when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Most climate and environmental groups argue emphatically that gas should not be seen as a transition fuel.

“Natural gas no longer functions as a credible bridge in the energy transition,” wrote Shruti Shukla, a senior advocate on international energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2025 article, adding that the fuel “risks slowing decarbonization, raising system costs, and locking economies into avoidable volatility.”

And in the long run, it may not even come to be seen on Wall Street as a questionable investment, according to Cohn. As fuel price spikes continue driving the world toward renewables, fossil fuels may become less and less attractive as investment opportunities. 

“There are other very prominent solutions like solar, wind, and batteries, which will mature and continue to see price declines, and so the view that you need gas is increasingly contested,” Cohn said.

This post has been updated to more accurately characterize the nature of BlackRock’s business.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On Wall Street, the ‘energy transition’ includes natural gas and data centers on Nov 3, 2026.

To Sierra Isley, the American Dream brings to mind a home ringed by a white picket fence. “The house in the suburbs is just what you’re taught growing up,” the 26-year-old said. “You know, that’s what you see on TV.” What she wanted for her life was a bit different from that picket-fence ideal, but she still saw the prospect of buying her first house two years ago as a chance to live out what she called “that big dream that everybody has as a kid.” 

Isley and her girlfriend, Jamie, were moving from Philadelphia to Asheville, North Carolina, and found a home they liked, a three-bedroom brick house with lots of natural light and a big tree out front. With some help from their parents, they put down a deposit and got their offer accepted. But when they went to sign the closing papers, a complication got in the way: The house had a huge lien on it. After consulting with lawyers, they decided to break the contract and hunt for an apartment to rent in Asheville.

It was a blessing in disguise. One month later, while Sierra and Jamie were still unpacking boxes and building furniture, the remnants of Hurricane Helene turned Asheville into a disaster zone. The basement of their apartment flooded, but they were luckier than some of their neighbors, whose homes had been destroyed. 

Owning a home has long been seen as a cornerstone of the American Dream — a way to build wealth that you could use one day to pay for your children’s education and fund your retirement. That arrangement was always more precarious than it was made out to be. But as fires and floods damage homes and drive up insurance rates, pouring your life savings into a house has become riskier than ever. In a report called “Property Prices in Peril,” the firm First Street projected last year that climate risks could knock nearly $1.5 trillion off the value of American homes by 2055. For some people, the sociologist Rebecca Elliott wrote, “the American dream of homeownership may become a nightmare.”

A fallen tree on a home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina, in September 2024. Sean Rayford / Getty Images

Americans are beginning to grasp the threat that climate change poses to their aspirations. According to exclusive polling for Grist from the think tank Data for Progress, 58 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that climate change will hinder their ability to achieve the American Dream over the next 20 years, including 42 percent of Republicans. The survey suggests that people are worried that climate change will increase the cost of living, a concern so widespread that it’s expected to sway the midterm elections on Tuesday.

The irony is that fossil fuels have long been promoted as necessary ingredients for the American “way of life.” Starting a century ago, oil and gas companies led extensive campaigns to tie their products to comfort and prosperity, a narrative that has been repeatedly deployed by politicians and oil industry executives to thwart climate action. President Donald Trump’s administration has often said that efforts to rein in fossil fuels threaten the American Dream. Earlier this year, when the administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.”

More in this series

• The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream
• Fossil fuels are hiding all over your house. We built a model home to show how.
• Exclusive: Most voters believe climate change threatens the American Dream

But the fossil-fueled American Dream is in the process of destroying itself. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas have ushered in a new period of precarity, undermining the promise that each generation can expect a better life than the last. Scientific reports warn that climate change “imperil[s] the quality of life” for communities in the United States, disrupting livelihoods and cultural traditions. 

Either Americans decide to reimagine what makes up the American Dream and abandon that oil-soaked version of prosperity, or climate change will dismantle it for them.

The memories of living through Hurricane Helene are still fresh in Isley’s mind. Hauling water from their flooded basement up to the toilet to flush it when the water ran out. Driving to Jamie’s parents’ house in Atlanta, holed up in a room with both of their cats until they couldn’t take it anymore. Coming back to Asheville and cooking meals in the Crock-Pot with disposable liners because even when the water was running again, it wasn’t safe to wash dishes with.

Two years later, Isley browses Zillow for fun, but she looks at homes through a post-disaster lens. “Now I have that fear in the back of my mind — anywhere near a river, or even a stream, if there’s a little bit of water on the map, I’m like, ‘Oh, no,’” she said. Jamie is trans, and after Trump was elected in 2024, the two of them briefly entertained the idea of moving somewhere with more protective policies, like California. But Isley’s mind immediately went to wildfires. Out of the question. 

Sierra Isley on a hiking trail in Asheville.
Courtesy of Sierra Isley

Isley had fled from hurricanes before, when she lived in Florida during college. She thought she’d be safe from them tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Asheville was supposed to be a “climate haven,” somewhere that would fare better than the rest of the country as the world warmed. Those promises were shattered when almost 14 inches of rain fell on Asheville over three days in September 2024. The French Broad River overflowed its banks, flooding homes and destroying parts of the town’s River Arts District. In western North Carolina, more than 74,000 homes were damaged, and only about 4 percent had flood insurance, resulting in $9.5 billion in uninsured residential property losses. 

Home values in western North Carolina have declined since the storm, especially in the hardest-hit counties. Asheville’s average home price shrunk 5 percent over the past year, while the national average increased 1.2 percent.

To some degree, housing markets are already pricing in the risk of increased environmental hazards. Homes within FEMA’s high-risk flood zones sell for 2.8 percent less, on average, than what they would otherwise sell for, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The researchers found that homes exposed to flood risk were still overvalued by between $121 billion and $237 billion, though — and they identified Appalachia as a hot spot of overvaluation, one year before Helene hit. The devaluation of homes in high-risk zones is unfolding unevenly and causing “tremendous social harm,” said Elliott, a sociology professor at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Homes are billed as a way for people to build wealth, but they can turn into a trap. After Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and the New Jersey coast in 2012, many homeowners couldn’t sell their houses for enough money to buy a new place, leaving them stranded. Even homes that haven’t seen any kind of devastation are at risk of losing value as more people become wary of living in floodplains, coastal places exposed to storms, and wildfire-prone areas. “Those homes could become, in effect, economically worthless even before they are physically uninhabitable,” Elliott wrote in a study about property values and climate change.

After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, a New Jersey home was spray-painted with the phrases “for sale” and “Sandy special.”
Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Insurance is meant to offer a measure of safety when taking on a huge debt for a mortgage on a house. Douglas Heller, the director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America, called it “the safety net for the American Dream.” But insurance rates are part of what’s making homeownership unaffordable for so many. Since 2020, property insurance costs have ballooned almost 80 percent, with the average single-family mortgage holder now paying $209 per month. Homeowners in the riskiest areas are paying substantially more, and many in California have been dropped by their insurers. Home insurance rates are rising faster in the Midwest than any other region, driven by the costs of severe storms. 

“We are, for a lot of people, on the edge of a dysfunctional insurance marketplace,” Heller said. The more extreme weather we’re seeing is only part of the story: He argues that the insurance industry has become a “climate opportunist,” using climate change as an excuse to justify excessive rate increases.

People relying on Social Security benefits who own condos around Lake Tahoe are particularly vulnerable to rising rates, said Andrew Engler, the founder and CEO of Rock Rose Risk, who helps people in California protect their homes against wildfire and get their insurance premiums down. They’re facing ballooning homeowners association payments, to share the cost of insurance in a risky wildfire area, on a limited paycheck. If they try to move, their properties are worth significantly less because of the huge HOA bills, Engler said. Economists estimate that rising insurance costs linked to disaster risk have reduced the growth of home prices by more than $40,000 in the most hurricane- and wildfire-prone ZIP codes.

Renting might make you more nimble, but it doesn’t insulate you from these costs. One reason rents are going up is because landlords’ property insurance rates are increasing. “Whether you are a homeowner or a renter, we’re all paying for living under the increased risks of climate change,” said Caroline Nagy, the associate director of housing policy at Americans for Financial Reform. That makes it harder for people to save for a home — if that’s even a good idea anymore.

When Sierra Isley walks around her neighborhood these days, she sees the evidence of Helene all around her — in the form of banners with the slogan “Asheville Strong” and shirts that say “WNC Strong.” 

One of the most surprising things about disasters might be the way that people who live through them rise to the occasion and come together. In the aftermath of the Helene, with the power and cell service knocked out, Sierra and Jamie walked all around town, talking to their neighbors to try to learn what had happened. People started congregating at the fire station where there was fresh water.

“It’s hard to put into words what that experience was like, but I’ve never felt more of a community, and really having to lean on my neighbors and feeling like my neighbors were leaning on me,” Isley said.

While the American Dream is usually all about independence and personal freedom, living through a disaster has a way of revealing how people depend on each other. The experience can prompt people to hold tightly to what they have, doubling down on protecting their communities, said Nick Tinoco, a sociology researcher in a doctoral program at the University of California, Los Angeles, who interviewed survivors of the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Los Angeles County. Some of the residents he talked to have taken things into their own hands and organized volunteer fire brigades, and plan to stay behind to defend their neighborhoods during future fires. 

A white picket fence is all that remained of a home in Malibu, California, after the Woolsey Fire tore through in 2018.
David Crane / Digital First Media / Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

As supposedly safe “climate havens” like Asheville experience more disasters, the idea that people can simply move out of harm’s way is losing its grip. “I think we have to just reckon with the fact that we’re going to have to make people secure in the places that they live,” Elliott said. 

She thinks it’s time to rethink the bargain of the American Dream — the expectation that so much of a person’s economic future depends on the fate of a single structure. Many young people have begun to define success differently. A poll from Ipsos last year showed that 46 percent of baby boomers associate homeownership with the American Dream, but only 13 percent of Gen Zers do, suggesting that there’s room for its defining features to change.

Sierra and Jamie couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the house they’d almost bought, and they drove over to check it out soon after Hurricane Helene hit. It was still standing, but they couldn’t see if there was any damage hidden inside. “Who knows if it flooded or anything like that, what kind of storm damage it took, and that would have immediately been our problem,” Isley said.

Living through Hurricane Helene didn’t just make Isley relieved she hadn’t bought a house in Asheville. It has shaped what she wants for her life, helping her discover a passion for public health and pushing her to want to work in emergency preparedness. Now she’s applying to schools to pursue a master’s degree in public health.

“I think I owe it to people like me, people in other rural communities who are going to face the same kind of climate change emergencies, to use my skills to help combat climate change and natural disasters,” Isley said. “I just feel such a calling.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The American Dream wasn’t built for climate change on Nov 2, 2026.